A deeply allegorical and powerfully thought-provoking dystopian must-read.
Debut author Bender offers an Orwellian thriller about an amnesiac’s struggle to understand his place in a fascistic country.
The embattled nation in Bender’s novel has recently created the Department of Purity, a new branch of government dedicated to “national unity and security.” When the protagonist, who calls himself “Seven,” wakes up in a forest with no memory of his life, he makes his way into the capital city and soon finds himself immersed in a society where political propaganda plays a monumental role in daily existence. Residents are either called “Patriots” or “Heretics,” and the president’s primary goal is to rid the country of supposed revolutionaries bent on ruining the unity of the general public: “a great cleansing has begun.” Seven goes on to befriend a young man named Adrian at a youth hostel who helps him get a job and find a sense of stability in his largely blank existence. But after Adrian is senselessly murdered by an Elite Guard and Seven kills the government henchman, he turns to the Underground for safety and support—and learns firsthand just how insidiously tyrannical the government has truly become. Fueled by a brilliantly nebulous backdrop, this briskly paced, action-packed novel is undeniably a page-turner of the highest order. Also, many readers will draw immediate comparisons between the Department of Purity and the real-life passage of the USA PATRIOT Act after 9/11. The only criticism of the book comes in its depiction of women; Seven refers to them as “broads” and unapologetically objectifies them throughout. Such sexism notwithstanding, the novel engagingly explores themes such as invasive governmental surveillance and mind control, which makes for a highly entertaining and enlightening reading experience.
A deeply allegorical and powerfully thought-provoking dystopian must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4348-3274-0
Page Count: 194
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.
In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin (The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain.
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-22929-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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