Raises some interesting questions about human identity, but the inflated prose undermines the narrative.
A fantasy/science-fiction novel that occasionally reads like a comic book or a graphic novel without the images.
The plot of Timeslide is intermittently coherent, but readers will suss out that it’s set in a future world in which most inhabitants can’t remember more than five years of their past. A group of replacers (“just like people, only smaller, and weaker, and softer, and shriller”) threaten to take over, both literally and metaphorically, other life forms that are more mechanical and androgynous. The replacers, in other words, are in danger of humanizing the powers-that-be. These powers consist of Lone, the narrator (whom readers find at the end of the novel is actually Bruce Malone, an intelligence officer sent by the president to stop certain untoward scientific experiments being carried out by “Newton”) who works hand-in-glove with the Amazonian Karla, destroyer of replacers and mega-woman extraordinaire. She’s contemptuous of Lone’s weaknesses, but he admires her. At one point he sees her “collapsing [the replacers] dead with her q-pulser, moving with such quickness, elusiveness, and precision that before I fully come back to my senses all our enemies have been targeted and abated.” Abated indeed. Atreides is in love with language, perhaps a bit too much so, because Lone can lapse into prose tinged with purple–“I wormhole through it all. I pass like a god-gale lifting the veils of possibility, painted with the marbling-dreams of the cosmic mind, to a reality of self-possession.” The most verbally effusive character is Madsphinx, who lives up to his (or its) name by spouting a stream of quasi-philosophical, quasi-scientific and occasionally quasi-comic persiflage–“So, Eckhart and his followers had to recover Proclus’s Neoplatonism with the meta-ontology of the One as the seat of the Being–sedes ipsius esse in uno est–and the theme of the fluxus entis.” Madsphinx can go on like this for hours, testing the reader’s forbearance.
Raises some interesting questions about human identity, but the inflated prose undermines the narrative.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-5067-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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