Anthropocene Rag

January 13, 2020
Irvine’s first nonlicensed novel since 2012’s Mare Ultima is an eclectic, kaleidoscopic view of a future United States. A quasi-intelligent nanotech called the Boom has wreaked havoc on the country, reshaping the land to its whims and driving many mad. The Boom selects a group of humans, the “lucky six,” and one increasingly self-aware artificial intelligence, Prospector Ed, to travel to Monument City. None know why they were chosen, but they won’t pass up the chance to be accepted into the city that is rumored to be a haven. The quest to Monument City, by turns whimsical and ominous, takes them across a chaotic continent of dangerous technology and Boom-resurrected figures from American history and myth, among them Mark Twain, Paul Bunyan, Henry Ford, and pirate Jean Lafitte. Irvine’s imaginative landscape mixes the strange and the familiar, giving rise to both philosophical questions and nail-biting horror. This wondrous, playful, but still weighty science fiction odyssey will appeal to Irvine’s fans and serve as an excellent introduction to his work. Agent: Jason Yarn, JYLA.

March 1, 2020

This fascinating sf Western is set in a future that brings together American myths, nanotechnology, and a ruined United States with some intense climate change outcomes. The Boom, an ever-changing sentient nanotech power that changes people's everyday reality, has taken control: one woman's foster parents were killed when the Boom instantly and without warning made a greenhouse they frequented into a baseball stadium. An AI unit who goes by Prospector Ed, complete with the push-broom mustache and gold mining outfit, is on a mission to understand where he comes from, and collects a handful of young adults from across America to give out Willy Wonka-style golden tickets to the legendary Monument City. The tickets help the varied group escape from the Boom and other AI units who want to turn them into part of the myths they are playing out. They must fight terrain and monsters created by the Boom in an ever-changing landscape. VERDICT Irvine (A Scattering of Jades) has created an interesting yet horrifying world where nanotechnology meets a destroyed Earth. Though tagged as a sf Western, it will also please fans of future apocalyptic novels.--Brooke Bolton, Boonville-Warrick Cty. P.L., IN

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2020
This latest by prolific speculative fiction and comics writer Irvine (Buyout, 2009) presents a post-apocalyptic America where the Boom, an unleashing of clouds of rogue nanites, has led to a bizarre landscape where AI playfully emulate the fictions and fantasies of their creators. Six people orphaned by the capricious shifting of the Boom are contacted by rapidly emerging AI Prospector Ed, who gives them each a golden ticket to Monument City, fabled home of Moses Barnum, the rich megalomaniac responsible for creating the Boom. As the six travelers journey across the distorted Boomscape, they encounter talking animals, a self-aware construct shaped like Mark Twain, smart storms, living Mickey Mouse graffiti, and a variety of other strange and wonderful sights. Irvine's inventive world-building and concise yet satisfying characterization allows him to sketch out a complicated and ever-shifting world that stretches beyond the boundaries of the relatively brief span of the novel itself. Somewhere between the hallucinatory worlds of Philip K. Dick and the alien exploration of human culture's remains in Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection (1967), Irvine's latest is highly recommended to any reader interested in exploring the texture and feel of a strange new world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)