Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

The Disruption by W.H. Hilf begins in 2064, when engineer Tom McCreary helps bring online an artificial intelligence, GAIA, to guide humanity’s future. When GAIA exceeds human command and the world fractures soon after, the event becomes known as the Disruption. Forty years later, the damage has settled into daily life. On a depleted Earth, Riley and his sister Marika grow up in a farming village shaped by control and half-remembered rules about forbidden technology. Light years away on Proxima, Julia lives beneath a protective Dome where another AI, Geppetto, quietly governs the colony’s routines. As technicians begin to notice deviations in Proxima’s systems, buried decisions from GAIA’s creation resurface. Past and present draw closer, and the boundaries between protection and control begin to erode, linking two worlds through a failure that was never contained.

W.H. Hilf’s The Disruption is an intelligently written and unsettling work of science fiction that I wasn't sure I'd enjoy. Thankfully, I gave it a chance because it is a spectacular read. The storyline moves across decades and planets, yet its real subject is how authority survives catastrophes by presenting itself as a necessity. The world-building is so good. On Earth, village councils translate failing harvests into obedience and punishment, while on Proxima, a managed paradise teaches children history through simulations designed to prevent questioning. The anchor here is artificial intelligence, and it connects these worlds not as rogue inventions, but administrative heirs, carrying forward older habits of control through archived ethics and procedural language. Hilf builds on this with deftly constructed scenes, from scripted interplanetary phone calls to rituals performed in the name of order. The prose is straightforward and easy to follow, basing its plot on the premise that the future is rarely imposed all at once. It is built slowly and with permission. Recommended.