Delivers sci-fi action while maintaining a highbrow, character-driven narrative.
In Diogenes’ sci-fi debut, a military drone pilot steps into a dystopian world to lead a murder investigation and clash with renegade robots.
On a casual weekend with potential love interest Anna, military agent Ray Alexander has to put himself back into work mode when robots arrive that have been reprogrammed to attack Anna and her uncle Cal. Before Ray has a chance to determine the robots’ specific target, he’s nearly killed by swarmers—small flying automatons that successfully murdered another drone pilot. Ray looks into identifying a person who fled the scene of the robot attack and is soon faced with more trouble when Anna disappears. The author permeates his story with delectable sci-fi bytes, like a peculiar time convention called “qhours,” each comprised of 10 90-second minutes, and Ray’s Panviewer headgear that allows for a panoramic “fullview.” The book further boasts stellar action, particularly the multiple swarmer assaults, as well as tech humor, including crash-landed, lucky-to-be-alive passengers complaining that they can’t access social networking; even Ray is upset that he has no time to peruse his backlog of emails. There’s a robust backdrop of inharmonious systems of government—the Constitutional Republic, for which Ray works, is set against the anti-freedom United Christian States and the Caliphate. Yet the novel’s most notable feature is its broad, fertile language; readers may want a dictionary handy, since uncommon words—“moue” and “pellucid,” for instance—appear in liberal doses. But the vocabulary, while certainly intelligent, occasionally has a dulling effect, as when Ray uses an aurally harsh word like “pulchritudinous” to compliment Anna’s beauty or in the frequent sex scenes between Anna and Ray (as well as Ray and fellow pilot Zinnia), which feature somewhat clinical descriptions: Ray “skillfully palpated all the plicae of her pudenda.” Their physical encounters have the same cold, detached feel as the virtual alternative. Still, it’s captivating following Ray’s exploits—he gets help from an old lover while finding a new lover and looking for his current lover—all the way to an ending that’s fearlessly unreserved.
Delivers sci-fi action while maintaining a highbrow, character-driven narrative.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492208235
Page Count: 442
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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