An ill-timed and awkwardly executed novella.
An asteroid creates a deadly dilemma for the president of the United States in this SF novella.
It’s 2050, and a massive asteroid called Camulos is headed for Earth. The nondescript Maj. Kristin Orsted and her fellow NASA Space Force pilots race to destroy it before impact. In case that plan doesn’t pan out, U.S. President John Sanders—descendant of a “long respected political family hailing from Vermont”—has unleashed a “planned pandemic” (a new coronavirus called “COVID-50”) on the world. While Dr. Tony Cifau tallies deaths and works on a vaccine, the National Security Agency uses phones, tablets, and smart TVs to see which citizens follow social distancing guidelines. The feds then zero in on people with skill sets and “genetic make-up” deemed beneficial to the survival of human species. It’s all part of a plan to get 1,000 “highly educated, highly skilled, cross-functional, and obedient” Americans aboard a shuttle to Mars. Those who can’t “follow orders” or “wear...a simple mask” are automatically struck from the passenger list, meaning that they’ll perish if the asteroid hits. Baird’s prose is sturdy and his plot, ambitious. However, the plan raises ethical and moral questions that aren’t well explored. Not one character picks up on the elitism at play, and President Sanders does little more than mope around the Oval Office. The work is also often weighed down by SF jargon—not related to new planets or alien languages (as in Star Wars, which Baird references multiple times) but boring back and forth between Orsted and mission control about meganewtons, calculations, and fuel capacities. Characters are vaguely sketched and seem less like real people than they do pawns for the plot. Notably, the book’s descriptions of COVID-50’s gruesome symptoms and the frustrations of lockdown feel too raw. There may come a time for quarantine lit, but many readers will feel that that time is still in the future.
An ill-timed and awkwardly executed novella. (acknowledgements, author bio) (ISBN: 979-8672700908 Page Count: 174 Publisher: Independently Published/NA (?) Categories: Science Fiction, Space, Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi, Teen Sci-Fi(?)Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-270090-8
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
A plodding novel from a talented writer.
A professor and his daughter navigate a new America where all white people have died by suicide.
“They killed themselves,” explains Charlie Brunton, the narrator of Campbell’s high-concept novel. “One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.” Charlie is a Black man who’s served time in prison, wrongfully convicted of rape; after the mass suicide of white people, he became a professor at Howard University, trying to make sense of a country with no real government or systems: “Only a fragile structure remained….” Charlie gets a phone call from his daughter, Sidney, born to the white woman he was accused of raping, asking him to drive her from her home in Wisconsin to Alabama, where she’s heard that some surviving white people are living. Sidney has internalized racism, opining that “the world got left to the heathens” and lamenting her physical similarities to her Black father. Charlie and Sidney enlist the help of a pilot to get them to the South, eventually ending up in Mobile, where they encounter a new society that neither of them expected and learn what was behind the mass suicide of white Americans. Campbell’s novel starts off fairly strong—it’s undoubtedly an interesting thought experiment—but goes off the rails quickly, sunk by the author’s often too-florid prose and unrealistic dialogue. Sidney’s transition from self-hating to enlightened is forced, and aside from the two protagonists, the characters are purely functional. This book reads less like a novel and more like an extended treatment for a television series.
A plodding novel from a talented writer.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781668034927
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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