A terrifying glimpse at a believable future.
Dietzel (The Last Teacher, 2015, etc.) offers a chilling sci-fi novel about big government run amok in the future.
The Tyranny rules at the will of the rich and powerful, keeping the middle class and poor in line with AeroCam surveillance drones and black-suited thugs. The powers that be get away with everything as powerless people are jailed or murdered for the slightest infractions. A secret society of dissenters known as the Thinkers decides to take action, sending 10 men back in time in hopes of changing the timeline so that the Tyranny doesn’t come to be. Why? Time traveler Daniel explains: “How many friends had he watched get dragged away by the Tyranny to be found the next day with a blaster hole in the back of their head?...How could he allow his son to grow up in such a world?” One traveler goes too far into the past, though, and ends up burying a book for future generations to uncover—one that eventually finds its way to Thomas Jefferson, who rails against the possibility of such a tyrannical government. Another traveler seeks to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who’s seen as a reformer by the ruling class. At first, Dietzel’s dystopian America might seem a bit far-fetched. However, the novel’s characters are quite plausible—all cogs in a machine not of their own making and all afraid to get out of lockstep. As even the Ruler himself explains, “if I had one of our men punished for killing a kid or some broad? Can you imagine what the leaders would say about me? They’d claim I was against the Tyranny!” Perhaps to set up another book in the series, Dietzel frustratingly leaves the novel open-ended, offering no closure, which readers may find to be a disappointing end to a thought-provoking volume.
A terrifying glimpse at a believable future.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5151-4687-2
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Watch the World End Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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