A loosely plotted, seriocomic pageant of humanity’s failures and foibles from a sympathetic robot POV.
In Dennstedt’s SF novel, an extraterrestrial robot is tasked with monitoring humanity’s painful ascent back to civilization after a devastating global war.
A worldwide war reduces humankind to stone-age savages ignorant of their high-tech glorious past. A concerned alien civilization, unable to directly intervene due to environmental issues, dispatches the narrator to the benighted planet; he’s a durable humanoid robot capable of self-repair and camouflage to blend with Homo sapiens. His mission is to spend millennia gently guiding the human race back to enlightenment and responsible function. The robot has a hummingbird-shaped scout drone called Billy who flits in out of the storyline, sometimes fatefully. The robot is a Wandering Jew-meets-Candide type figure who acquires assorted nicknames over the centuries but ultimately settles on “Scoots,” shortened to “Scot.” With new exploratory information periodically uploaded from Billy, Scot befriends a series of people, from children to a fairly enlightened monarch to a sailing-ship’s crew to a leper colony’s matriarch to a slum lord. Scot innocently strives to set sensible and ethical examples, but human aggression and perfidy often subvert the guileless hero’s motives. His mass-produced toys inspire the coinage of money and commensurate greed; marketplace pressures turn his repair shop into a gun factory; and his superspeed with firearms gets him conscripted into strongman/enforcer duties. Even after humanity evolves to build idyllic cities, will the Earthlings just blow everything up again? Dennstedt supplements his novel I, Robot Soldier (2024) with this robo-yarn, which is only tenuously connected and can be read as a standalone. The episodic narrative owes debts, acknowledged up front, to SF grandmasters Isaac Asimov (whose Three Laws of Robotics come into play) and Robert Heinlein (Scot is the proverbial and eternal stranger in a strange land). The parable-like storytelling eschews hard science and works in a moderate amount of sardonic humor (“You know, Scot, if you plan on encouraging the human race, you probably should work on your people skills a little more”) as Scot violates a few prime directives to realize his goal. Illustrations by the author are generated via AI.
A loosely plotted, seriocomic pageant of humanity’s failures and foibles from a sympathetic robot POV.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798285935308
Page Count: 334
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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