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
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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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