A perfect fusion of SF, thriller, and mystery—smart speculative fiction at its very best.
The first installment of Evans’ Songs of the Sage SF series explores a near future in which language is a streamed commodity controlled by corporations.
In the early 22nd century, learned language is largely obsolete. The majority of the world’s populace is “chipped” at birth with a neural implant that streams “Unilanguage” technology, which is controlled by powerful mega-corporations. The language-streaming business is a highly lucrative and rapidly evolving industry—but when a catastrophic global language outage inexplicably sweeps much of the world, humankind quickly devolves into chaos. Emyr Morgan, head of the Europol Cybercrime Division, is tasked with investigating the outage. The grand-scale conspiracy that he uncovers is ingeniously intricate and involves the most powerful people on the planet. He soon finds himself on the run, with only one person in his corner: the enigmatic Ebba Black, a linguistics professor, heiress, hacker extraordinaire, and the world’s last natural speaker of multiple dead or proscribed languages. She also may head a terrorist organization; Morgan muses, “I had never in my whole life met anyone quite like her” in a moment of comic understatement. The novel is powered by a multitude of narrative elements: deeply considered and meticulously described worldbuilding, an impressively complex storyline with numerous bombshell plot twists, emotionally compelling characters, and weighty themes concerning the power of language and the danger of humankind’s becoming overly dependent on technology. The pace is breakneck and the action nonstop, leading up to a stand-up-and-applaud conclusion that not only satisfies, but sets the stage for the next installment.
A perfect fusion of SF, thriller, and mystery—smart speculative fiction at its very best.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781739996222
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Nephilim Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.
As the world dies, the remnants of the patriarchy and their minions keep right on terrorizing the weak.
Caustically original in the same fashion as her chilling Tender Is the Flesh (2020), Bazterrica’s latest devises an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe. The most palpable tragedy is that no matter how the world dies, women always seem to end up with the same sorry fortune. The story is set in an unknown wasteland where all the animals on Earth have perished, with callouts to a mysterious, poisonous haze and a collapsed world. Our narrator is a young woman relegated to sheltering in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, an isolated, fundamentalist order subservient to an unseen, deity-like “He,” and divided into strict castes. Among these are the Enlightened, kept isolated from the rest of the order behind a mysterious black door; the Chosen, divine and devoted prophets who are ritually mutilated; and the servants marked by contamination, who sit just below the narrator’s caste, the unworthy young women. The story is a little tough to follow due to the narrator’s fragmented memory, not to mention lots of interruptions from the old ultraviolence and body horror. Although men are banned from the cloistered stronghold, it’s a relentlessly sadistic and violent society ruled by the Superior Sister, enforcer of His will and the instrument of punishment up to and including torture and death. The narrator is already mourning Helena, a spirited iconoclast who couldn’t survive under such oppression, when a new arrival named Lucía sparks fresh hope that may prove as fruitless as everything else in this bleak testament to suffering. As a subversion of expectations and an indictment of unchecked power, it’s unflinching and provocative, but readers expecting a satisfying denouement may be left wanting.
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051887
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
