A high-density wrap-up of a diverting cyber-sci-fi trilogy.
As humanity succumbs to a vast mind-control conspiracy, Jake Travissi suspects that reality may no longer be on his side in the finale of Davison’s (State of Union, 2102, etc.) God Head Trilogy.
This third installment doesn’t hold back, opening with nothing less than the nuclear destruction of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Islamic fundamentalists are practically the last holdouts against the Consortium, a mid-21st-century conspiracy of techno-elites out to implant civilization with Internet-linked computer chips. The Chip enhances physiology and perception and instantly connects people with the rest of mankind—but it also means that the Consortium can “hack” them and turn them into mindless slaves, exile them to a sham reality (à la The Matrix) or even order them to die. Jake, an LA lawman with a strong sense of right and wrong, relentlessly battles the Consortium to the point of allying with religious terrorists. The villains find him a source of fascination because he alone managed to resist and override his Chip programming early on. Now, a nanotech-based virus is seeding Chips worldwide into people and animals. Jake, along with a few fellow resistance fighters, flees to the only untainted realm left: the independent colonies on the moon. There, he aims to fully activate his Chip for a last stand against the Consortium’s ultimate cyberweapon—a ruthless, sadistic artificial intelligence named Constantine, who controls billions of human minds simultaneously. As our hero survives one narrow-escape cliffhanger after another, he begins to wonder if can he trust his reality at all—or if his experiences are creations of Consortium puppet masters. A story that began as a cyberpunk police thriller has, across three volumes, zoomed out to become a mind blower of Olaf Stapledon–esque dimensions, ruminating on robot ethics, futurism, and what it means to be human and have free will. (Davison even manages to express the Consortium’s point of view in a disquietingly attractive manner.) Action fans, meanwhile, will find a body count in the billions. As long as readers don’t mind this final installment’s deus-ex-machina conclusion (in a very literal sense), they’ll certainly appreciate its uncommonly forceful grand-canvas sci-fi storytelling.
A high-density wrap-up of a diverting cyber-sci-fi trilogy.Pub Date: April 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0985552862
Page Count: 426
Publisher: Bedouin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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