The robot-uprising premise gets a bracing reboot with an intriguing new operating system.
In an oppressive future America, where authorities persecute rogue movements that promote the rights of artificial intelligence, a software-based entity arises to lead a rebellion.
Keller commences a trilogy with this SF entry set in 2142 America, a dystopian surveillance state overseen by dreaded “String Police” using algorithms to predict potential criminals and terrorists. Suspects can be arrested—even killed—in the process (there is a subtle nod to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, the most famous depiction of the concept). But the government and its noxious, ambitious Joint Chiefs Gen. Thomas Mitchell have reason to be paranoid. Robots, androids, and other AI systems have surpassed human intelligence (though acknowledgement of the fact is forbidden), and the establishment fears the dawning of machine awareness. Unauthorized activist movements, including an illegal “Robochurch,” promote the rights of synthetic beings despite harsh push back from authorities. Moreover, a software-based entity calling herself Maia Stone becomes conscious. Claiming only benign, altruistic goals of peaceful human-machine coexistence (if she can be trusted), Maia Stone manifests omnipotently throughout cyberspace as a virtual goddess figure symbolizing and leading a machine revolution. Only in the second act does Keller supply a major backstory—that this technology-choked, misogynistic society, via artificial wombs and programmed sex-robot “wives,” has effectively made women obsolete. They face species extinction. Is Maia Stone a disguised superweapon of the feminists, a tool of tech resisters, or even a creation of power-mad Mitchell? The novel makes a notable comparison/contrast to Daniel Wilson’s Robopocalypse franchise, whose cartoony, Steven Spielberg–friendly action propelled it up bestseller lists. Often narrated by Maia Stone herself in Scripture-like terms, Keller’s tale delivers much more high-density stuff, brainy with themes of theology, nonviolent activism, determinism, gender inequality, the definition of sentience, and the ethics of being a deity (or the nearest thing to one). Smart readers may note the clever shoutouts to the Short Circuit comedy movies, Spartacus, and other properties. If antics and dialogue sometimes noisily mesh gears with too many big ideas in play, the rich abundance of those concepts is, in the words of an old Apple ad campaign, insanely great. Maia the Force be with the sequel.
The robot-uprising premise gets a bracing reboot with an intriguing new operating system.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73723-040-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: TiLu Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.
In a dystopian near future, art battles back against fear.
Ng’s first two novels—her arresting debut, Everything I Never Told You (2014), and devastating follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere (2017)—provided an insightful, empathetic perspective on America as it is. Her equally sensitive, nuanced, and vividly drawn latest effort, set in a dystopian near future in which Asian Americans are regarded with scorn and mistrust by the government and their neighbors, offers a frightening portrait of what it might become. The novel’s young protagonist, Bird, was 9 when his mother—without explanation—left him and his father; his father destroyed every sign of her. Now, when Bird is 12, a letter arrives. Because it is addressed to “Bird,” he knows it's from his mother. For three years, he has had to answer to his given name, Noah; repeat that he and his father no longer have anything to do with his mother; try not to attract attention; and endure classmates calling his mother a traitor. None of it makes sense to Bird until his one friend, Sadie, fills him in: His mother, the child of Chinese immigrants, wrote a poem that had improbably become a rallying cry for those protesting PACT—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act—a law that had helped end the Crisis 10 years before, ushering in an era in which violent economic protests had become vanishingly rare, but fear and suspicion, especially for persons of Asian origin, reigned. One of the Pillars of PACT—“Protects children from environments espousing harmful views”—had been the pretext for Sadie’s removal from her parents, who had sought to expose PACT’s cruelties and, Bird begins to understand, had prompted his own mother’s decision to leave. His mother's letter launches him on an odyssey to locate her, to listen and to learn. From the very first page of this thoroughly engrossing and deeply moving novel, Bird’s story takes wing. Taut and terrifying, Ng’s cautionary tale transports us into an American tomorrow that is all too easy to imagine—and persuasively posits that the antidotes to fear and suspicion are empathy and love.
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49254-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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