A steady, thought-provoking story of a future Earth imperiled by a too-perfect AI guardian.
In Wu’s SF novel, a systems analyst discovers a potentially apocalyptic danger that a powerful artificial intelligence may be unable or unwilling to stop.
After a period of global struggle, a benign AI called CONCORD has managed Earth’s affairs for 30 years. It ensures that all trains run on time, that no electrical blackouts happen, and that all nine billion people on the planet eat, drink, and happily live their lives. Adrian Vale is one of the human guardians tasked with monitoring “the machine” and its invariably reliable and predictable functions. But Adrian has a better-than-average talent for pattern recognition, and he notes minute system lags and even failures that CONCORD should notice and record; instead, the AI seems to be erasing them from the evidence logs. Adrian discovers that mysterious, detrimental pulses from space have been hitting Earth at regular intervals for millennia—and they’re historically coincident with famines, plagues, and other disasters. CONCORD has quietly been overcoming these attacks, but lately the waveforms have been arriving more rapidly, as if building to a climactic event, and the machine’s protection seems to be faltering. Adrian and a small number of allies delve into disused archives and forbidden cloisters to determine if a catastrophic failure for all humankind is imminent—and all the while, Adrian knows that CONCORD is watching them. Author Wu doesn’t frame this doomsday scenario as a Michael Crichton–esque thrill ride, but rather as a philosophical novel, featuring elegant explanations of such concepts as chaos theory and over-cranked optimization in detailed but nontechnical language and precisely restrained, lyrical prose. There’s no distracting tech buzzwords, and the author gracefully delivers and illuminates the book’s ultimate message. The dystopian aspects of digital dictatorship, such as those in Ira Levin’s superficially similar novel This Perfect Day (1970), are secondary, but skillfully addressed: “The cheapest way to suppress a true alarm is not to silence the man who raises it. It is to make him, and everyone around him, including the man himself, sincerely believe that the alarm is the man.”
A steady, thought-provoking story of a future Earth imperiled by a too-perfect AI guardian.Pub Date: June 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798180464989
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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