A narrative that assumes far too much previous knowledge but ultimately finds an identity all its own.
A strange hybrid of a yarn that seeks to embellish and extend a universe created by another writer—in this case, Cixin Liu's superb Three Body Problem trilogy, which culminated in Death's End (2016).
Baoshu's tale began life as online fan fiction, and it shows in a confusing opening. Trilogy readers will need to recall that a dying Yun Tianming allowed his brain to be captured by an approaching alien Trisolaran fleet. He hoped to trick the invaders, who are constitutionally unable to lie and cannot understand subterfuge. Instead, they trap him in a virtual reality, and eventually, the aliens force him to help them subjugate humanity. Yun survives. Much later, long after both Earth and Trisolaris have been destroyed, a consciousness calling itself the Spirit of the Master arrives. The Spirit needs Yun's help to locate the Lurker, an evil entity that threatens to destroy what's left of the universe. But, as Yun eventually comes to understand, the Spirit's plan involves rewinding everything to zero, followed by another Big Bang and a rerun identical to the current version. And what, Yun wonders, would be the point of that? The entities at odds since the beginning of time bring to mind the creation story in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. The universe-engulfing struggle recalls John C. Wright's astonishing multibook Eschaton saga. And the whole has a transcendental quality that might earn a nod from William Blake. Baoshu writes powerfully about difficult concepts (one such is the self-explanatory "ideabstraction" in Liu's felicitous translation), and his central thesis, involving dimensional collapse as the key to explaining the evolution of the universe, is an absolute stunner. None of this will mean anything, though, unless you're very well-acquainted with the original trilogy.
A narrative that assumes far too much previous knowledge but ultimately finds an identity all its own.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30602-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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
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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