An often enjoyable, if slightly formulaic, SF novel about breaking away from a collective.
A parable in which unrest comes to a neatly hierarchical future state.
In the future world thatO’Neil imagines, society underwent a grand Reorganization a generation ago and is now carefully organized into levels of affluence. In Tier One are the Swells, who live in gated communities and have their every need or want quickly attended to by attentive “artificial intelligence entities”; they’re also guarded by the omnipresent, robotic Mech Marshals who enforce the law. On Tier Two are the Shoals, who likewise enjoy comfortable lives with all of their needs met, although perhaps less quickly or urgently than the people in Tier One. And finally, there’s Tier Three—the vast majority of the population, known as Sands, who are mostly contentedly idle and want for nothing, although they enjoy fewer luxuries; sometimes they provide luxuries for others in the form of Sands-made items, which are coveted by the upper Tiers for their supposed authenticity. Against this backdrop, readers meet the human law enforcement officer Lansing, his investigative AI partner (named “Partner”), and 15-year-old Traxter, a follower of an underground philosophical movement aimed at undercutting the seemingly perfect world society. One of Traxter’s instructors warns him about their AI helpers: “They meet all our needs. They spread us out. They teach us to behave. So they can ignore us.” Indeed, the darker reality underlying all the supposed contentment is stressed repeatedly over the course of the narrative: “The AIs are slowly cutting humans out of the decision cycle,” Lansing warns at one point. “We don’t make any sense to them, and they see our control as interference.”
In an unusual wrinkle, O’Neil’s novel is a companion piece to on an earlier nonfiction work by the same author. In The Unused Path(2021), he outlined a straightforward philosophy of life for readers to consider when they’re confronted with potentially corrosive complexities of the modern world. In this new novel, “the Unused Path” is intriguingly employed as the name of a dissident group disrupting the seemingly flawless society; it’s also the name of that group’s philosophy of nontechnological mindfulness, which features such mantras as “Develop your mind,” “Spend time alone with your thoughts,” and “Specificity contributes to accuracy.” Readers don’t need to read the first book in order to appreciate this one, but the use of such textual interconnectedness does make the somewhat familiarplot—about fugitives in a blandly perfect environment finding an off-the-grid, subversive alternative—more compelling than it would ordinarily be. Various subplots feel, more or less, like afterthoughts, but the main action manages to capture the imagination and hold it. The main players are developed well over the course of the narrative, and the book’s dialogue, especially, rings true and is consistently snappy and readable. The worldbuilding is thorough and internally consistent, as well, although many readers may wish the author had offered more specific details about the Reorganization that lies at the heart of the work.
An often enjoyable, if slightly formulaic, SF novel about breaking away from a collective.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73782-451-0
Page Count: 324
Publisher: FNG Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
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