Readers delighted by the first book will certainly wish to renew their acquaintance.
Sequel to Dark Eden (2014), Beckett’s 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning tale of humans stranded on a remote planet who have mostly forgotten their origins.
Leaving aside the utterly implausible proposition of a society descended from just two individuals, Beckett’s sunless planet Eden has huge trees pumping hot water up from subterranean volcanic rivers to power its ecology. He doesn’t engage with the question of how this might work but populates Eden with a fine array of weird creatures perfectly adapted to the weak illumination provided by various luminescent organisms. At the end of the last book, the revolutionary Johnfolk left the conservative Davidfolk, crossing the Worldpool ocean to establish an innovative new colony, New Earth. Intelligent and restless Starlight Brooking, who lives on an island in the middle of the ocean and has never been anywhere else, decides to visit Veeklehouse, a town where the original landing vehicle reposes. There, she meets the handsome Greenstone Johnson, son and heir of New Earth’s brutal and ruthless strongman, Headman Firehand. The two fall in love, and Starlight accompanies Greenstone to New Earth. Firehand is dying, while his old rival and now right-hand man Chief Dixon nurses ambitions to take over. Still, Greenstone becomes the new Headman; Starlight wears the legendary Gela’s ring and discovers that New Earth’s workers, most of whom are serfs, worship her. Greenstone, seen as a weak leader, won’t survive long against Dixon’s plotting, so she tries to build support for his cause through the power the ring gives her to move the masses. What could possibly go wrong? Again, the narrative unfolds via several first-person accounts, this time more for effect than substance. Apart from the exercise in power politics, Beckett introduces some intriguing new ideas, which, presumably, he will develop in books to come.
Readers delighted by the first book will certainly wish to renew their acquaintance.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3870-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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