A beautifully realized story that proves that politically driven space opera and tender love stories do not have to be...
In the first in a series, Meierz’s debut, a rich sci-fi love story about a female teacher sent to a foreign planet to tutor the daughter of its rulers in various Earth languages, could be described as a space-opera spin on Anna and the King of Siam.
When the government informs high school teacher Marianne that she has been selected for a mission to the Tolari homeworld, where she will be the sole human occupant on that planet for 26 years, she hesitates, although she’s aware of the unpleasant consequences that would befall her should she ignore this “request.” Once on Tolar, a planet that houses a humanoid species known for being technologically primitive by Earth standards, she comes to discover that things are not quite as they seem. Meierz’s novel charts Marianne’s slowly budding romance with the Sural, the Tolari leader, as well as her gradual acclimation to this new world that is perhaps not as bizarre or backward as she originally thought. Meierz writes admirably, conjuring an alien planet and culture in a manner as straightforward as it is succinct. Her assured, no-frills approach to worldbuilding makes it easy to suspend any disbelief one might have regarding the novel’s more fantastical elements. Her realistic characters and their relationships build organically. The romance that develops between Marianne and the Sural, as well as Marianne’s shift in allegiance, might not come as a surprise to any reader, and there’s a predictable, overly melodramatic revelation regarding a trauma in Marianne’s past, but Meierz captures readers’ attention through her naturalistic character development and pacing. She also makes Earth’s government truly frightening and reprehensible.
A beautifully realized story that proves that politically driven space opera and tender love stories do not have to be mutually exclusive.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1480229792
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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