An uncomplicated but well-rendered exploration of a familiar body-switch premise.
Aliens offer an average guy in Oregon a way to avoid death by transferring his consciousness to a female body in Denton’s debut SF novel.
Scott Michael Evers was raised by an alcoholic father and became a loutish, single, saloon-centered adult, prone to settling conflicts with his fists. He has one extraordinary distinction, though: As a boy, he was abducted by aliens—the big-eyed, inquisitive Sroans, whose saucer crashed at Roswell in 1947. Off-world,they monitor Scott remotely via implants. When Scott develops stage 4 cancer and stoically prepares to die in 2005, his extraterrestrial guardian angels reveal themselves with an urgent offer. A despondent Ukrainian woman whom the Sroan were studying has just shot herself in the head, and the aliens have the ability, via superscience, to transfer Scott’s mind to her body, enabling him to live and remain in close proximity to his small extended family; his best pal, Dan; and the few others he cares about. He accepts the Sroans’ offer, but as Jody, she encounters difficulty when she tries to convince skeptics that she’s been remade. She also has trouble adapting to her new situation; for one thing, men now treat her as a sex object—just as Scott used to do when he inhabited a male body. Meanwhile, government and military operatives notice the alien meddling and decide to take action. The body-switch gimmick was a standby in comedy literature even before it became a Hollywood rom-com plot. Here, Denton straightforwardly explores this setup in an SF context using the same sort of relatable, plainspoken language that genre maestro Richard Matheson employed for the plight of his protagonist in the 1956 novel The Shrinking Man. Denton doesn’t dazzle with wordplay, but he manages to eschew absurd jokiness. Along the way, he shows a generosity of spirit to the various characters, even the putative bad guys. That said, some readers may be disappointed the novel doesn’t delve more deeply into feminist themes and questions of identity and transgender politics, as SF virtuosos have done with similar material.
An uncomplicated but well-rendered exploration of a familiar body-switch premise.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 514
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Liu’s trilogy is the first major work of science fiction to come to the West out of China, and it’s a masterpiece.
What if alien civilizations do exist? In this final installment of a stunning and provocative trilogy (The Dark Forest, 2015, etc.), Liu teases out the grim, unsettling implications.
Previously, astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji forestalled an invasion attempt by advanced aliens from planet Trisolaris. Luo’s “dark forest” deterrence works thus: if intelligent species exist, inevitably some will be hostile; therefore, safety lies in remaining hidden while threatening to reveal your enemy’s location to the predators. Earth knows where Trisolaris is, but the Trisolarans can’t threaten to reveal Earth’s location since they want to occupy it. Here, the story picks up at an earlier juncture. Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer developing a probe to study the approaching Trisolaran fleet, learns that a friend has been tricked into volunteering to die in order to assist the project. Horrified, she retreats into hibernation. When she revives centuries later, dark forest deterrence holds the Trisolarans at bay. Luo, now old, hands Cheng the key to Earth’s defense. Unfortunately, the sophons—tiny, intelligent, light-speed computers sent by the Trisolarans as spies—know Cheng lacks Luo’s ruthlessness and immediately seize control of Earth; only by luck does Earth manage to trigger its deterrent. Hostile aliens immediately destroy planet Trisolaris, whose invasion fleet turns away because it’s only a matter of time before the same invisible antagonists deduce the existence of Earth and strike the solar system. Once again, Cheng must choose between logical ruthlessness and simple human compassion, with the fate of humanity at stake. This utterly absorbing book shows little interest in linear narrative or conventional character interactions. Instead, the author offers dilemmas moral, philosophical, and political; perspectives—a spectacular glimpse of three dimensions seen from a four-dimensional viewpoint; a dying universe shattered by billions of years of warfare; and persuasive ideas whose dismal repercussions extend beyond hope and despair into, inescapably, real-world significance.
Liu’s trilogy is the first major work of science fiction to come to the West out of China, and it’s a masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7710-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An exciting start from a fresh talent, offering emotional and political complexity plus plenty of interplanetary action.
An intricate plot for revenge drives this far-future SF political thriller, a debut novel that is also the first of a trilogy.
The planets of the Treble are ruled by the Kindom, a religious order, and the wealthy First Families. Esek Nightfoot, a cruel, vicious, and sociopathically self-interested Cleric and First Family scion, cut off all career opportunities for a brilliant student called Six, challenging them to do something “extraordinary” to impress her into taking them as a novitiate. Six’s “extraordinary” act was to leave school before graduation and begin collecting evidence that exposes the Nightfoots’ complicity in a genocide. Esek has pursued Six for years, often with the uneasy assistance of Cleric Chono, a far more pious person who feels loyalty both to Six, a former schoolmate, and to Esek, who once pulled Chono out of a sexually abusive situation. Their quest eventually leads to Jun Ironway, a gifted hacker who holds a piece of the data implicating the Nightfoots and also has her own dark history with both Esek and Six. Does Esek want to kill Six, as her family’s matriarch demands, or make good on her promise to make them one of her novitiates? Or does she have something else entirely in mind? As the political situation of the Treble becomes more unstable, the chase careens toward a violent and shocking endgame. The narrative jumps around in time, fully filling in past events that are initially referenced in the present-day story. At first this seems unnecessary and confusing, but as several staggering twists emerge, it becomes clear that the choice is utterly necessary and the confusion might actually be the author’s method of obscuring a key revelation. The reader may figure out that revelation before it explodes in the text but will likely be surprised by a good part of what follows. The author also does an excellent job of applying what are typically high fantasy or historical fiction tropes (the tension between religious and secular entities, the unrest over the hereditary passage of power, and the fraught relationship between mentor and student) to high-tech science fiction (perhaps Dune was an influence?).
An exciting start from a fresh talent, offering emotional and political complexity plus plenty of interplanetary action.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-316-46332-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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