An enjoyable adventure that poses provocative questions.
In Ford’s speculative novel, a man is torn between two contrasting post-apocalyptic worlds.
When readers first encounter Peter, an everyman action hero, he’s launching himself at a deadly saber-toothed tiger who’s had the temerity to come prowling around Peter’s adopted family’s dwelling looking for a meal. The scene is harrowing, the stakes are pulse-poundingly high—and readers don’t even know who Peter is yet. From there, the author slowly reveals the setting—the realm of Ecologia—and Peter’s tenuous place in it. The time period is not initially established, but it eventually becomes clear that there’s been a nuclear war and that the Earth is now divided into two cultures. Ecologia is nothing more than a giant-game preserve where human beings exist in a near-Paleolithic state, fighting to survive off the land. The other world—Peter’s homeworld—is called Economica, and it looks a lot like our own, but with more advanced tech and even greater governmental suppression. (“Balance was restored by the establishment of the two Realms, Ecologia and Economica, to be forever held separated for the preservation of Gaia, our Mother Earth.”) Peter has discovered an undetected portal between Economica and Ecologia, and he uses it to easily travel back and forth in secret whenever the spirit moves him. He has an important decision to make when his access to the portal is set to close: Should he remain in Ecologia or return home to Economica? It’s an intriguing premise, and Ford compellingly draws overt parallels between Peter’s quandary and the very real questions facing contemporary society with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and ever-increasing automation. In the face of the cold authoritarianism depicted here, battling the stray saber-toothed tiger now and then might not seem that bad (especially when you’re got a supportive family around you and a wild and an untamable beauty pledged to keep you warm at night). If there is a downside to Ford’s provocative yarn, it’s that there seems to be a lot more potential to explore.
An enjoyable adventure that poses provocative questions.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781788649568
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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