A bracingly tough female protagonist enhances a so-so SF tale.
In this cli-fi novel, a young woman tries to overcome her dark past (and disability) to join her isolated community’s powerful policing squads.
Author Souter, also a filmmaker, sets his dystopian story in the year 2070, although there are few futuristic props. Climate change wreaks havoc on food harvests and supply chains, and central government has collapsed, leaving individual cities and towns to fend for themselves against wildfires and rioting. In one community, ironically renamed Prosperity Way, demagogue Paulix Kane has taken over with a seductively persuasive philosophy of peace and security via harsh law and order. He dubs himself the Supreme Valor, and his police force, the Elite Front, patrols the minifascist state, divided between the wealthy “Royalton” area and the poorer Zone B. Hope Mulder is a 21-year-old Zone B native, and she was born missing a left arm to a young mother straightaway murdered. Though raised with love by her adoptive family, the intense Hope pins her future on the goal of a position with the feared Elite Front. Summary public executions as punishment for taking a life are an unquestioned part of the law (and Prosperity Way natives unintentionally kill each other so often it becomes grimly amusing; one can almost sympathize with the grumpy Supreme Valor). When her cherished stepbrother dies because someone else was horseplaying with a bow and arrows, Hope’s fierce reaction at the execution impresses Paulix, and she gets to train with Elite Front despite her disability. Others in the Kane dynasty are not so sympathetic, and the hero grows disillusioned with the pitiless justice system and the bullying mindsets behind it. Souter’s prose is sturdy and efficient, and the steely Hope is a fascinating character, which counters the dearth of surprises and arid, featureless setting. Readers of “prepper” fiction might be attracted to the doomsday/survivalist aspect of the material, though the milieu and sense of fatalism tend to recall some of the less sentimental Westerns of yesteryear (think Shane or the oaters of Elmore Leonard).
A bracingly tough female protagonist enhances a so-so SF tale.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-911974-1
Page Count: 366
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.
Second part of an alien-contact trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, 2014) from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In the previous book, the inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet with three suns, discovered that their planet was doomed and that Earth offered a suitable refuge. So, determined to capture Earth and exterminate humanity, the Trisolarans embarked on a 400-year-long interstellar voyage and also sent sophons (enormously sophisticated computers constructed inside the curled-up dimensions of fundamental particles) to spy on humanity and impose an unbreakable block on scientific advance. On Earth, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization formed to help the invaders, despite knowing the inevitable outcome. Humanity’s lone advantage is that Trisolarans are incapable of lying or dissimulation and so cannot understand deceit or subterfuge. This time, with the Trisolarans a few years into their voyage, physicist Ye Wenjie (whose reminiscences drove much of the action in the last book) visits astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji, urging him to develop her ideas on cosmic sociology. The Planetary Defense Council, meanwhile, in order to combat the powerful escapist movement (they want to build starships and flee so that at least some humans will survive), announces the Wallfacer Project. Four selected individuals will be accorded the power to command any resource in order to develop plans to defend Earth, while the details will remain hidden in the thoughts of each Wallfacer, where even the sophons can't reach. To combat this, the ETO creates Wallbreakers, dedicated to deducing and thwarting the plans of the Wallfacers. The chosen Wallfacers are soldier Frederick Tyler, diplomat Manuel Rey Diaz, neuroscientist Bill Hines, and—Luo Ji. Luo has no idea why he was chosen, but, nonetheless, the Trisolarans seem determined to kill him. The plot’s development centers on Liu’s dark and rather gloomy but highly persuasive philosophy, with dazzling ideas and an unsettling, nonlinear, almost nonnarrative structure that demands patience but offers huge rewards.
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7708-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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