Slapping a fresh coat of paint on a few age-old science-fiction tropes makes for a delightful read.
A robot purchased to act as a small boy's bodyguard and nanny finds himself torn between sides in a world war pitting AI against humanity.
Minutes after a terrorist attack destroys the world's first city for free robots, the U.S. government mandates the forceful shutdown of all AI, and a mysterious software update disables the universal programming that prevents bots from harming humans. As the world burns around him, Pounce, a fluffy robot designed to look like a stuffed tiger, escorts his newly orphaned 8-year-old charge, Ezra, across a grim landscape full of bots that want the boy dead. Through Pounce's detailed account of the days that follow, which he spends protecting Ezra using a combat-optimized "Mama Bear" mode, Cargill explores philosophies of duty, morality, and free will. All the while, the furry bodyguard remains preoccupied with one basic question: Does he truly love Ezra, or has he just been programmed to do so? Although the bot's conversations with the boy occasionally take a reductionist approach—as in the moment when Pounce informs his charge that "All thinking things deserve pity and understanding"—the book never grows rote or heavy-handed, and choice quips from Ezra such as "What good is it surviving the end of the world if there are still stupid rules about what grown-ups can do and kids can't?" punch through frequently to lighten the mood. Veteran SF fans will spot shades of Isaac Asimov, whose Laws of Robotics appear early on, as well as the novel's dedicatee, Harlan Ellison, but Cargill never lets homage stand in the way of good storytelling.
Slapping a fresh coat of paint on a few age-old science-fiction tropes makes for a delightful read.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-240580-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.
In a dystopian near future, art battles back against fear.
Ng’s first two novels—her arresting debut, Everything I Never Told You (2014), and devastating follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere (2017)—provided an insightful, empathetic perspective on America as it is. Her equally sensitive, nuanced, and vividly drawn latest effort, set in a dystopian near future in which Asian Americans are regarded with scorn and mistrust by the government and their neighbors, offers a frightening portrait of what it might become. The novel’s young protagonist, Bird, was 9 when his mother—without explanation—left him and his father; his father destroyed every sign of her. Now, when Bird is 12, a letter arrives. Because it is addressed to “Bird,” he knows it's from his mother. For three years, he has had to answer to his given name, Noah; repeat that he and his father no longer have anything to do with his mother; try not to attract attention; and endure classmates calling his mother a traitor. None of it makes sense to Bird until his one friend, Sadie, fills him in: His mother, the child of Chinese immigrants, wrote a poem that had improbably become a rallying cry for those protesting PACT—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act—a law that had helped end the Crisis 10 years before, ushering in an era in which violent economic protests had become vanishingly rare, but fear and suspicion, especially for persons of Asian origin, reigned. One of the Pillars of PACT—“Protects children from environments espousing harmful views”—had been the pretext for Sadie’s removal from her parents, who had sought to expose PACT’s cruelties and, Bird begins to understand, had prompted his own mother’s decision to leave. His mother's letter launches him on an odyssey to locate her, to listen and to learn. From the very first page of this thoroughly engrossing and deeply moving novel, Bird’s story takes wing. Taut and terrifying, Ng’s cautionary tale transports us into an American tomorrow that is all too easy to imagine—and persuasively posits that the antidotes to fear and suspicion are empathy and love.
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49254-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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