Easily read sextet of largely cautionary SF tales in the old-fashioned manner.
Williams’ compact short stories occur in landscapes devastated by war and pollution. An exception (maybe) is the title piece, but “A Clockmaker’s Tale” too carries the author’s mixed view of technology’s consequences. In a society of flying cars and other breakthroughs, George Sebastian Phillips, an artisan, still laboriously services, maintains, and builds mechanical clocks by hand. A salesman convinces him to try the “Work Buddy,” an AI skull attachment that allows users to drowse and sleep while their bodies continue to do skilled labor. No harm in that, right? George’s efficiency improves, but, predictably, at a horrible cost. More benign are the intelligent robots in “10,000”; a pair of AIs on the moon attempt to revive the human race after a fiendish biological weapon erases humans from the Earth. A specimen pool of 10,000 cryogenically frozen human volunteers are available for the robots’ research, but failure and frustration bring grief even to the automatons. Two tales, “Post-Truth Tours” and “Law and Disorder,” may well unfold in the same bleak world, a place where stern AI judgments face anyone who defies social norms. “Waste Not,” perhaps the most thought-provoking entry, envisions a hellish, garbage-choked dystopian society and a poor family man taking a desperate chance to escape it. “Last Bus to Freedom,” the tale with the least obvious SF trappings—mainly war drones and mythical place names—is mostly action, describing a POW uprising and harrowing attempted escape through enemy lines. Like his horror-oriented compatriot Charles Birkin, Williams tells his material matter-of-factly and doesn’t shy away from pain and doom, though his attitude is not as pessimistic as Birkin’s. Genre readers may note the absence of space aliens in the assortment. Homo sapiens (and their silicon-chip cohorts) provide more than enough trouble, mayhem, and solutions-that-are-worse-than-the-problems, thank you.
Easily read sextet of largely cautionary SF tales in the old-fashioned manner. (science fiction)Pub Date: June 20, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 ridiculous concept imbued with gravity, charm, humor, plausible cynicism, and pathos—and perhaps the merest touch of spite.
A Wallace & Gromit dream is more of a nightmare in this darkly farcical science fantasy in which the moon inexplicably becomes…well, not green, but decidedly dairy.
When the moon and every lunar sample on Earth transform into a cheese-like substance, it seems amusing at first, but the appearance of this newly organic, extremely unstable satellite has far-reaching, apocalyptic consequences. A variety of U.S. citizens—disappointed astronauts from newly cancelled lunar missions, scientists whose understanding of the universe has been entirely upended, writers frantically adapting their pitches, retirees at a rural diner finding solace in their friendship, a small church community looking for divine answers, bickering cheese-shop owners whose product gets both welcome and unwelcome attention, the ultra-wealthy owner of an aerospace company with a spectacularly self-involved agenda, bank executives seeking a financial angle, and government officials desperately scheduling press conferences—respond in ways grand and petty, generous and self-serving. Those responses can only escalate when a cheesy lunar fragment threatens to destroy all life on our planet. Scalzi’s premise is absurd, but it’s merely the pretext to take a multifaceted, satiric look at how Americans deal with large-scale crisis, something we’re abundantly and recently familiar with, and will no doubt experience again in the not-so-distant future. He writes of denial, conspiracy theories, anger directed at the wrong people, unscrupulous political machinations, and multiple attempts at profiting from the end of the world, for as long as it lasts. There are moments of unexpected kindness and generosity, too. Of course, Scalzi takes aim at his favorite corporate, social, and government targets, as well as at the cheap sentiment that crisis always seems to inspire (as exemplified by a catastrophic Saturday Night Live episode).
A ridiculous concept imbued with gravity, charm, humor, plausible cynicism, and pathos—and perhaps the merest touch of spite.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780765389091
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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