Impressive AI mayhem and thematic parsing for SF fans.
A sequel describes a future Pacific Northwest splintered into competing nation-states where the emergence of automated artificial intelligence city states from hibernation threatens to do more than just shift the balance of power.
SF author Otto focuses on the intricate dystopian realm he created in his novel Detonation (2018) but mostly with another set of characters. Prolonged conflict has broken out over advanced AI, reminiscent of (but a bit more thoughtful than) Daniel Wilson’s Robopacalypse franchise. In the process, major cities are destroyed. Human society continues in diminished, Balkanized form, with a major force being the “Essentialists,” a caste trying to persevere without high technology. The Pacific Northwest and coastal waters of the former United States and Canada are now varied seagoing nation-states technologically regressed to something approximating the age of fighting sail. There, a ticking time bomb of advanced AI exists: several regional “Independent City States of Morganis,”built 80 years ago. Meant as utopian havens of automation and protection, the idealistic city states turned dangerously against humans and one another. Now, after a ruinous clash and generations dormant, these city states—each more sophisticated than the last—have been somehow triggered to gradually come back online. To competing expansionist forces—especially an opportunist “Prefecture,” a throwback to imperial Japan—the power and potential weaponry embodied by the city states are an irresistible lure. Dryden Quintain, an anthropologist disgraced by his alcoholism, studies ICSM history as an intellectual pursuit, but he soon finds himself a pawn in the intrigues. So does Lexie, a spirited female pirate who becomes a prisoner of the “Observers,” a monkish group that keeps watch over the dangerous tech. Ironically, to do so, the Observers resort to neural implants and connections that have made them somehow inhuman. Via these characters, the author skillfully invokes principles such as “value-loading” and other logic paradoxes that strive to explain how machines designed to be humankind’s faithful servants can become the masters (or exterminators) instead. While not short of striking combat scenes and violence, as war droids and drones fill the landscape, this tale is also SF with major ideas, as much so as Isaac Asimov’s iconic “Three Laws of Robotics.” Otto’s bio notes that he runs a nonprofit that promotes the ethical use of AI.
Impressive AI mayhem and thematic parsing for SF fans. (science fiction)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 521
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
A plodding novel from a talented writer.
A professor and his daughter navigate a new America where all white people have died by suicide.
“They killed themselves,” explains Charlie Brunton, the narrator of Campbell’s high-concept novel. “One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.” Charlie is a Black man who’s served time in prison, wrongfully convicted of rape; after the mass suicide of white people, he became a professor at Howard University, trying to make sense of a country with no real government or systems: “Only a fragile structure remained….” Charlie gets a phone call from his daughter, Sidney, born to the white woman he was accused of raping, asking him to drive her from her home in Wisconsin to Alabama, where she’s heard that some surviving white people are living. Sidney has internalized racism, opining that “the world got left to the heathens” and lamenting her physical similarities to her Black father. Charlie and Sidney enlist the help of a pilot to get them to the South, eventually ending up in Mobile, where they encounter a new society that neither of them expected and learn what was behind the mass suicide of white Americans. Campbell’s novel starts off fairly strong—it’s undoubtedly an interesting thought experiment—but goes off the rails quickly, sunk by the author’s often too-florid prose and unrealistic dialogue. Sidney’s transition from self-hating to enlightened is forced, and aside from the two protagonists, the characters are purely functional. This book reads less like a novel and more like an extended treatment for a television series.
A plodding novel from a talented writer.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781668034927
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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