A compelling dystopian detective story with a unique setting that keeps its secrets close to the vest.
In Miller’s SF novel, an investigator faces personal demons when his work takes him into dystopian subterranean slums.
In the future, the Hawaiian Islands contain the last bastion of humanity after some undefined global catastrophe. Under the direction of elitist technocrat “Designers” (who are venerated by some to the point of religious worship), the archipelago has been transformed into individual, multitiered city-states reliant on high technology, recycling, and imported resources to function. An uneasy detente exists between the island cities (political strife caused the destruction of the city of Honolulu). Designed Psychological Manifestation entities—implanted, sentient AI assistants reflecting the user’s original personality—are largely outlawed, but investigator Kilohana “Kilo” Ressler still has one, a pseudo-twin named EO. (“He resided between worlds, able to interact with me and the environment around him while remaining invisible and imperceptible to everyone else.”) Kilo (and, unavoidably, EO) has no choice but to embark on a mission dictated by the Designers. Expeditions to the poison-tainted “Continent” to mine vital island necessities are yielding higher death rates than the sanctioned quotas allow—someone is up to something. To solve the mystery, Kilo must reluctantly descend into “the Below”—roiling, semi-lawless underground realms of the poor, the criminal, and the exploited—and confront his own origin. The logline of Miller’s SF debut suggests Blade Runner colliding with Hawaii Five-0; the author has acknowledged Philip K. Dick as an influence on this futuristic detective thriller, which is hardboiled to the point of near-nihilism and flavored with the odors of machine oil and lab-grown meat. In the tradition of Dick’s work, the novel is rife with fiendish conspiracies, deceits, disloyalties, injustices, and impostures that never quite get sorted out. The backdrop of Pacific and Polynesian cultures never feels like a gimmick (there’s no gratuitous surfing). Parsing the dense text is not always easy—readers may go through several chapters before realizing that EO is not corporeal.
A compelling dystopian detective story with a unique setting that keeps its secrets close to the vest.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9798891386013
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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