A brief, barbed satire following a tech billionaire’s destructive rise.
Peoples skewers an egotistical tech titan who mistakes riches for admiration in this satirical novella.
Noel Skum (anagrammists, have at it), the lonely scion of an Australian mining empire, discovers the world of computers at his prep school. Though his grades are mediocre, he uses his new programming skills to hack into Dartmouth College and get himself admitted. Blessed with an entrepreneurial knack, Noel starts a series of businesses—a porn-sharing website, a test answer database, an electronic guide to every ski slope in New England—culminating in Finance-A-Friend, which he sells for $125 million a week before graduating. In subsequent decades, he follows a familiar-sounding path making reusable rockets and electric cars while fathering two dozen children with nearly as many women. “Noel either was worshipped by sad, lonely, balding and overweight middle-aged men,” writes Peoples, “or was uncomfortably tolerated in cowed silence by everyone else.” From there, Noel’s path diverges from that of his real-life inspiration. As Earth’s first trillionaire, Noel becomes something of a supervillain, moving across the world in his fleet of SF vehicles and bribing governments and religious leaders while dodging assassination attempts and bad press. With his invention of a generalized artificial intelligence, Noel is finally in a position to fulfill his greatest desire: to overthrow the world’s governments and take humanity—or at least some of it—to the stars. The pseudonymous author peppers this satire with plenty of nods to our current moment (example: “popular holocast” host “J.O. Brogain”) and finds numerous ways to make fun of his target (Skum’s magnum opus is “ElonGate…a tiny phallus-shaped microchip implanted in the user’s gluteus that operated as a sort of global ID card”). The narrative is conveyed mostly as summary, and while the story may be cathartic for readers who do not like Elon Musk, it ultimately has little to say about the mogul that hasn’t already been widely observed and noted. Illustrated using the AI program Midjourney, the book feels like a poignant artifact of our current techno-political moment in history.
A brief, barbed satire following a tech billionaire’s destructive rise.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Ope!
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2025
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
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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