7th Sigma

February 15, 2011

You can't go to the Southwest anymore, because it's been taken over by enormous, metal-eating bugs. Kimble Monroe was born there, though, and he's one of the few to remain. Good sf wherever this Nebula and Hugo Award nominee is popular.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2011
In statistics, the Greek letter sigma is the sign used to denote standard deviation. An event with a standard deviation of seven has odds against it of roughly 99.99 percent. The 7th sigma of the book's title is a young man named Kimble, who lives, by his own choice, in the most dangerous place in the world: New Mexico, where the bugsmetal-eating, self-replicating machines that mysterious appeared half a century agohave taken up residence. (The bugs aren't fond of water and so stay in the arid Southwest.) Although it sounds like the premise of a postapocalyptic science-fiction adventure, the novel reads more like a western, the bugs functioning mainly as a way to isolate Kimble and his community from the rest of the country, as though it were a Wild West settlement. Like many of Gould's novels (e.g., Wildside, 1996), the novel features a young hero and a coming-of-age theme, as Kimble discovers he has a unique gift that can be used to protect the people he loves and perhaps save the world, too. Nicely handled.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)