An entertaining thriller with a potent message about dehumanizing technology.
A futuristic messenger gets caught up in a war between AIs for world domination in Dyson’s labyrinthine sci-fi novel.
In 2087, with decryption technology making secure electromagnetic transmission impossible, top-secret communications are conveyed by employees of the Courier Company; the messages are encoded in their DNA by a virus that also gives them super-strength (and kills them if they abandon their missions). One initially nameless Courier (eventually identified as Luna) is ambushed in Singapore by Dis2Re, a dissident group seeking to read the DNA message in her blood. They think the information will help them destroy the Shoutr social media platform (run by an AI Super Intelligence called Ape-X), which is brainwashing humankind into accepting world government by the Global Alliance. The Courier joins activists Anjali Bhatti, who has an artificial eye and mechanical legs, and Ross Feynman, a cynical nerd whose only relationship is with Belle, his AI girlfriend. Fighting off cyborgs as they go, they set out for the Australian lair of Dis2Re’s leader, a trillionaire named Halliburg who designed Ape-X and was then ousted by it. The plot grows into a web of double- and triple-crosses enmeshing Halliburg, Ape-X, the Global Alliance, and EMMA, the rival AI that runs the Courier Company. Dyson’s yarn is full of fast-paced action conveyed in punchy, kinetic prose: “I get to my feet and run for my life, keeping Anjali’s figure ahead in the center of my tunneled vision…Rockets strike the ground just behind me as jagged chucks of black pavement rain through the air in front.” But it’s also a mordant, evocative portrait of all-engulfing digital mediation; “[A]ll I’m good for in this world is ticking my eyes across a screen moving files around….no human can be enough for me,” observes Feynman. The result is a page-turner with a disquieting take on how AI may isolate and demoralize rather than destroy us.
An entertaining thriller with a potent message about dehumanizing technology.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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