A dystopian tale both engaging and conceivable.
In Gariffo’s sci-fi debut, a mysterious agent handles covert, sometimes-lethal jobs for one of the world-dominating corporations in the mid-21st century.
Agent Sliver’s clandestine work has become routine—even when it involves killing. His latest mission from World, Inc., in New Detroit is to shut down terrorists intent on attacking corporations such as Sliver’s employer. Within the last few decades, five supercorporations have saved the world from economic decline and, in the process, seized control from governments. While Sliver readily accepts assignments from his boss, Fellrock, he hopes his target will be Ancarn, CEO of a corporation called Multinational, though the agent is mum on the reason why. But change may be on the horizon. The typically unsentimental Sliver sympathizes with the daughter of targets he’s just eliminated. He takes Kelly aboard his airship but tells no one since she’s an anomaly (her genetics, for one, aren’t registered like everyone else’s). Complicating matters is a new mission that entails a high-profile assassination and someone’s discernible attempt to take out his ship—and Sliver as well. Luckily, the agent has allies, including the ship’s onboard computer he’s affectionately dubbed Franklin, for facing his would-be assassin. Gariffo painstakingly constructs a convincing near-future tale. The book’s highlight is a series of articles on the supercorporations’ gradual takeover (citizens further crippling the U.S. government by not paying income taxes is frighteningly plausible). The protagonist, meanwhile, is increasingly fascinating: Readers eventually learn his backstory with Ancarn and why Sliver habitually injects himself with Serum. Action scenes showcase Gariffo’s penchant for meticulous details: “Sliver swung the chair’s legs up into the face of the individual to his left and then threw the seat into the upper half of the flunky on his right.” Unfortunately, Kelly, the only significant female, is largely unexplored, from the impact of her family’s deaths to adjusting to a corporate-ruled world her parents kept hidden from her.
A dystopian tale both engaging and conceivable.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983349-60-7
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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