RaveOutside\"... it’s queasily fun to read Kleeman’s book, a propulsive mystery about a disaster-ridden world only a little different from our own ... Something New Under the Sun winningly combines mystery with speculative fiction but reads almost like a contemporary realist novel. Much of the believability is due to Kleeman’s sharp eye for the weirdness of consumerism, and especially her ability to satirize a certain type of fancy person with laser precision and humor ... a memorable addition to the canon of fiction about climate change, thanks to the same Hollywood tricks that fuel its plot ... a perfect portrait of capitalist complacency in the face of climate change: we continue insisting that the world we’ve built around ourselves is better than the one we were given, that we’re still in control, even as it becomes increasingly clear that our future holds no guarantees.
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Sarah Scoles
PositiveThe OutsideIn the hands of Sarah Scoles, a science writer and a journalist, the subject matter is framed for skeptics just as much as believers ... some of the most interesting parts of the book include Scoles’s attempts to understand people who aren’t eccentric billionaires and have seen something they can’t explain ... Scoles deftly gets to the heart of what we feel when we think we’ve connected with something sent from the greater universe: whatever’s out there, maybe it wants to know us and be known, and the experience of discovery makes us special.
C Pam Zhang
RaveOutside... stunning ... Zhang goes a step further, giving their narrative a grandness and grit that has, so often, only been applied to white western frontiersmen ... Moments like this are a heady pause in the middle of an expedition that evokes so many elements of the western canon. Zhang easily inhabits some conventions of the genre, writing with poetic toughness about relentless bad luck and the visceral realities of survival. But How Much of These Hills Is Gold also rests on a foundation of the Chinese-American experience that’s so rarely represented in fiction about the West (or anywhere in American literature) ... a long-overdue treatment of the American West, since narratives about the frontier have had the tendency to exclude many of those who helped build it.
