A thematically rich, brainy, and meditation-worthy “what-if” considering the ramifications of a life in which death has no...
Genetically gifted humans with unnaturally long lifespans evade the aging-obsessed pursuers who would exploit them in Bratman’s SF novel.
In this smart, witty SF tale, rare humans are born with the genetic mutation for extraordinary long life; they are categorized as “hafeems,” who undergo a slow aging process, living for centuries before they finally expire, or as “True Immortals,” who reach mid-20s maturity and remain vulnerable to fatal injuries but are otherwise eternally young. Only 300-something years old, Blair is a fresh Immortal who has already abandoned several wives to age and die without him (immortals live with mortal families in 12-year “frames” before changing identities and fleeing elsewhere.) Blair is identified as an immortal and tracked by powerful forces, assumed to be existentially tormented mortals who covet (and are willing to kill for) the secret of endless life. But things are not so simple. The storyline’s shifting narrators include Saul, a hafeem who mentored Blair in navigating their secret subculture before their estrangement, and Janice, a mortal drug addict and online sex worker who stumbles into a (kinky) affair with Blair when he mistakes her punk nihilism for the POV of a fellow immortal. Blair is naive and shallow, physically perfect but slightly weighed down by his guilt, selfish choices, and loneliness; in a canny move by the sly author, Blair disappears for much of the narrative, making room for richer characters, some reflecting an attitude of existence stretched over epochs. Immortality is a long-standing SF/Fantasy trope, and while the ingredients gathered here could produce a standard action-chase beach read, the author productively shifts gears, bringing in hard SF (prepare for heavy-duty DNA-lab talk), social satire, suspense, pop-culture references (from Shakespeare to Six Feet Under), and philosophy, with pithy zingers and jaded wisdom from the timeless ones and those who love them (“Here’s the definition of nerdy: you get love-crazy over things that shrink you instead of grow you”). Remember, some of these folks hung with Socrates.
A thematically rich, brainy, and meditation-worthy “what-if” considering the ramifications of a life in which death has no sting.Pub Date: May 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798393653156
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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