The cautionary tale imagines a sobering but ultimately implausible future.
Ginsberg’s SF novel questions whether it’s worthwhile to surrender free will for the possibility of perfection.
In the world of the novel, the Algorithm determines how to meet each person’s desires; a Data Gathering Device in every person’s left ear collects the relevant information. The Algorithm is the brainchild of Lamar T. Haddington, now America’s president. A child of divorce, Haddington created the formula to answer his suicidal mother’s final question: “Why couldn’t everything be perfect?” But the Algorithm, boasting the slogan, “For all to be perfect, all imperfections must be eliminated,” hasn’t made life perfect for everyone: A border wall has been erected around the country to keep out immigrants, and dissidents are housed in horrible conditions in former zoos. Additionally, due to the recording devices wedged into their ears, people are living in a surveillance state. (Those who disagree with the Algorithmic reality are found out and swiftly punished.) The narrative focuses on Hugo Rodríguez, a true believer in the Algorithm. Haddington’s Algorithmic Corporation supplies everything to Hugo—his education, career, pets…even his soulmate and their child. Although Hugo has some doubts during his formative years, in the end, he remains an Algorithm zealot; like most of those around him, he wants that perfect life promised by Haddington. Ginsberg’s frightening story is timely in an era when citizens of divided United States are more than ready to blame ‘the other’ for the nation’s problems. This fairly short novel flies through Hugo’s early life from birth to parenthood, and the author doesn’t quite convincingly convey how a relatively intelligent man such as Hugo would so easily yield to the omnipresent entity. Americans have always wanted to choose their own direction and have resisted ceding control of their lives—this novel, despite all its well-observed portents, fails to fully make its argument.
The cautionary tale imagines a sobering but ultimately implausible future.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798986976662
Page Count: 255
Publisher: The Ginsberg Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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