By turns bawdy and bold, Russell shifts between precise, accurate scientific description and sheer absurdity, which renders...
Struck by catastrophes like a fatal supervirus, 23rd-century Earth has become a world of peaceful, nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes living harmoniously in nature alongside telepathic animal clones resuscitated from the Pleistocene era, until an invention created by an unlikely alliance alters the future.
Connected by a solar-powered Internet, guided by a philosophy called "The Return," humanity enjoys “the best of times, the best of worlds,” as teacher Clare says to Brad, a mathematical genius whose job is to monitor and repair solar computer technology. Clare comes to Brad’s lab to guide him through a spirit-quest that will turn into a world-altering journey. Toying with many origin stories, Russell (Teresa of the New World, 2015, etc.) ties physics to basket-weaving, biology to holography in a convoluted tale riddled with contradiction: if humanity believes in panpsychism, in which all life (including plants) enjoys a consciousness that “is everywhere and in everything” (or TOE, as Brad calls it: the theory of everything), why do people hunt? Even the novel itself asks “how could you hunt someone you could talk to?” and yet Clare has just killed a telepathic saber-toothed cat, albeit in self-defense. And why does telepathy also have “syntax and meaning” when it isn’t a language? Brad, Clare, a bi-gendered hermit named Luke/Lucia, and his/her beloved mutant direwolf, Dog, form an unlikely alliance; after Dog is killed, Brad and Dog’s consciousness (lodged in Luke/Lucia’s cerebellum) discover the key to immortality together, learning how to switch on dead DNA to holographically resurrect not just Dog, but “squirrels, bears, horses, mammoths, mice, deer, camels,” and Clare’s deceased child. But when immortality becomes a possibility, a dangerous rift opens up between the tribes and the immortals, sending Luke/Lucia, Dog, Clare, Brad, and their children into exile.
By turns bawdy and bold, Russell shifts between precise, accurate scientific description and sheer absurdity, which renders this ambitious tale of human hubris quite uneven and eventually implausible.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63158-068-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yucca Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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