An engaging tale featuring cli-fi, college intrigue, romance, and particle physics.
A physics graduate student in a future Colorado wracked by climate change disasters faces multiple dangers when she attempts momentous experiments in clean-energy production and time reversal.
Smith offers this SF novel as a prequel to her parallel-universes adventure Kat Cubed (2016). The setting is an unnamed Colorado college campus in March 2098. Kathy Garcia is a 27-year-old grad student, part of a group of brainy folks recruited from all over the world. They are hoping to reverse the catastrophic effects of climate change by achieving fusion-based clean energy in a magnetic-field reactor called a “Tokamak.” But a freak avalanche (one of numerous altered-weather disasters) sweeps through the physics building, killing some of Kathy’s colleagues and devastating the technology—which, in an academic milieu destabilized by pandemics, wildfires, hunger, economic malaise, and increased mortality, was not the best anyway. Improvising with computers and gear salvaged from a nearby, relatively undamaged neutrino studies laboratory, Kathy and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Jake Moretti—and Ellen, the protagonist’s helpful, phone-based software, personal assistant app who seems to be evolving into a true artificial intelligence—seek to continue the project. But they encounter unexpected opposition and professional jealousy from other members of the international research team. As the stakes escalate to the truly life-threatening, Kathy makes the amazing discovery of a Tokamak side effect that could effectively serve as a microcosmic form of time travel and a vehicle for reaching out to earlier generations for help. Readers already acquainted with Kat Cubed will know that the ultimate result is three alternating, dystopian-future realities, all afflicted to varying degrees by climate change. This prelude can be enjoyed as more or less a stand-alone even if readers don’t know a Tokamak from an autoclave. The author is a scientist in real life and a prolific author of largely whimsical romps incorporating concepts of physics and probability. Smith delivers a nicely casual voice, a hero whose concessions to swear words are minor things likeGaia, yikes!and flooding (instead of the other f-word), and highly advanced science in doses manageable and nonpedantic enough for general readers.
An engaging tale featuring cli-fi, college intrigue, romance, and particle physics.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950198-35-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.
The world as we know it ended in Wanderers, Wendig’s 2019 bestseller. Now what?
A sequel to a pandemic novel written during an actual pandemic sounds pretty intense, and this one doesn’t disappoint, heightened by its author’s deft narrative skills, killer cliffhangers, and a not inconsiderable amount of bloodletting. To recap: A plague called White Mask decimated humanity, with a relative handful saved by a powerful AI called Black Swan that herded this hypnotized flock to Ouray, Colorado. Among the survivors are Benji Ray, a scientist formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Shana Stewart, who is pregnant and the reluctant custodian of the evolving AI (via nanobots, natch); Sheriff Marcy Reyes; and pastor Matthew Bird. In Middle America, President Ed Creel, a murdering, bigoted, bullying Trump clone, raises his own army of scumbags to fight what remains of the culture wars. When Black Swan kidnaps Shana’s child, she and Benji set off on another cross-country quest to find a way to save him. On their way to CDC headquarters, they pick up hilariously foulmouthed rock god Pete Corley, back from delivering Willie Nelson’s guitar to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This novel is an overflowing font of treasures peppered with more than a few pointed barbs for any Christofacists or Nazis who might have wandered in by accident. Where Wanderers was about flight in the face of menace, this is an old-fashioned quest with a small band of noble heroes trying to save the world while a would-be tyrant gathers his forces. All those big beats, not least a cataclysmic showdown in Atlanta, are tempered by the book’s more intimate struggles, from Shana’s primal instinct to recover her boy to the grief Pete buries beneath levity to Matthew Bird’s near-constant grapple with guilt. It’s a lot to take in, but Pete’s ribald, bombastic humor as well as funny interstitials and epigraphs temper the horror within.
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-15877-7
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
