An often enjoyable, if slightly formulaic, SF novel about breaking away from a collective.
A parable in which unrest comes to a neatly hierarchical future state.
In the future world thatO’Neil imagines, society underwent a grand Reorganization a generation ago and is now carefully organized into levels of affluence. In Tier One are the Swells, who live in gated communities and have their every need or want quickly attended to by attentive “artificial intelligence entities”; they’re also guarded by the omnipresent, robotic Mech Marshals who enforce the law. On Tier Two are the Shoals, who likewise enjoy comfortable lives with all of their needs met, although perhaps less quickly or urgently than the people in Tier One. And finally, there’s Tier Three—the vast majority of the population, known as Sands, who are mostly contentedly idle and want for nothing, although they enjoy fewer luxuries; sometimes they provide luxuries for others in the form of Sands-made items, which are coveted by the upper Tiers for their supposed authenticity. Against this backdrop, readers meet the human law enforcement officer Lansing, his investigative AI partner (named “Partner”), and 15-year-old Traxter, a follower of an underground philosophical movement aimed at undercutting the seemingly perfect world society. One of Traxter’s instructors warns him about their AI helpers: “They meet all our needs. They spread us out. They teach us to behave. So they can ignore us.” Indeed, the darker reality underlying all the supposed contentment is stressed repeatedly over the course of the narrative: “The AIs are slowly cutting humans out of the decision cycle,” Lansing warns at one point. “We don’t make any sense to them, and they see our control as interference.”
In an unusual wrinkle, O’Neil’s novel is a companion piece to on an earlier nonfiction work by the same author. In The Unused Path(2021), he outlined a straightforward philosophy of life for readers to consider when they’re confronted with potentially corrosive complexities of the modern world. In this new novel, “the Unused Path” is intriguingly employed as the name of a dissident group disrupting the seemingly flawless society; it’s also the name of that group’s philosophy of nontechnological mindfulness, which features such mantras as “Develop your mind,” “Spend time alone with your thoughts,” and “Specificity contributes to accuracy.” Readers don’t need to read the first book in order to appreciate this one, but the use of such textual interconnectedness does make the somewhat familiarplot—about fugitives in a blandly perfect environment finding an off-the-grid, subversive alternative—more compelling than it would ordinarily be. Various subplots feel, more or less, like afterthoughts, but the main action manages to capture the imagination and hold it. The main players are developed well over the course of the narrative, and the book’s dialogue, especially, rings true and is consistently snappy and readable. The worldbuilding is thorough and internally consistent, as well, although many readers may wish the author had offered more specific details about the Reorganization that lies at the heart of the work.
An often enjoyable, if slightly formulaic, SF novel about breaking away from a collective.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73782-451-0
Page Count: 324
Publisher: FNG Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2022
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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