A taut, efficient dystopian look at a tech-filled tomorrow, to be continued.
In Relk’s SF novel, a self-possessed soldier in a pointless, Orwellian future war determines to desert the battlefield—or die trying.
The United Hemispheres have superseded the old United States, where no elections have occurred since 2028 and all aspects of life are controlled by the giant Goliath Network. David is a veteran in an ongoing United Hemispheres war of back-and-forth bloodshed between color-coded armies with fearsome advanced weapons. Nobody remembers or cares how the conflict started or what the goal is. David, however, is different: “He had long ago stopped his internal debate about whether his survival instinct was a sign of weakness or cowardice.” He doesn’t draw attention to himself (since vocal dissenters are summarily executed), and he opted out of getting medical implants that turned many newer, younger recruits into docile troops. He even bunks alone in an abandoned HQ, as all his friends and comrades have perished. David knows his luck won’t last, and he plans to bolt from the battle zones. His escape will reveal to him what readers already know—that the outside world is a technological utopia, where robots perform all labor. Goliath regulates travel, and its AI software feeds an apathetic public’s custom-tailored tastes (including a religion that’s a slush of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism). David’s family gave him up for dead and became cogs in the establishment. What will a reunion bring? Some hard-combat SF details in Relk’s novel will likely sate action fans. However, the material changes into something more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) as it proceeds to its ambiguous open ending, and genre readers will also find hints of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974) and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) along the way. Relk, a former soldier, previously invoked the setting of this yarn in a prequel novella, The Network Apostate (2024), and this new short and caustic work will likely make readers eager for whatever comes next.
A taut, efficient dystopian look at a tech-filled tomorrow, to be continued.Pub Date: June 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798992047110
Page Count: 199
Publisher: Dystopian Dreams Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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