A subtle and meaningful collection about humankind under stress.
Dystopian futures reveal the universality of primal human emotions in this SF story collection.
Each story in this anthology focuses on people grappling with the consequences of intense emotions. Highlights include “Terror,” in which a father and son living in a subterranean city win a lottery to join a group of citizens headed aboveground to prepare Earth for repopulation. According to their leaders, “the Terror,” defined as having “sharpened pointed” teeth and “catlike” eyes, live on the surface. As part of their pre-ascent orientation, the citizens view frightening images from the past. The leaders manipulate them through the use of special effects (“thunder rolled around the room, so that the very benches they sat on trembled”) so that they’ll uncritically accept the mission. In “Despair,” Skazi, a gambling addict and prisoner, awakens in corporate psychiatric facility Trans-Con, which rehabilitates mentally ill persons by shifting “the consciousness of patients…to primates and returning it back.” It turns out that participation in the program is mandatory, and noncompliance of any kind results in enslavement and exile to another planet for life. A clear concern for humanity, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian fiction, appears throughout all of Falconer’s stories here; their characters start out as victims of their unique situations, as one might expect, but they’re also at the mercy of their own individual flaws, as well. As if to accent the theme of humanity, the stories all distinctively open with the protagonist encountering a specific smell, such as “garlic,” “perfumed floral air,” “roasting coffee beans, “freshly cut grass,” or “sweat, linen, plastic.” Moreover, they all struggle against greater societies where humanity—as a group and as a state of existence—has been diminished, giving the tales an unmistakable feeling of profundity.
A subtle and meaningful collection about humankind under stress.Pub Date: July 28, 2021
ISBN: 979-8545048656
Page Count: 223
Publisher: Paul Bird
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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