This bracing SF series opener delivers thorny jargon and equally challenging and bold cultural ideas.
Centuries after a war and science breakthroughs reconfigured humanity, a space-based, dominant race of gender-fluid elites investigates apocalyptic rumors and cultlike revelations spreading among the masses subsisting on Earth.
Whitlow opens a multivolume SF saga with this mind-stretcher set mainly on a far-future Earth (aka Erdos) about 300 years after a ruinous war that practically redesigned humankind. An advanced race of elites—the “Meritorians”—adopted existence on the moon, Mars (aka Marda), and outer planets. They are (mostly) the benevolent and ultraprogressive masters of the solar system, low gravity, and their own medicine, which altered their physiologies to the point of being a new species. Their very thoughts are interlinked by “cognos,” a descendant of the internet, and they regard unaltered Earth dwellers as aberrant troglodytes. The Meritorians are friendly and collaborative with an upper caste called “Consumers” but have little regard for the peasant masses that teem in underground cities and settlements and still communicate verbally, among other offenses. Now, these low-borns are alarming Meritorians with a cultish movement offering vaguely apocalyptic and seditious pronouncements of an approaching individual/entity called “Javeh.” Surveillance scans prove the validity of Javeh’s beatific visions and whisperings, but Meritorian superscience cannot decipher the code or how the messages are being transmitted. In advance of an important Meritorian conference on Erdos, the terrorism begins. Readers will be tested by a dense, future-speak argot largely (but not entirely) related in the Meritorian vernacular, which replaces all personal pronouns with gender-neutral ones (“Se draws serself up and puts ser weight into the comp suit, which mercifully supports ser as se totters away to the stairs”). The lingo indicates that the main dogma of Meritorian society comprises transgenderism and the overthrow of the “binary fallacy,” which the civilization believes brought humanity to ruin. Readers who can peer past the opaque curtain of the author’s peculiar language will be rewarded by intellectual puzzles and troubling questions, largely unanswered by the open-ended climax. Is Javeh a reactionary rebel mastermind or a wrathful (and transphobic) God who is returning? This is heady stuff for the adventuresome who like SF that does not give up its secrets easily.
This bracing SF series opener delivers thorny jargon and equally challenging and bold cultural ideas. (science fiction)Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7349098-2-1
Page Count: 196
Publisher: James Perry
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.
Having survived a disastrous deep space mission in 2038, three asteroid miners plan a return to their abandoned ship to save two colleagues who were left behind.
Though bankrolled through a crooked money laundering scheme, their original project promised to put in place a program to reduce the CO2 levels on Earth, ease global warming, and pave the way for the future. The rescue mission, itself unsanctioned, doesn't have a much better chance of succeeding. All manner of technical mishaps, unplanned-for dangers, and cutthroat competition for the precious resources from the asteroid await the three miners. One of them has cancer. The international community opposes the mission, with China, Russia, and the United States sending questionable "observers" to the new space station that gets built north of the moon for the expedition. And then there is Space Titan Jack Macy, a rogue billionaire threatening to grab the riches. (As one character says, "It's a free universe.") Suarez's basic story is a good one, with tense moments, cool robot surrogates, and virtual reality visions. But too much of the novel consists of long, sometimes bloated stretches of technical description, discussions of newfangled financing for "off-world" projects, and at least one unneeded backstory. So little actually happens that fixing the station's faulty plumbing becomes a significant plot point. For those who want to know everything about "silicon photovoltaics" and "orthostatic intolerance," Suarez's latest SF saga will be right up their alley. But for those itching for less talk and more action, the book's many pages of setup become wearing.
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18363-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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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