This heady SF yarn satisfyingly explores a cave-full of human dilemmas and evolves surprisingly well.
An anthropologist journeys to an idyllic faraway planet where human-descended colonizers have integrated alien “quantum AI” in Noordermeer’s SF novel.
Zadie Thornton, a contemporary anthropologist of Bahraini and English descent, has dedicated seven years of her rather cloistered life to pursuing a doctorate degree focused on the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity. She bitterly concludes that her work was in vain; the field evolves too rapidly. Her archaeologist uncle introduces Zadie to an ancient relic that teleports her many light-years away to the idyllic planet Mushēški. Here dwell descendants of ancient Sumerians, the first Earth civilization to make alien contact. These Sumerians summoned an extraterrestrial race, the Abgal, who enhanced the humans’ simple society with agriculture, city-construction, and the written word. Some Sumerians went further, joining the Abgal in deep space and allowing their DNA to be interwoven with AI at a quantum level. These enhanced humans now call themselves Anunnaki (readers of “ancient astronaut” texts will recognize the name) and share a conflict-free, long-lived, collective-consciousness culture. The Anunnaki maintain vast bio-dome environments preserving earlier, now-vanished species of ancient Terran hominids (including yeti/Bigfoot types) who live in unspoiled tribal splendor. Zadie is alarmed, however, by the dark side of the Anunnaki, which includes a loss of individuality, minimal emotion, “a policy of compulsory euthanasia at 840 years,” and a pernicious slow dementia known as “Quantum Psychosis.” Zadie finds herself abandoned by her dementia-stricken hosts in one of the prehistoric zoos. Noordermeer’s impressive debut is mind-expanding anthropological SF that conveys wisdom and persuasive arguments via an Alice-in-Awe-and-Wonder-Land setup and such dubious conceits as talking abominable snowmen. The science (more genetics and sociobiology than physics) is not too intimidating, the issues carry weight without relying on cackling techno-tyrants or villainous robots, and the characters are appealing, even those whose personalities have all but thinned to biological-computer level. While a long stretch of the narrative involves a series of lab-bound experiments (but what experiments!), the author manages to keep things moving forward. The conceit of a modern researcher set amid primordial beings should appeal to fans of Michael Bishop’s No Enemy but Time (1982).
This heady SF yarn satisfyingly explores a cave-full of human dilemmas and evolves surprisingly well.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781067058913
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Blue Giraffe Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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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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
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