In his gripping and thought-provoking new thriller, Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, Nick Kolakowski imagines a post-apocalyptic, post-United States that feels disturbingly plausible, given the way things are going with our climate, our political divisions, and our growing dependence on technology.
Rising seas have turned New York City–the setting of some key scenes–into a nightmare version of Venice. America is no longer just divided; it’s completely fractured, having descended into a conglomeration of rival clans and territories, the highways connecting them under siege by bandits and patriot-movement-like gangs. And in perhaps the darkest development, artificial intelligence has begun to surpass human intelligence, assuming power-grabbing forms that make Alexa, Siri, and robotic vacuum cleaners look downright quaint by comparison.
Within this dark world, the novel’s central character, Maxine Hardwater, inhabits a microcosm of additional miseries. Born into poverty, to a mother who dies from a drug overdose and to a father who is killed in prison, Maxine is left to raise her younger brother and to scrap together a living for both of them. Also, she’s perpetually under the eye of what’s left of law enforcement, whose agents believe she can lead them to her uncle, a Robin Hood-like outlaw named Preacher. Over the course of the novel, Preacher proves mostly elusive, even to Maxine, though in time he becomes a crucial ally for her.
Early on, Maxine tries to follow Preacher’s advice of avoiding the outlaw life, choosing college instead. But shortly after entering a university, she just gets into trouble. While commandeering a snow plow to break into a beer distributor, she’s blasted by a military drone, which takes her right arm but not the toughness that she’s become known for. Equipped with a prosthetic right arm, weaponry skills, and a custom armored vehicle, she eventually gets a job as a convoy runner, protecting truckloads of goods as they travel bandit-plagued highways.
Maxine’s encounters with the bandits are riveting, calling to mind scenes from Mad Max movies. These parts of the novel are enhanced by descriptions of the technology that Maxine and her enemies use against each other. Most impressive is her prosthetic arm, which connects signals from her brain with whatever weapon she’s carrying, allowing her to fire with deadly accuracy.
I won’t reveal the details of her battle with the novel’s most notorious bandit, the Night Mayor. But it leads to the loss of Maxine’s convoy job and to the discovery that her life is on the line, and not just because of the enemies she’s made while trying to survive under the toughest of circumstances. To stay alive, she has to fully embrace the outlaw existence that Preacher had wanted her to avoid.
Maxine also has to make common cause with an ever-more-powerful form of artificial intelligence that has the power to save–or destroy–her, and what’s left of human civilization. When this AI overlord threatens to erase the mind and soul of Maxine, if not her physical being, she has to find new ways to fight back.
Kolakowski’s writing about the powers and drawbacks of artificial intelligence is captivating, as is the way he integrates the sense of an increasing AI threat into the structure of the novel itself. He achieves this through journal-like-entries from what appears to be a post-Maxine future. These are woven into Maxine’s story and seem to portray a conflict over how that story is being constructed. In early journal entries, scholarly voices argue against liberties that machine-learning algorithms are taking as they attempt to reconstruct Maxine’s story, from saved parts of her memory and from other contemporaneous sources. In later entries, the scholarly voices–and Maxine’s–are increasingly drowned out by those of the “chief” algorithm and its lust for control. This narrative coup left me chilled, and it offered a bracing reminder that ostensibly human-friendly technology, such as smart-home devices, might be used against us. (This very thing happens in the novel, on a grand scale.)
On a brighter note, Maxine’s resilience amid these and other misfortunes offers a hopeful thread that runs throughout the novel. It also suggests the possibility of a sequel, and I hope there is one. I’m also looking forward to the sequel of Kolakowski’s novel Boise Longpig Hunting Club, which I reviewed last February and highly recommend.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":▪ Road-based suspense stories, like those featured in the Mad Max films
▪ Stories about subversive technology, such as The Demon Seed
▪ Post-apocalyptic tales
