An ill-timed and awkwardly executed novella.
An asteroid creates a deadly dilemma for the president of the United States in this SF novella.
It’s 2050, and a massive asteroid called Camulos is headed for Earth. The nondescript Maj. Kristin Orsted and her fellow NASA Space Force pilots race to destroy it before impact. In case that plan doesn’t pan out, U.S. President John Sanders—descendant of a “long respected political family hailing from Vermont”—has unleashed a “planned pandemic” (a new coronavirus called “COVID-50”) on the world. While Dr. Tony Cifau tallies deaths and works on a vaccine, the National Security Agency uses phones, tablets, and smart TVs to see which citizens follow social distancing guidelines. The feds then zero in on people with skill sets and “genetic make-up” deemed beneficial to the survival of human species. It’s all part of a plan to get 1,000 “highly educated, highly skilled, cross-functional, and obedient” Americans aboard a shuttle to Mars. Those who can’t “follow orders” or “wear...a simple mask” are automatically struck from the passenger list, meaning that they’ll perish if the asteroid hits. Baird’s prose is sturdy and his plot, ambitious. However, the plan raises ethical and moral questions that aren’t well explored. Not one character picks up on the elitism at play, and President Sanders does little more than mope around the Oval Office. The work is also often weighed down by SF jargon—not related to new planets or alien languages (as in Star Wars, which Baird references multiple times) but boring back and forth between Orsted and mission control about meganewtons, calculations, and fuel capacities. Characters are vaguely sketched and seem less like real people than they do pawns for the plot. Notably, the book’s descriptions of COVID-50’s gruesome symptoms and the frustrations of lockdown feel too raw. There may come a time for quarantine lit, but many readers will feel that that time is still in the future.
An ill-timed and awkwardly executed novella. (acknowledgements, author bio) (ISBN: 979-8672700908 Page Count: 174 Publisher: Independently Published/NA (?) Categories: Science Fiction, Space, Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi, Teen Sci-Fi(?)Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-270090-8
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.
The world as we know it ended in Wanderers, Wendig’s 2019 bestseller. Now what?
A sequel to a pandemic novel written during an actual pandemic sounds pretty intense, and this one doesn’t disappoint, heightened by its author’s deft narrative skills, killer cliffhangers, and a not inconsiderable amount of bloodletting. To recap: A plague called White Mask decimated humanity, with a relative handful saved by a powerful AI called Black Swan that herded this hypnotized flock to Ouray, Colorado. Among the survivors are Benji Ray, a scientist formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Shana Stewart, who is pregnant and the reluctant custodian of the evolving AI (via nanobots, natch); Sheriff Marcy Reyes; and pastor Matthew Bird. In Middle America, President Ed Creel, a murdering, bigoted, bullying Trump clone, raises his own army of scumbags to fight what remains of the culture wars. When Black Swan kidnaps Shana’s child, she and Benji set off on another cross-country quest to find a way to save him. On their way to CDC headquarters, they pick up hilariously foulmouthed rock god Pete Corley, back from delivering Willie Nelson’s guitar to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This novel is an overflowing font of treasures peppered with more than a few pointed barbs for any Christofacists or Nazis who might have wandered in by accident. Where Wanderers was about flight in the face of menace, this is an old-fashioned quest with a small band of noble heroes trying to save the world while a would-be tyrant gathers his forces. All those big beats, not least a cataclysmic showdown in Atlanta, are tempered by the book’s more intimate struggles, from Shana’s primal instinct to recover her boy to the grief Pete buries beneath levity to Matthew Bird’s near-constant grapple with guilt. It’s a lot to take in, but Pete’s ribald, bombastic humor as well as funny interstitials and epigraphs temper the horror within.
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-15877-7
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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