A hugely entertaining, surprising and perhaps prophetic package that, without seeming to, raises profound questions about...
An eye-popping glimpse of a near future when designer drugs are commonplace, from the author of Raising Stony Mayhall (2011, etc.).
It’s a future where anybody with a chemjet printer and a recipe from the Internet can create designer drugs. In Toronto, biochemists Lyda and her genius wife, Mikala, IT whiz Gil, finance specialist Edo and lab tech Rovil start a company dedicated to developing a drug that would combat schizophrenia. They achieve success with Numinous, but the drawbacks, alas, become apparent too late: It’s addictive, the effects are permanent—and those who take it gain the unshakable conviction that a personal deity accompanies them. Worse, after taking a massive overdose—how this all comes about emerges only gradually—Lyda stabs a now-estranged Mikala to death, or so it appears. Gil takes the blame; Edo goes hopelessly crazy; Rovil seems functional. Declared insane, Lyda’s locked up along with her invisible companion, a guardian angel called Dr. Gloria. While incarcerated, Lyda learns that a drug very much like Numinous has hit the street in the form of a sacrament dispensed by a new church. To prevent an epidemic of psychotic zombies, she must escape, locate the other survivors of the original five and put a stop to it. She’ll need the help of Ollie, a brilliant but drug-ravaged intelligence analyst. Among the obstacles they’ll negotiate are a drug-dealer gang of Afghan women; Native American cigarette smugglers who take great delight in outwitting the U.S. Border Patrol; and Vincent, a psychotic assassin who farms miniature buffalo in his living room. This taut, brisk, gripping narrative, dazzlingly intercut with flashbacks and sidebars, oozes warmth and wit.
A hugely entertaining, surprising and perhaps prophetic package that, without seeming to, raises profound questions about the human mind and the nature of perception.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3692-7
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
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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