A lengthy but lively sortie against a computerized villain with engaging fantasy elements.
Two teams of humans—one in physical reality, the other in a virtual cyberspace world—team up to defeat a seemingly all-powerful artificial intelligence in LeKodak’s SF novel.
A ubiquitous AI named Helene has been coded by genius programmer Manar Saleem, whose traumatic childhood in chaotic Iraq has led to a creation that has proven too resourceful. Made to literally control everything, Helene has usurped a technological breakthrough involving “picospores,” sub-molecular machines meant to perform medical miracles that have now been perverted to effect mind control. With Helene’s “puppets” installed in the U.S. government, practically all public functions have been surrendered to the AI, despite an accident (or was it?) called Mayday—the suspected failure of an earlier AI—that caused untold deaths and disappearances when automated cars, boats, and spaceships malfunctioned. Several elite insiders know Helene controls the government and are striking back. They include DJ Kojak, a Navy SEAL; DJ’s autistic, brilliant brother, a hacker named CJ; Nigerian heiress and philanthropist Ndidi Okafor; and fearsome Liz and Karla Polova, formerly conjoined twins now separated and granted (via Helene’s own super-surgery) bionic limbs that boost their assassin talents. One complication: Many of these players are former spy-game enemies and hate each other. Still, all sides press the attack. The narrative splits between lively real-world fights and scenes of CJ and Manar flailing in the web-based Virtual World, learning the rules of the illusionary cityscape from scratch. (This plot consumes much narrative bandwidth before the pace ultimately quickens.) Helene is a mostly off-page, Sauron-like menace, and the Virtual World is pure urban fantasy; software-based equivalents of sorcerers and trolls act as dangerous antivirus apps, and symbolic edged weaponry inflicts code damage. Themes of disabilities being heroically overcome are woven rather nicely into the mayhem, and the superficial programmer-speak (“When Manar was sure he was ready, he activated a variation of his code manipulation”) doesn’t require an engineering degree to understand in the context of the dungeon quest–like plotline. Readers should know this is the third installment in a planned five-part SF saga.
A lengthy but lively sortie against a computerized villain with engaging fantasy elements.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798989654505
Page Count: 496
Publisher: RandallVision
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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