A clever computer romp that should charm readers like a fairy tale.
In this sci-fi debut, a programmer creates an artificial intelligence that upends his life.
Programmer Gabe Erikson lives in an empty house now that his ex-girlfriend Michelle has moved out. She took all the furniture, but that’s OK. All Gabe needs to survive are his computer and racks of servers. He’s created a bucolic digital realm called Little Computer People. He names the being inside—whom he thinks of as his daughter—Pi. He hopes to sell LCP to the engineering firm Pratt & Taiki and become incredibly wealthy. He also meets and grows smitten with Kimiko, Michael Pratt’s adopted daughter, ahead of the sale. Pi, however, is one precocious entity. She challenges Gabe to convince her that he isn’t a program so tiny and inconsequential that he takes up no space. When Gabe tries to explain that he exists outside her scope of reality, she replies, “I see,” and then accuses him of lying. Next, she begins deleting data for fun, which forces him to cut the power and acknowledge that LPC needs more work before Pratt & Taiki can see it. If this weren’t stressful enough, Kimiko insists that Gabe prove he’s serious about dating her by going skydiving. In this delightfully geeky novel, Surlak-Ramsey presents Gabe believably as a control freak obsessed with his own divinity. Religious metaphors abound, as in the line “What I needed was a supercomputer that burned up teraflops like Hell burned up sinners.” When Gabe removes a worm from his system, Pi calls him a murderer and starts hacking into his real life (his bank account, for example). Kimiko proves a down-to-earth foil for him as chaos ensues, like when she says, “A true master accepts all responsibility, both the good and the bad. Until you can do that, you are no master of your craft.” Too often, though, the author emphasizes that Kimiko is a “samurai hottie,” placing an otherwise excellent character into a limiting Dream Girl box. The humorous narrative nevertheless remains superbly entertaining, even if you don’t know bits from bytes.
A clever computer romp that should charm readers like a fairy tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tiny Fox Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2016
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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