Carried along by the bumptious rollick of its language, this tale is full of sound and fury, signifying literally everything.
Odd-couple asteroid miners Quiver and Mic—a manufactured human and her artificial companion—explore the post-Earth universe in this surrealist SF tour de force.
Quiver is a “transitional prototype...gestated in a dynamic carbon envelope” back on the moon. Mostly human but for the small detail of her chemical incubation, she nevertheless feels an acute sense of alienation. Mic, her fully robot AI companion, has been programmed both in the science of interstellar “rare mineral reconnaissance” and in the art of soothing Quiver when she “flips her fuses.” Mic is also highly schooled in the cultural mores of the gone Earth, erased in “a cascade of catastrophes” which flung the remnants of the human race to Elsewhere, where they attempt to regroup. Via frequent data-dumps from Side Wheel, a virtual database of all things terrestrial, Mic has trained himself as a geisha, memorized the entire discography of “diva[s] from the distant past” like FKA twigs or Nicki Minaj, and developed a deeply erotic obsession with all things Al Pacino. Meanwhile, Quiver spends her time in The Lights—their spaceship’s version of Star Trek’s holodeck—immersed in a Jungian Eden that is co-inhabited by a mysterious redheaded woman. When an argument between the two miners escalates into name-calling (“ 'You forking self-righteous GIZMO!' [Quiver] shrieks….'You maddening THINGAMABOB' ”), Mic comes to a realization about his own selfhood. In the resulting existential backwash, the two badly bungle a rare mineral retrieval. At this, Mic and Quiver decide to go rogue and set a course for the planet Trafik, a fabled place of intergalactic free spirits where all their fantasies (even the Al Pacino ones) just may come true. What follows is a winsome space picaresque in which surreality piles upon surreality as the ill-matched soul mates navigate the unknown universe in their search for identity, belonging, and the sensual pleasures of the flesh, even if that flesh is actually machine. A longtime master of the extraordinary sentence, Ducornet has outdone herself here, blending SF’s penchant for invented jargon with her own queer linguistic egalitarianism in which all adjectives describe all nouns (even such unlikely couplings as “profiterole lasers”) in a primordial soup of possibility. This slender book captivates with its ferocious curiosity, quick wit, and ultimately tender generosity.
Carried along by the bumptious rollick of its language, this tale is full of sound and fury, signifying literally everything.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-56689-606-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.
Having survived a disastrous deep space mission in 2038, three asteroid miners plan a return to their abandoned ship to save two colleagues who were left behind.
Though bankrolled through a crooked money laundering scheme, their original project promised to put in place a program to reduce the CO2 levels on Earth, ease global warming, and pave the way for the future. The rescue mission, itself unsanctioned, doesn't have a much better chance of succeeding. All manner of technical mishaps, unplanned-for dangers, and cutthroat competition for the precious resources from the asteroid await the three miners. One of them has cancer. The international community opposes the mission, with China, Russia, and the United States sending questionable "observers" to the new space station that gets built north of the moon for the expedition. And then there is Space Titan Jack Macy, a rogue billionaire threatening to grab the riches. (As one character says, "It's a free universe.") Suarez's basic story is a good one, with tense moments, cool robot surrogates, and virtual reality visions. But too much of the novel consists of long, sometimes bloated stretches of technical description, discussions of newfangled financing for "off-world" projects, and at least one unneeded backstory. So little actually happens that fixing the station's faulty plumbing becomes a significant plot point. For those who want to know everything about "silicon photovoltaics" and "orthostatic intolerance," Suarez's latest SF saga will be right up their alley. But for those itching for less talk and more action, the book's many pages of setup become wearing.
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18363-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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