A wild take on humanity’s last stand and our flawed understanding of who we are.
Where does the human race go from here? This book is a radical answer to a dark question.
This speculative, artful, and deeply confusing novel sketches out the end of the world while simultaneously positing nearly unthinkable solutions and grappling with fundamental questions about identity, evolution, memory, and individualism. Over 14 tangentially connected, sometimes intertwined stories set across generations, Kawakami infuses her ethereal fiction about future civilization with both scientific inquiry and an acute sense of wonder about the human condition. The opener, “Keepsakes,” introduces the world on its way out, no longer sustainable by natural means. Humans are now cloned in factories and sourced from the DNA of animals as well as people. Designated caregivers called mothers raise children while watchers keep different communities isolated from one another. In “Narcissi” and “Green Garden,” we learn the extent of the cloning involved and begin to meet outliers who don’t fit in. While the science fiction concepts at play aren’t as onerous as the long-spanning timelines in Iain Banks’ The Culture or Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, there’s no easy narrative arc here, either. We get a little more explanation in “Echoes”: “As a result of multiple impacts and other catastrophic events, the human population was in free fall.” But Jakob O’Neal and his partner, Ian Chen, have a plan to divide up the remaining human population in order to force evolution to do its job. Ironically, not much of this speculative future has to do with technology at all—in some timelines, rudimentary technology still exists, while in others, people start to develop inherent changes, among them photosynthesis, clairvoyance, and other superhuman abilities. Yet despite all these fantastic elements, Kawakami is more interested in people and their makeup, introducing a prophet in “The Miracle Worker” and the pains of love in the bookended stories “Love” and “Changes.”
A wild take on humanity’s last stand and our flawed understanding of who we are.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781593766115
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.
As the world dies, the remnants of the patriarchy and their minions keep right on terrorizing the weak.
Caustically original in the same fashion as her chilling Tender Is the Flesh (2020), Bazterrica’s latest devises an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe. The most palpable tragedy is that no matter how the world dies, women always seem to end up with the same sorry fortune. The story is set in an unknown wasteland where all the animals on Earth have perished, with callouts to a mysterious, poisonous haze and a collapsed world. Our narrator is a young woman relegated to sheltering in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, an isolated, fundamentalist order subservient to an unseen, deity-like “He,” and divided into strict castes. Among these are the Enlightened, kept isolated from the rest of the order behind a mysterious black door; the Chosen, divine and devoted prophets who are ritually mutilated; and the servants marked by contamination, who sit just below the narrator’s caste, the unworthy young women. The story is a little tough to follow due to the narrator’s fragmented memory, not to mention lots of interruptions from the old ultraviolence and body horror. Although men are banned from the cloistered stronghold, it’s a relentlessly sadistic and violent society ruled by the Superior Sister, enforcer of His will and the instrument of punishment up to and including torture and death. The narrator is already mourning Helena, a spirited iconoclast who couldn’t survive under such oppression, when a new arrival named Lucía sparks fresh hope that may prove as fruitless as everything else in this bleak testament to suffering. As a subversion of expectations and an indictment of unchecked power, it’s unflinching and provocative, but readers expecting a satisfying denouement may be left wanting.
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051887
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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