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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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