An often intriguing speculative tale about frightening technology and those who control it.
Lester’s science fiction novel centers on the machinations of a powerful tech company.
In the near future, Belle is an aimless, unemployed 30-year-old woman living in an Alaskan village. When she receives a job offer from “the world’s premier tech company,” Eccleston Evolution, she’s quite surprised. Its founder, Sophia Eccleston, is a notoriously abrasive person in her 70s who, thanks to advances in technology, doesn’t look a day over 20. She wants Belle to work as a nanny for her sightless, 8-year-old daughter, Juno. Belle will live at the company’s secluded headquarters in Alaska. The site contains animals that were once extinct but were brought back to life with technology that uses DNA extracted from fossils (although none of them are dinosaurs, à la Michael Crichton’s 1990 thriller Jurassic Park). Meanwhile, an aggressive businessman, Lucas Ivanov, is planning a hostile takeover of Eccleston Evolution. In yet another plotline, a man named Seth Johnson, whose wife was cryogenically frozen by Eccleston prior to her death, is facing financial hardship as he struggles to pay Eccleston to keep his spouse alive. He starts to lose his grip, and he’s committed to a mental hospital before later embarking on a rescue mission. The early pages of Lester’s novel very effectively draw readers in; different aspects of the near-future world are revealed, and questions arise about Eccleston Evolution, which also has a hand in humanoid robotics technology. The plot thickens when it turns out that Juno may be much more than she seems. The book also has quite bit of business talk, however; the discussions surrounding the possible takeover of Eccleston aren’t particularly compelling, since readers have little reason to care about either Eccleston or Ivanov as characters. (Ivanov is notably described as someone who “buys what he can’t create.”) Still, the novel does have some surprises, particularly in the later pages, which feature disturbing discoveries.
An often intriguing speculative tale about frightening technology and those who control it.Pub Date: June 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798989612109
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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
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
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