A hard-hitting, sometimes frighteningly realistic portrayal of a dystopian world.
A late-23rd-century community in a massive multi-section complex endures class struggle and political divides in Agarwal’s SF novel.
The Space Fountain is an intercontinental transportation system with megastructures built in capital cities around the world. These structures contain apartments, like the New York station, where Aria lives. All stations are split into sections organized by wealth; Aria goes to art school in Section 9, because her father, who’s friends with the police commissioner, pulled some strings. Meanwhile, teenager Vijay hails from Section 20, one of the poorest areas in the Delhi station. When there’s a chance that he’ll be kicked out of said station, partially due to his father’s failing health, he sneaks onto a shuttle and winds up in New York. As Aria is running for a local political seat (along with several fellow residents, including “bankers, engineers, entrepreneurs, eccentric billionaires, etc.”), Vijay struggles to find a job and stay healthy, lest he be sent to the less-desirable mainland. Elsewhere in the same station, Max, a cyborg resident gardener, seems content, but that may change when his lost memories slowly return. Agarwal delivers wonderfully dynamic characters: Vijay earns sympathy with his plight as he leaves behind his mom in Delhi, but he also does something that will shock many readers. Max’s hazy past makes him a curious enigma, and Aria is generally unlikable, thanks to her sense of self-importance and occasional mean-spiritedness. Despite the far-future setting, this narrative is topical, with a political campaign that turns nasty, talk of deportation, and the wealthy segregating themselves from those in poverty. As the trio of plotlines gradually intertwine, an increasing sense of chaos results in a frenetic final act. Relatively brief chapters and scenes keep the story ticking along, even during indeterminate periods of time. A few instances of violence pop up, but the author smartly implies them, focusing on the consequences, rather than the acts themselves.
A hard-hitting, sometimes frighteningly realistic portrayal of a dystopian world.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2026
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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