An inventive, accessible presentation of Hamlet with an SF twist.
Two alien AIs sneak their way through Shakespeare’s greatest play in Neill’s imaginative staging.
In the far distant future—long after humanity has died out and life has moved on to a different galaxy—the intelligences of an advanced machine-based civilization are still attempting to understand the works of William Shakespeare. The newly minted artificial consciousness J-9 (or Janine, as she prefers to be called) has been created to live within simulations of Shakespeare’s plays, observing the characters’ actions and thereby drawing inferences as to what ancient humans might have been like. With the help of her assistant, Otto—a mutating entity that most often takes the form of a robotic owl—Janine enters a production of Hamlet as a bit player, standing in as a guard, a servant girl, an attendant, or whoever else might slip into a scene unnoticed. From these—the best seats in the house—she and Otto watch the play unfolding in its entirety, with only the occasional asides that help explain some of the more opaque aspects of the language or plot. For example, when it’s revealed the new king Claudius has married his brother’s widow only two months after the dead king’s death, Janine “wrinkles her nose and purses her lips as if she has just bitten into a lemon. JANINE: That seems…hasty.” The reading experience is primarily that of reading Hamlet—there are extended sections where Janine and Otto fade into the background, leaving the reader alone with the text. Neill’s most helpful contributions come in the form of his setting and scene directions, including a highly evocative description of Elsinore castle: “It is no traditional four-walled bailey and keep, nor is it a bastion in the shape of a star to give archers or cannonades angles on attackers. Rather, the walls of Elsinore have followed the contours of the cliffs…giving it the appearance of a building with innumerable facades.” For fans of SF looking for a way into Shakespeare, Janine and Otto make for a fun and not overly intrusive set of guides.
An inventive, accessible presentation of Hamlet with an SF twist.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798282260809
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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