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
This is a thought-provoking debut, and Giddings is a young writer to watch.
A first-time novelist offers medical horror with a political edge.
Lena Johnson’s grandmother has just died, leaving behind a staggering amount of debt. Lena’s mother is debilitated by an illness—or collection of illnesses—no one can diagnose or cure. When Lena is offered a position that pays an incredible sum of money and full health-insurance coverage for her mom, she feels that she has no choice but to leave college and become a research subject in a secret government project. Her participation requires her to lie to family and friends about what she’s doing, and she signs a nondisclosure agreement that discourages her from ever revealing the torture she and other people of color will endure at the hands of white doctors. The historical underpinnings of Giddings’ premise are obvious. Lena follows in the footsteps of black men whose syphilis went untreated even though they were promised health care for joining the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and her experience echoes that of the enslaved women James Marion Sims brutalized while testing new gynecological techniques. It might seem that, unlike them, Lena has a choice, but does she? The position she finds herself in after her grandmother’s death is a reminder that hundreds of years of structural racism have made it difficult for black families to accumulate and pass on wealth. But this novel isn’t just about Lena’s physical ordeal. The emotional and mental strains of being black in an environment seemingly designed to punish blackness—and the necessity to pretend that everything is fine—are devastating, too. At the novel’s beginning, Lena is in the habit of noting when a person she’s describing is white, a powerful rejoinder to the widespread tendency to consider whiteness the default American identity. Toward the end, she has to consciously remind herself that she is still human. In terms of style and storytelling, Giddings doesn’t always succeed, but there’s no denying the potency of her message.
This is a thought-provoking debut, and Giddings is a young writer to watch.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291319-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that traces humanity’s journey from what we imagine ourselves to be to what’s next.
Letters from humankind and our descendants weave together a story of love, robots, and poetry.
“Poetry is different from fiction, it’s not about story, it’s about becoming someone else,” explains one of the leads in this thoughtful speculative experiment. In it, translator Hur tackles the existential questions posed in Blade Runner but finds answers (and a title) in Emily Dickinson. The novel opens on a crisis in South Africa, as researcher Mali Beeko wonders why one of her most important patients has disappeared. In this near-future, a chosen few have been rescued from early deaths by scientists who systematically replace every diseased cell in their bodies with a bioengineered healthy cell using nanites. This alone would be a cool way to ponder the Ship of Theseus, a philosophical exercise that questions the nature of identity when a person or object is replaced, but the experiment just keeps going. First, over time, the patients themselves becomes influential. Ellen Van der Merwe is a classical cellist whose terrible fate will only become clear later, while Yonghun Han is a literary researcher who uses his extra years to create an AI called Panit, or “Beloved,” as a way to stay close to his late husband. Leaning more on literary discovery than hard SF tropes, the story is extrapolated to the far future by transposing Panit into an android body, followed inevitably by a war between the evolving androids (all reproductions of Ellen) and what people remain. That’s a big idea, but the narrative here is more interested in who we are than who wins. It’s a sad story, but Hur uses its disquieting ideas to sweet effect. It’s an unfailing affirmation of the persistence of love and art, even in the face of oblivion, one that tells us “it’s the story you write that is you.”
A novel that traces humanity’s journey from what we imagine ourselves to be to what’s next.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780063344488
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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