This bracing SF series opener delivers thorny jargon and equally challenging and bold cultural ideas.
Centuries after a war and science breakthroughs reconfigured humanity, a space-based, dominant race of gender-fluid elites investigates apocalyptic rumors and cultlike revelations spreading among the masses subsisting on Earth.
Whitlow opens a multivolume SF saga with this mind-stretcher set mainly on a far-future Earth (aka Erdos) about 300 years after a ruinous war that practically redesigned humankind. An advanced race of elites—the “Meritorians”—adopted existence on the moon, Mars (aka Marda), and outer planets. They are (mostly) the benevolent and ultraprogressive masters of the solar system, low gravity, and their own medicine, which altered their physiologies to the point of being a new species. Their very thoughts are interlinked by “cognos,” a descendant of the internet, and they regard unaltered Earth dwellers as aberrant troglodytes. The Meritorians are friendly and collaborative with an upper caste called “Consumers” but have little regard for the peasant masses that teem in underground cities and settlements and still communicate verbally, among other offenses. Now, these low-borns are alarming Meritorians with a cultish movement offering vaguely apocalyptic and seditious pronouncements of an approaching individual/entity called “Javeh.” Surveillance scans prove the validity of Javeh’s beatific visions and whisperings, but Meritorian superscience cannot decipher the code or how the messages are being transmitted. In advance of an important Meritorian conference on Erdos, the terrorism begins. Readers will be tested by a dense, future-speak argot largely (but not entirely) related in the Meritorian vernacular, which replaces all personal pronouns with gender-neutral ones (“Se draws serself up and puts ser weight into the comp suit, which mercifully supports ser as se totters away to the stairs”). The lingo indicates that the main dogma of Meritorian society comprises transgenderism and the overthrow of the “binary fallacy,” which the civilization believes brought humanity to ruin. Readers who can peer past the opaque curtain of the author’s peculiar language will be rewarded by intellectual puzzles and troubling questions, largely unanswered by the open-ended climax. Is Javeh a reactionary rebel mastermind or a wrathful (and transphobic) God who is returning? This is heady stuff for the adventuresome who like SF that does not give up its secrets easily.
This bracing SF series opener delivers thorny jargon and equally challenging and bold cultural ideas. (science fiction)Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7349098-2-1
Page Count: 196
Publisher: James Perry
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A huge, churning, relentlessly entertaining melodrama buoyed by confidence that human values will prevail.
A rare, rattling space opera—first of a trilogy, or series, from Corey (aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).
Humanity colonized the solar system out as far as Neptune but then exploration stagnated. Straight-arrow Jim Holden is XO of an ice-hauler swinging between the rings of Saturn and the mining stations of the Belt, the scattered ring of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. His ship's captain, responding to a distress beacon, orders Holden and a shuttle crew to investigate what proves to be a derelict. Holden realizes it's some sort of trap, but an immensely powerful, stealthed warship destroys the ice-hauler, leaving Holden and the shuttle crew the sole survivors. This unthinkable act swiftly brings Earth, with its huge swarms of ships, Mars with its less numerous but modern and powerful navy, and the essentially defenseless Belt to the brink of war. Meanwhile, on the asteroid Ceres, cynical, hard-drinking detective Miller—we don't find out he has other names until the last few pages—receives orders to track down and "rescue"—i.e. kidnap—a girl, Julie Mao, who rebelled against her rich Earth family and built an independent life for herself in the Belt. Julie is nowhere to be found but, as the fighting escalates, Miller discovers that Julie's father knew beforehand that hostilities would occur. Now obsessed, Miller continues to investigate even when he loses his job—and the trail leads towards Holden, the derelict, and what might prove to be a horrifying biological experiment. No great depth of character here, but the adherence to known physical laws—no spaceships zooming around like airplanes—makes the action all the more visceral. And where Corey really excels is in conveying the horror and stupidity of interplanetary war, the sheer vast emptiness of space and the amorality of huge corporations.
A huge, churning, relentlessly entertaining melodrama buoyed by confidence that human values will prevail.Pub Date: June 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-12908-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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