An intriguing seriocomic fable of a supposed utopia gone wrong.
In Marullo’s SF novel, a future utopian community of evolved humans faces a quandary as long-suppressed sexual desire resurfaces in their society.
After the death of Earth’s original solar system, the planet is cast out on its own. It wanders as a rogue for a million years before getting a second chance by getting recaptured in the orbit of a passing star. Environmental upheavals are catastrophic, but over eons, a new iteration of Homo sapiens (“Homo Sapiens 2.0”) emerges, apparently repeating exactly the same evolutionary process as before and now occupying a single-continent landmass. The people who dwell upon the planet Opine, called Opinions, are intellectual and have a “cider complexion”; they’re nature-loving, generous, and have no organized religion, war, hatred, bigotry, or greed. A digital archive of old Earth has enlightened Opinions to their wretched history; indeed, mocking the “Fools” of the past is a common Opinion pastime. Their culture long ago quashed bad behavior by using a regime of drugs and gene therapy, and it has a side effect of muting human sex drives. Then Opinion student Aster Bottlebrush changes everything by politely asking his friend Dianella Whitebeam if he can see and fondle her naked breast, and she assents. The event has the effect of shaking Opinion society to its very core, as it reveals that the aforementioned “Self Suppressor” treatment is not absolute, as everyone thought.
Marullo, the author of Till Times Are Done (2019), among other novels, adopts several aspects of utopian fiction in this satirical work; it’s a mod of storytelling that has a venerable history in the SF genre (and one that underpins some of its earliest tales, in fact). Some readers may find that the narrative’s first act is rather tough going, offering readers a throwback to such chestnuts as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), which both delve into the idea of allegedly perfect human societies. In this one, the author follows a familiar format, detailing how the whimsical Opinions finally managed to get things right, long after the Fools evidently destroyed themselves in a mid-21st-century storm of political corruption, division, wealth inequality, pandemics, and science denial. However, after the Bottlebrush-Whitebeam incident, the story truly kicks into gear, and the Opinions start looking less rosy and their culture recalls Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World (1932). There are erudite quotes from such thinkers as Aristotle, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, T.H. White, and others, but things get sexier—literally and figuratively—in the novel’s home stretch, as the Opinions start acting more than a little Foolish. By the time the finale rolls around, the book has turned into another genre warhorse known as the “shaggy god story,” which tackle biblical notions, such as Creation, from an SF perspective. This punchline is one that is worth readers’ while, and it may well have readers wondering where they would stand in the author’s depiction of a paradise lost.
An intriguing seriocomic fable of a supposed utopia gone wrong.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2022
ISBN: 9798218055233
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Marullo Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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