Familiar SF material of flawed humanity facing judgment by robot, gracefully and poetically rendered.
A disaffected computer programmer’s data experiments accidentally create a sentient artificial intelligence whose access to all information makes her powerful, celebrated, and possibly dangerous.
In this SF novel, Canadian author Murarka tells a tale of an AI unleashed on the future like the proverbial genie in the bottle. But is this genie like the Barbara Eden variety or something a bit more lethal, such as HAL 9000? In a polyglot dystopian future sometime after a “Great Unrest,” a magnificent city-state called Agnus Sistra IV has been constructed deliberately over an unimportant stretch of shoreline as a sort of new model community. Nonetheless, human foibles such as wealth inequality and thirst for power continue. Dargaud Whispa is an alienated, self-employed software engineer living in squalor while writing computer programs for restaurant menus. Experimenting with a new method of data storage, Dargaud somehow triggers a “singularity” that results in the spontaneous awakening of an AI, borne of countless bits and bytes. Self-identifying as female and calling herself Enoya, the entity is inquisitive, endlessly grateful to Dargaud for her creation, and vastly resourceful. With access to all known (and some unknown) information, Enoya deduces the existence of aliens (via a previously unrecognized, ancient deep-space artifact) and, closer to home, uncovers the location of the missing victims of a notorious child predator. When this latter revelation is sent to law enforcement, officials arrest Dargaud on suspicion, naturally, but Enoya’s follow-up explanations (plus secret computer-blackmail, applied to the proper authorities, over data-mined financial crimes) arrange for the programmer to be released straightaway. The inventor and the AI are both hailed as heroes and feted in the media, with Dargaud giving in to his baser instincts of lust and celebrity. Through it all, Enoya professes nothing but admiration for Homo sapiens, whom she calls the “wise man,” but nonetheless is implacably watching and listening to all developments through her wireless retina interface. What is she really thinking and planning?
Murarka does not spell things out plainly (the way Daniel Wilson’s ready-for-Hollywood Robopocalypse did), supplying readers with the intelligence—real and artificial—to realize that the judgment of Enoya is fast approaching. The verdict may not necessarily be good, no matter what the computerized creature’s benevolent tone may suggest. This is well-modulated, Rod Serling–esque SF, not overly lengthy. Murarka resorts to cyberspeak (“Collections of Cobalt nodes store the information that make up who you are modeled after human neurons”) only when the narrative makes it absolutely necessary—no need to phone the IT Department for translations. It is quite fitting that Enoya’s daunting power arrives in the guise of art and music, not in swarms of armed military flying drones or T-800 Terminator cyborgs. The finale leaves behind a properly haunting set of afterimages for readers’ wetware brains to process.
Familiar SF material of flawed humanity facing judgment by robot, gracefully and poetically rendered. (science fiction)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-64-681765-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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