A comic and engaging yet didactic look at the mechanisms underlying economies.
In this debut novel, a group of abducted earthlings learns about economics in a satirical SF setting.
Three female earthlings—Evadne Lynn, Flora Neemer, and Millicent Tenor—have been sent to the economic reeducation camp on the tiny, remote moon of Ting. There, they receive hologram lessons from Violet Self, who uses as her textbook The Manual of Basic Economics for the Stupid and Ill-Informed to convert the young women from socialists to capitalists. These lessons take on particular resonance for the prisoners given that they spend most of their energy gathering coconuts for sustenance. They are released before too long but cannot go back to Earth, which has been quarantined due to an outbreak of coronavirus. Instead, they are sent to the larger moon of Kapathund, a socialist society caught in the midst of hyperinflation. Kapathund is the home world of Violet, who meets with the women to explain why the socialist moon isn’t anything how they imagined it to be. With Violet’s help, the group seeks to cure Kapathund of its inflation and learn something about the true nature of capitalism along the way. Petersen’s comic world, rendered in precise prose, brings to mind the work of Douglas Adams. While there is much talk of the underlying theory of economics, Petersen has quite a lot to say about human behavior as well, as here where Violet observes another group of prisoners on Ting: “There was always one person who seemed...not smarter or more industrious, not even more prone to capitalism. But there was usually one person who was unhappier than the other two. More unfulfilled, more driven…it was usually a feeling of frustration, rather than optimism, that pushed people forward.” The book’s message is decidedly pro-capitalist, though its definition of capitalism is a bit more nuanced than the term generally used in American political debates. The story does not have much of an emotional dimension—the cartoonish characters primarily exist to represent various (and often misinformed) ideological positions—but the novel is short enough to mostly satisfy as a satire.
A comic and engaging yet didactic look at the mechanisms underlying economies.Pub Date: July 18, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning.
An intrepid teen encounters the dark secrets of the elite in her climate-ravaged world in this translated work from South Korea.
Sixteen-year-old Jeon Chobahm is shocked to learn that Goh Haeri, the beloved reality TV star who happens to be Chobahm’s look-alike, just died by suicide—and also that she’s being asked to become Haeri’s secret replacement. In their frozen, post-apocalyptic world, Chobahm, like everyone around her, leads a bleak life. She bundles up daily against the dangerous cold and toils in a power plant. But now she’ll live Haeri’s cushy life in Snowglobe, an exclusive, glass-dome-enclosed community, where the climate is mild, and the resident actors’ lives are broadcast as entertainment for those in the open world. As glamorous as life there may seem, however, Chobahm quickly learns that there’s a sinister underbelly: People are killed off when they’re no longer useful, and there’s something strange about Haeri’s family dynamics. As she meets a host of new companions, including Yi Bonwhe, the heir of Snowglobe’s founding family, Chobahm discovers a devastating secret and embarks on a risky plan to expose the truth. Climate change, societal inequity, and the ethics of escaping from our own lives by watching others’ are addressed in this intelligent, absorbing book. Chobahm is a complex character inhabiting a strongly developed world, and her compassion, ambition, outrage, and sorrow ring true.
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning. (Dystopian. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593484975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK TO SCREEN
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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