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
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.
A post-apocalyptic—and pre-apocalyptic—debut.
It’s 2011, if not quite the 2011 you remember. Candace Chen is a millennial living in Manhattan. She doesn’t love her job as a production assistant—she helps publishers make specialty Bibles—but it’s a steady paycheck. Her boyfriend wants to leave the city and his own mindless job. She doesn’t go with him, so she’s in the city when Shen Fever strikes. Victims don’t die immediately. Instead, they slide into a mechanical existence in which they repeat the same mundane actions over and over. These zombies aren’t out hunting humans; instead, they perform a single habit from life until their bodies fall apart. Retail workers fold and refold T-shirts. Women set the table for dinner over and over again. A handful of people seem to be immune, though, and Candace joins a group of survivors. The connection between existence before the End and during the time that comes after is not hard to see. The fevered aren’t all that different from the factory workers who produce Bibles for Candace’s company. Indeed, one of the projects she works on almost falls apart because it proves hard to source cheap semiprecious stones; Candace is only able to complete the contract because she finds a Chinese company that doesn’t mind too much if its workers die from lung disease. This is a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment. This is Ma’s first novel, but her fiction has appeared in distinguished journals, and she won a prize for a chapter of this book. She knows her craft, and it shows. Candace is great, a wonderful mix of vulnerability, wry humor, and steely strength. She’s sufficiently self-aware to see the parallels between her life before the End and the pathology of Shen Fever. Ma also offers lovely meditations on memory and the immigrant experience.
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-26159-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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