A tense read with an impressive reveal and an unpredictable conclusion.
This thought-provoking SF novel by author Nedeau painstakingly details the fragility of identity.
Darien Mamon is spoiled rich kid who’s had to find his own way after his parents’ deaths in an accident. After he was expelled from college in Miami for cheating, Darien scraped by with a series of badly paying coding jobs; then he was diagnosed with cancer, and its treatment left him in a deep, deep hole financially. That’s why the job offer from MemorSingular was a godsend. He’s now employed as a grunt at the MemorSingular memory-storage facility in Tucson, Arizona, working in a converted missile silo, and he works with the company’s renowned Dr. Hollister as the subject of cutting-edge memory experiments. But the experiments have a side effect: Darien begins having memories that are unfamiliar but also feel very real, and when he finds out the reason for the strange recollections, it comes as a shock—although it also explains why Hollister has been trying to eliminate Darien’s fear of heights. To escape his fate at Hollister’s hands, Darien enlists the help of Nancy, his ex-girlfriend's best friend who hates him, and her fellow rebels at South Miami Technical College. Over the course of this thriller, Nedeau slickly crafts a sinister twist on the reason why people’s memories blur as they age. The author plants the seed for the huge plot twist early on, then slyly veers away from it, making the reader think that Darien is simply suffering from some kind of mental breakdown. Nedeau also accomplishes the surprising feat of making the unpleasant protagonist likable by novel’s end; Darien is shown to mature as he learns that he’s not the only victim of the conspiracy at the heart of the story. The supporting cast members aren’t as nuanced as the main character, but they do play their roles well in the suspenseful narrative.
A tense read with an impressive reveal and an unpredictable conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-953305-01-5
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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