A breezy sci-fi saga that will delight aficionados of both science and spirituality.
An offbeat novel about a group of spiritually gifted beings that discovers a means to bring their peaceful message to other planets.
Scherer’s debut is a crafty, bizarre hybrid of science fiction tropes, New-Age didacticism and old-fashioned conspiracy theory. In 2013, archeologists Carla and Norman Wallace discover an ancient spiritual library lost deep in a jungle. Seven decades into the future—with a blessed lack of exposition—Talia Jensen sits in a room and explores the world using only her spirit, which is unattached to her body; she’s one of only a few people who have mastered the higher techniques of the Wallace Doctrines, lessons discovered in the jungle library. On her astral-projection journey, however, she has a run-in with a soul trap, which almost catches her. She quickly gets a team together, including the handsome Robin Sanford, to locate the soul trap in the real world. Although Robin is hardly a master of astral projection, he’s bold and bright; however, the author doesn’t prolong Talia and Robin’s cheeky romantic subplot, and this thoughtful brevity keeps the story moving. The team manages to disable the soul trap and gives it to a group of scientists to reverse engineer. They don’t know who has placed the traps or why, but the new technology allows them to quickly develop the ability to travel to other star systems, and they hope to spread the Wallace Doctrines throughout the galaxy. They also discover a wicked cabal, headed by a family called the Withermites, that controls banks, media and political leaders. Readers may find the plot a bit absurd, but the novel has a self-reflexive tongue-in-cheek style that makes it all good fun. The novel’s political and spiritual messages are unguarded: peace over war, harmony over greed, truth over deception. Such messaging sometimes pulls readers out of the plot, but in general, the prose is so precise, and the story so concise, that readers will forgive the overt ideology—and anticipate the sequel hinted at on the final page.
A breezy sci-fi saga that will delight aficionados of both science and spirituality.Pub Date: April 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482069099
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary...
Environmental unconcern, genetic engineering, and bioterrorism have created the hollowed-out, haunted future world of Atwood’s ingenious and disturbing 11th novel, bearing several resemblances to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
Protagonist Jimmy, a.k.a. “Snowman,” is perhaps the only living “remnant” (i.e., human unaltered by science) in a devastated lunar landscape where he lives by his remaining wits, scavenges for flotsam surviving from past civilizations, dodges man-eating mutant predators, and remembers. In an equally dark parallel narrative, Atwood traces Jimmy’s personal history, beginning with a bonfire in which diseased livestock are incinerated, observed by five-year-old Jimmy and his father, a “genographer” employed by, first, OrganInc Farms, then, the sinister Helthwyzer Corporation. One staggering invention follows another, as Jimmy mourns the departure of his mother (a former microbiologist who clearly foresaw the Armageddon her colleagues were building), goes through intensive schooling with his brilliant best friend Glenn (who renames himself Crake), and enjoys such lurid titillations as computer games that simulate catastrophe and global conflict (e.g., “Extinctathon,” “Kwiktime Osama”) and Web sites featuring popular atrocities (e.g., “hedsoff.com”). Surfing a kiddie-porn site, Jimmy encounters the poignant figure of Oryx, a Southeast Asian girl apprenticed (i.e., sold) to a con-man, then a sex-seller (in sequences as scary and revolting as anything in contemporary fiction). Oryx will inhabit Jimmy’s imagination forever, as will the perverse genius Crake, who rises from the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute to a position of literally awesome power at the RejoovenEsense Compound, where he works on a formula for immortality, creates artificial humans (the “Children of Crake”), and helps produce the virus that’s pirated and used to start a plague that effectively decimates the world’s population. And Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.) brings it all together in a stunning surprise climax.
A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary Zamyatin’s We. Atwood has surpassed herself.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50385-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A...
In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother’s refusal to identify his father.
Sibylla and five-year-old Ludovic are quite a pair, riding round and round on the Circle Line in London’s Underground while he reads the Odyssey in the original and she copes with the inevitable remarks by fellow passengers. Sibylla, an expatriate American making a living as a typist, herself possesses formidable intelligence, but her eccentricities are just as noteworthy. Believing Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to be a film without peer, she watches it day after day, year after year, while in the one-night stand with Ludo’s father-to-be, she wound up in bed with him for no better reason than it wouldn’t have been polite not to, although subsequently she has nothing but scorn for his utterly conventional (if successful) travel books. Ludo she keeps in the dark about his patrimony, feeding him instead new languages at the rate of one or two a year, and, when an effort to put him in school with others his age wreaks havoc on the class, she resumes responsibility for his education, which, not surprisingly, relies heavily on Kurosawa’s film. As Ludo grows up, however, he will not be denied knowledge of his father, and sniffs him out—only to be as disappointed with him as his mother is. Hopes of happiness with the genuine article having been dashed, Ludo moves on to ideal candidates, and approaches a succession of geniuses, each time with a claim of being the man’s son. While these efforts are enlightening, they are also futile—and in one case tragic—until Ludo finds his match in one who knows the dialogue of Seven Samurai almost as well as he does.
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6668-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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