Team-superhero–style action meets cyberpunk sci-fi with satisfying, sometimes-head-spinning results.
In the year 2085, Nathan Wainwright, chief architect of advanced computers that regulate a ubiquitous virtual reality environment, is lured into top-level U.S. government intrigue and treachery thanks to his sideline as vigilante.
Earth has been radically transformed, not only by natural disasters resulting from climate change and pollution, but also by technology spawned under the 40-year presidency of an American strongman/dictator, Victor Marconi, who showed his mettle by instantly, ruthlessly vaporizing major cities in Russia, China, India, and Brazil, which had formed an alliance and seemingly orchestrated a monstrous Pearl Harbor–style sneak nuclear attack. One of Marconi’s other feats (prior to his suicide during a corruption investigation) was sanctioning the creation of Sleepernet, a virtual reality system accessible to all and monitored by 10 space-based supercomputers so advanced that they have outsized personalities to match their mythic names (Zeus, Olympus, Titan, Hera, Isis, etc.). Nathan was foremost among 10 brilliant engineers who brought Sleepernet online a decade earlier. Now, with a strong Bruce Wayne–like drive borne from tragedy—his wife died in an early Sleepernet snafu—Nathan dons a high-tech disguise (more like the Grim Reaper than Shazam) and foils lawbreakers and evildoers. He fights crime with or without the assistance of his fellow Sleepernet creators, who don’t always share his ideals. Nathan is approached by sexy Susan DiRevka, a congressional aide who fears that a senator has been replaced by an imposter (easy enough; it’s a peculiarity of the post-Marconi era that elected officials go masked and anonymous). But is Nathan being set up by those who covet Sleepernet as the ultimate tool of power and surveillance? Or is the conspiracy even bigger? Punctuating his chapters with pithy Mark Twain quotes (“Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any”) and working Winston Churchill–isms into the narrative here and there, debut author McCool isn’t the first sci-fi writer to try to reboot the superhero aesthete with a what-if premise: What if costumed avengers were real or at least scientifically achievable and socially valid? But he approaches the material with a degree of realism that surpasses merely riffing ironically on clichés of the funny pages. The highly readable results lean more toward cyberpunk than Stan Lee (maybe Frank Miller is a good compromise), with high-tech combat described against a political background smacking of the George W. Bush era—a fascistic USA ruled by corporate stooges and military-industrial warmongers who are never held accountable, especially not by the propaganda-spewing media or the docile, duped, dopily patriotic public. Hence Nathan’s crusade, which ultimately (and rather unsurprisingly) uncovers the lies on which the unconstitutional Homeland Security–style reach of the Marconi presidency/personality cult is based. Scientific infodumps can grow tortuous: Virtual reality overlaps with the real thing (even to the point of distorting space-time), and omnipotent AIs endow their programmers/votaries with demigod skills to match superhuman strengths—the proverbial gadgetry sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic.
Team-superhero–style action meets cyberpunk sci-fi with satisfying, sometimes-head-spinning results.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5327-7925-1
Page Count: 498
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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