A thoughtfully composed piece of cyberpunk that will please readers of both science fiction and noir.
A Los Angeles cyberpunk saga about the fusion of mind, machine and the federal government.
Opening on a semihallucinatory Santa Monica morning, Davison’s tale quickly changes from pleasing beach scene to an unexplained nightmare of lost innocence, lost love and a distillation of apocalyptic anxiety. The apparent, but ambiguous, loss of hero Jake Travissi’s family hangs over much of the book while Travissi attempts to stay in L.A. and think positively. Travissi, known to his compatriots in the police department as “Jackhammer,” has recently been ousted for having used excessive force on a governor’s son. But like all down-on-their-luck ex-cops, he has a second chance; if he’s willing to have the unfortunately named P-chip installed in his brain, he can work for the Department of Homeland Security. The novel’s premise is a keen extrapolation based on the utopian visions of futurists like Ray Kurzweil and the disturbing inevitabilities of Moore’s law. The P-chip creates harmonious prisons, impossibly fit and happy citizens, instant communication and, for Travissi, a slippery grasp on his will and thoughts. His chip has been compromised by a group of tyrannical hackers known as Godheads and they control key people in key positions to render the citizenry into a compliant stupor so that 21st-century elites can irrevocably enhance their power. The novel utilizes disconnected flashbacks and this buttresses the general themes of memory and its existential problems, but this is often done with little respect to enhancing tension and so the excuse for using this structure seems less convincing when the reader is begging for a little exposition. However, the intelligence and cleverness with which the novel has been written is obvious on every page. At times Davison can be a bit too purple, as when he describes L.A.’s heat locking down the city like a “lethargic” straightjacket. It’s a perfect metaphor brought down by going a word too far. The prose, though, is nonetheless the novel’s strength, and Davison always errs on the side of abundance rather than the faux hardboiled-ness that inflicts so many mystery thrillers on the market. Though the themes are familiar and the territory well-trodden, the book has wit and heart to spare.
A thoughtfully composed piece of cyberpunk that will please readers of both science fiction and noir.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0966614923
Page Count: 389
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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