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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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