Carried along by the bumptious rollick of its language, this tale is full of sound and fury, signifying literally everything.
Odd-couple asteroid miners Quiver and Mic—a manufactured human and her artificial companion—explore the post-Earth universe in this surrealist SF tour de force.
Quiver is a “transitional prototype...gestated in a dynamic carbon envelope” back on the moon. Mostly human but for the small detail of her chemical incubation, she nevertheless feels an acute sense of alienation. Mic, her fully robot AI companion, has been programmed both in the science of interstellar “rare mineral reconnaissance” and in the art of soothing Quiver when she “flips her fuses.” Mic is also highly schooled in the cultural mores of the gone Earth, erased in “a cascade of catastrophes” which flung the remnants of the human race to Elsewhere, where they attempt to regroup. Via frequent data-dumps from Side Wheel, a virtual database of all things terrestrial, Mic has trained himself as a geisha, memorized the entire discography of “diva[s] from the distant past” like FKA twigs or Nicki Minaj, and developed a deeply erotic obsession with all things Al Pacino. Meanwhile, Quiver spends her time in The Lights—their spaceship’s version of Star Trek’s holodeck—immersed in a Jungian Eden that is co-inhabited by a mysterious redheaded woman. When an argument between the two miners escalates into name-calling (“ 'You forking self-righteous GIZMO!' [Quiver] shrieks….'You maddening THINGAMABOB' ”), Mic comes to a realization about his own selfhood. In the resulting existential backwash, the two badly bungle a rare mineral retrieval. At this, Mic and Quiver decide to go rogue and set a course for the planet Trafik, a fabled place of intergalactic free spirits where all their fantasies (even the Al Pacino ones) just may come true. What follows is a winsome space picaresque in which surreality piles upon surreality as the ill-matched soul mates navigate the unknown universe in their search for identity, belonging, and the sensual pleasures of the flesh, even if that flesh is actually machine. A longtime master of the extraordinary sentence, Ducornet has outdone herself here, blending SF’s penchant for invented jargon with her own queer linguistic egalitarianism in which all adjectives describe all nouns (even such unlikely couplings as “profiterole lasers”) in a primordial soup of possibility. This slender book captivates with its ferocious curiosity, quick wit, and ultimately tender generosity.
Carried along by the bumptious rollick of its language, this tale is full of sound and fury, signifying literally everything.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-56689-606-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Gripping and heartfelt, this prismatic novel is more than worth its salt.
A Jesuit and a nuclear inspector are polar-opposite pillars of (dis)belief in a biblical apocalypse hastened and hindered by social media.
The Vatican sends Father Avelyn Brocken back home to Hreodwater, a remote salt-mining town in England, to investigate the supposed miracle of another priest turning into a pillar of salt. Twelve years ago, young Avelyn left Hreodwater for the church, hiding his distinctive violet eyes behind contact lenses and lasering off his intricate tattoos, inked in tribute to the Hreoda’s slumbering cult idol, the Salt King. At the Dead Sea, Dr. Tallis Osho, a nuclear safety inspector accustomed to epileptic hallucinations, investigates phenomena similar to what’s happening in Hreodwater, particularly the eerie “salt light” shorting out electronics and eventually infecting humans with something akin to radiation poisoning. These two compelling, complicated figures anchor an end-of-days plot that is both global and intensely personal, as salt light spreads across the planet while Avelyn is drawn back into the dark thrall of the Salt King and his imminent waking. Having jumped among an alt-history 19th century, far future Mars, and the Bronze Age in her previous books, Pulley now transports us to a wholly recognizable 2030, where everyone has a persistent Covid cough and monks and doctors need likes and subscriptions so they can join in the cultural conversation. Drawing on some of her favorite narrative elements—time jumps, perspective shifts, mammoths—Pulley cleverly reckons with thorny questions of truth versus belief, faith versus institutions, and whether it’s better to navigate the unimaginable alone or with a companion whose very presence you doubt. Seeing is believing—or perhaps believing is seeing. Though the novel deals in prophecy and cataclysm, it champions free will down to its very last moments.
Gripping and heartfelt, this prismatic novel is more than worth its salt.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9781639737291
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
