Cyberpunk shock meets infinite romantic regret in this dark, engrossing, and ultimately doleful SF tale.
A nanotechnology engineer’s mind, uploaded online, reboots after spending three years in a netherworld and must try to remember what went wrong with the experiment.
Kelly’s debut SF novel offers a first-person narration from entirely within a software-based environment called the Aethyr. Pittsburgh nanotech engineer Patrick “Paddy” Riordan was part of a pioneering experiment in the late 2020s by a cutting-edge/punk rock–style team of young coders, neurologists, and biochemists. The group planned to digitize a human brain and put its consciousness online, theoretically resulting in immortality, godlike perceptions, empathy, and power. The subject was supposed to be the team’s financier, terminally ill venture capitalist Andrew Damon. But Paddy, suffering chronic gastric pain, volunteered to leave flesh behind and go first even if that meant being clinically euthanized and having his brain sectioned. After three years in a limbolike state, Paddy regains awareness and his mortal appearance (complete with Iron Maiden T-shirt) in the Aethyr’s artificial program/simulation and its seedy, noirish city of New Eridu. (Here, as in the porn-dominated web, most places seem to be sex clubs and strip joints.) Surrounded by sinister phantoms and avatars that may either be people or AIs, Paddy finds that vital parts of his memory are missing. Moreover, a warrior type, calling itself the Varyag and declaring itself his defender, hints that the researcher who was the radiant love of Paddy’s life, MIT prodigy Zinaida, aka Zed, is in danger. Somehow in this incorporeal state, Paddy can help her. But is the Varyag lying? What happened to Andrew? What really happened to Paddy? For that matter, what’s happening right now? If this tale had been told in a more straightforward fashion, it might have had less impact. But in Kelly’s long-end-of-the-cyberscope gambit, starting with the outcome and leapfrogging back in time, the story is an intriguing puzzle of transhumanist tech, philosophy, metaphysics, and unreliable narrators. The narrative delivers a mounting sense of dread as digital entities broadly hint to Paddy that he will deeply regret learning the truth if he chooses to continue his quest. While describing the rubber reality of Aethyr is a tough proposition, SF readers raised on The Matrix and Black Mirror (the recipient of a shoutout) and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash should acclimate to the immaterial milieu.
Cyberpunk shock meets infinite romantic regret in this dark, engrossing, and ultimately doleful SF tale.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73412-910-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.
A Lambda Award–winning writer explores America’s dark history of brutalizing Black bodies in their latest work of speculative fiction.
Vern is a young woman raising her twin babies in a forest, dressing them in the hides of animals she’s hunted and hiding them away in makeshift shelters. Vern is being followed by ghosts and stalked by someone who butchers animals and dresses them in infants’ clothes. Both are connected to the Black separatist commune from which Vern has escaped. As a parasite takes over her body, Vern develops superhuman powers and begins to suspect that she is a test subject being used by the United States government. There’s a lot going on here—perhaps too much. The novel starts out strong; the portion of the narrative in which Vern and her children are fending for themselves in the wilderness has the feel of folklore, and the idea that she is haunted by the experience of her ancestors is evocative. As Solomon moves further into the realms of science fiction, though, their voice loses much of its force. This is surprising given the quality of the worldbuilding in An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), a dystopian tale set on a giant spaceship. The problem isn’t that the notion that Vern is part of a secret experiment conducted on Black people is implausible—Solomon references both the Tuskegee Study and the work of James Marion Sims, a 19th-century gynecologist who practiced new techniques on enslaved women. The problem is that the concept that drives the plot for half the novel is barely developed. With almost no evidence, Vern intuits that she is part of a shocking conspiracy, and, from that point, readers are supposed to take this as a given. Instead of building a compelling case, Solomon wrestles fantastic tropes into shapes that fit the frame they’ve created without effectively supporting it.
The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-26677-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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