A truly remarkable, character-driven dystopian novel.
In this final installment of Schneider’s SF trilogy, friends try to steady their spiraling lives as mid-21st-century Earth falls into chaos.
Kat Keeper knows she’s the reason the network, which has effectively replaced the internet, is broken. As one of the leaders of the Resistance, she’d tampered with it to bring it down, although she hadn’t intended for it to fail all at once. At least there’s a chance for her and a tech-savvy pal to rebuild a “safe, independent network” for the Resistance. However, MIND, the evil company that the Resistance aims to overthrow, still manages to control the fractured remains of the network and releases “disinformation vids” that make Resistance members look violent. In the meantime, the world, without the network, experiences power outages and loss of climate controls (like measures for blocking the harmful sun). As the disarray continues, Kat leaves New York and travels to San Francisco to help Ravven Vaara, her friend and Resistance co-leader. Ravven has been hearing orcas’ messages and speaking to them in visions; evidently, the queen orca wants to teach humans how to be better. Is this really happening, or is Ravven, as a Receiver (like Kat), simply hearing other people’s thoughts? While on the Westcoast, Kat meets Renzo Kundera, an architect and urban planner who only complicates her life further. Over in New Zealand, Nora2 is positioned as a worthy successor to the CEO of MIND after the deaths of her bosses in a spaceship explosion. But one of those boss’s consciousnesses is stored in a cube, and after being revivified, it resumes the company’s greedy attempts to harvest people’s memories.
Schneider’s story zeroes in on the individuals within this bleak future world. Kat’s trip to San Francisco, where she’d lived two years earlier, opens up a past she left behind—it dredges up memories of her late husband, her company that others forced her out of, and her relationship with MIND’s diabolical co-founder and creator of its same-named artificial intelligence. Kat attributes human traits to her beloved bot Michel, whose voice calms her and whose “feelings” she’s eager to protect. There’s an abundance of chic tech, including a hovercycle and a Secluder (essentially a burner phone). Nora2 is a fascinating amalgamation of this narrative’s advanced technologies and stellar character development. The number in her name indicates the silicon substrate embedded in her brain (the lower the number, the more expensive the mod). While the implant boosts her support and ambition, Nora2 is still a mistreated personal assistant saddled with a megalomaniac consciousness that thrives in an oval-shaped MindVessel. As the story progresses, the sense of danger increases as MIND’s disinformation campaign continues and the company more directly targets Kat (and even Ravven’s inventor boyfriend). Subplots move in unexpected directions, from the orcas, who chat with Ravven during her meditative visions, to Kat’s potential romance with Renzo, who has an unusual bond with his twin brother. The ending more than satisfies as a trilogy finale, delivering a rich, contemplative denouement that readers can muse on.
A truly remarkable, character-driven dystopian novel.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798999107428
Page Count: 358
Publisher: FutureX
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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