Buzz Kill: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

Overview

“Along with the almost satirical rendering of the world, the lovely writing, and engaging plot, the characters of George and Pandora are brilliant.” —Booklist

Pandora Lynch lives in Alaska with her single dad, an online therapist for Silicon Valley’s brightest and squirreliest. Homeschooled by computer and a self-taught hacker, Pandora is about to enter high school to learn how to be normal. That’s the plan at least.

NorCal runaway George Jedson is a hacker too—one who leaves the systems he attacks working better than before. After being scooped up by a social media giant, will George go legit—or pull off the biggest hack ever? Not even his therapist knows for sure, but maybe the headshrinker’s daughter…

After meeting in cyberspace, the two young hackers combine their passions to conceive a brainchild named BUZZ. Can this baby AI learn to behave, or will it be like its parents and think outside the box?

With a hilarious and deeply empathetic narrative voice, this elegiac and unapologetically irreverent novel is both humorous and tragic without ever taking itself too seriously.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781542005029
Publisher:	Amazon Publishing
Publication date:	01/28/2020
Pages:	460
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

David Sosnowski has worked as a gag writer, fireworks salesman, telephone pollster, university writing instructor, and environmental protection specialist, while living in cities as varied as Washington, DC; Detroit, Michigan; and Fairbanks, Alaska. He is the author of three previous critically acclaimed novels, Rapture, Vamped, and, most recently, Happy Doomsday. For more about David, visit www.wingznfangz.com.

Editorial Reviews

11/04/2019

Part family tragedy, part romance, and part cautionary tale about the dangers of modern technology, this sardonic prequel to Happy Doomsday suffers from a lack of direction. In Fairbanks, Alaska, high school hacktivist Pandora Lynch reconnects with her grandmother, who is slowly dying of dementia. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, homeless 16-year-old dropout George Jedson is miraculously hired to build a suicide-prevention artificial intelligence chatbot for the popular social media platform, Quire. Though the novel opens with Pandora and George’s rogue AI lovechild killing off most of humanity, the two don’t meet until halfway through the book. Once they do, their budding romance is first drowned in long-winded exposition about quantum computing, then cut short by George’s unexplained disappearance just as the story starts to pick up. When the AI introduced in the prologue is finally built, there have been too many narrative twists and distractions for readers to still be invested in its rampage. Fans of Sosnowski’s distinct and always enjoyable narrative voice may overlook the novel’s odd pacing, but those expecting a gripping sci-fi thriller will be disappointed. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/01/2019

In Alaska, bullied high schooler Pandora Lynch infiltrates the boys' bathroom, installs a chemical prank, and becomes an unintentional subversive. His therapist father, Roger, receives a text from the school warning of a "possible terrorism-related incident." Three thousand miles distant, NorCal runaway George Jedson hacks the personal autonomous vehicle of V.T. Lemming, CEO of Quire—the world's second most powerful social media company. Of course, Quire immediately hires George, who must lie about his age. When Pandora eavesdrops during her father's Quire-subcontracted remote evaluation of George, passion, both physical and intellectual, ignites. Heavily bonding in cyberspace, the two brainstorm BUZZ, which—or whom—may be an artificial intelligence. VERDICT Sosnowski (Happy Doomsday) fuses philosophical pessimism with humor and makes bearable explorations of human extinction. In today's cultural crisis such singular vision is rare amid a literature churning with despair. Readers favoring Chuck Palahniuk, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Salingeresque dark absurdity will relish.—William Grabowski, McMechen, WV

Library Journal

2019-10-28
Sosnowski (Happy Doomsday, 2018, etc.) channels his inner Asimov with a quirky story about two young hackers who attempt to create a fully conscious artificial intelligence—with unforeseen consequences.

Pandora Lynch is a 16-year-old who lives with her father in Fairbanks, Alaska. A self-taught hacker, her only real friend is her paternal grandmother, a World War II codebreaker who's battling dementia in an assisted living facility. George Jedson is a street-smart homeless kid and computer wunderkind who is offered a job at a San Francisco-based social media giant after hacking into the CEO's luxury vehicle. When Pandora's father—an online therapist for the company—begins counseling George, the two young people eventually cross paths online and immediately connect "like quantum particles that had become entangled." Pandora, who has watched her grandmother's essence slowly deteriorate, wonders if cybernetic immortality is indeed possible, and together the duo create Buzz, a baby artificial intelligence that they hope will eventually attain consciousness. Fans of Sosnowski's previous works will find his sardonic wit and social commentary an obvious strength in this narrative (a particular gun in a gruesome meme racks up more likes than "they'd seen since white polo shirts and tiki torches showed up half-price at Big Lots"). Additionally, the novel explores (albeit superficially) a variety of potentially intriguing ideas and issues, including the looming singularity, the dystopic potential of social media dependence, and humans' corruption of reality. Ultimately though, the overall storyline feels directionless, lacking immediacy and any real emotional intensity. Although some central characters are authentic and identifiable—Pandora's grandmother steals the show—George is two-dimensional, a forgettable cardboard character who has almost no internal arc. The biggest disappointment, however, is the conclusion, which, while contemplative, has very little thematic impact.

Although conceptually tantalizing, this novel never delivers the goods.

Kirkus Reviews

Sosnowski (Happy Doomsday) fuses philosophical pessimism with humor and makes bearable explorations of human extinction. In today’s cultural crisis such singular vision is rare amid a literature churning with despair. Readers favoring Chuck Palahniuk, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Salingeresque dark absurdity will relish.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Along with the almost satirical rendering of the world, the lovely writing, and engaging plot, the characters of George and Pandora are brilliant—fascinating, tough characters who, through their own skills, are able to bend the world to meet their needs.” —Booklist

“David Sosnowski’s novels have all been funny, insightful, and utterly of the moment, and yet he accomplishes what the great nineteenth-century novelists strove for: he makes us understand that everyone around us—sullen teenagers, homeless guys, demented old women—everyone has a vivid interior life and a compelling story.” —Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow

From the Publisher

Read More