An expansive adventure that blends fantasy and SF to address one of the most pressing issues of our time.
A sentient artifact that witnessed the fall of human civilization becomes a friend and advisor to a boy who discovers it many lifetimes later.
Twelve-year-old Ariel de la Sauvage has never seen a blue sky or tasted tomato sauce. Millennia before he began life in the small, remote village of Sauvage, humanity was defeated by AI-begat “dragons” in a war to end all wars, changing the course of life on Earth forever. While exploring the valley around Sauvage, Ariel discovers an object dating back to that era: a spaceship’s escape pod, entombed in a cave revealed by the calving of a glacier. In addition to the body of human warrior Altissa Praxa, the pod holds the chronicling device that served Altissa in life, a sophisticated and self-aware apparatus designed to record human memories. (For its part, the chronicler describes itself as “a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense.”) Making the leap from Altissa to Ariel, the chronicler, who acts as the book’s narrator, finds society transformed. Animals talk. Robots roam the roads. Wizards hold sway, including the Wizard Malory, the ruler of Sauvage. When Ariel inadvertently thwarts Malory’s secret plans one day, revealing an intricate conspiracy revolving around Ariel himself, he incurs the wizard’s wrath and only manages to escape Sauvage by the skin of his teeth. Pursued by Malory and his forces, Ariel is aided by a colorful cast of characters ranging from an elk to a bog body to a trash picker as he searches for a way to defeat the wizard—and figure out why Malory wants him in the first place. Thanks to the chronicler’s distinct voice and novel point of view, it makes for an ingenious choice of narrator; the plot itself is replete with thorny quests and arduous journeys in the manner of classics like A Wrinkle in Time and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though the finale feels somewhat rushed and leaves a few questions hanging. Coming at the dawn of the AI era, this is a thoughtful (and hopefully not prescient) book that, like its characters, asks: What happens next?
An expansive adventure that blends fantasy and SF to address one of the most pressing issues of our time.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780374610609
Page Count: 432
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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