An often entertaining, if somewhat familiar, dystopian tale.
The future is bleak in a supposed future paradise in Fisher’s SF novel.
In the early 2020s, Louis King lives a comfortable life as a professor of religious history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a doting wife, Violet, whom he comes home to every day. But everything changes when he starts experiencing mysterious symptoms—including blackouts, one of which causes him to crash his car. Soon, he’s diagnosed with advanced terminal brain cancer, and Violet convinces him to be cryogenically preserved until a cure can be found. The next thing Louis knows, a faction leader named Augustus awakens him in the year 2231. He finds himself in a walled kingdom called Arcadia, which replaced the United States after World War IV and whose government promises its inhabitants happiness—if they obey the rules. Each resident is placed in one of six factions: Medics, Scouts, Administrators, Enforcers, the Assembly, and Donors. Louis is quickly recruited into Augustus’ faction, the Scouts, and charged with venturing outside the city’s walls to find other “Cryo Kids” like himself and bring them back to Arcadia. The dystopian plot has elements that are strongly reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Divergent; these are especially noticeable during a climactic battle that takes place in an arena where contestants are forced to fight to the death. It all ends in a twist that wraps everything up—perhaps a little too neatly. The story shines, though, when it pauses to linger on society’s small details, such as meal replacement pills that can taste like anything a person wants or tech that can change the color of one’s apartment with the flick of a dial: “I slid my finger around the circle, and the wall rapidly changed colors like a futuristic funhouse.” As Louis learns about how Arcadia functions, readers will share in his mingled confusion and horror.
An often entertaining, if somewhat familiar, dystopian tale.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-35635-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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