Brutal, ugly, visceral and enthralling: the finest military science-fiction debut in years.
Far-future warrior makes tough choices, wondering whether honor, loyalty and survival are compatible.
On a desert planet inhabited by ferox, ferocious alien savages, Sven Tveskoeg, an ex-sergeant in a sort of galactic foreign legion, has been flogged half to death for insubordination when the ferox wipe out the base. Sole survivor Sven, tied to the flogging-post, finds that when spurred by pain he can communicate telepathically with his captors, and so survives among them for months. Later, rescued by the legendary Death’s Head brigade, Sven comes before General Jaxx; the general, curious about Sven’s claims, can’t trust a man who’s technically a deserter. Sven ends up on Paradise, a frozen, hellish prison planet where hardened criminals and political prisoners eke out a ghastly existence beneath the ice inside the dead bodies of giant worms. With his military skills, smarts, ability to self-heal and bionic arm, Sven’s soon running the place. Now satisfied, Jaxx drafts him into the Death’s Head and sends him to yet another planet, where the Death’s Head, mercenaries and conscripts battle Emperor OctoV’s enemies, the Enlightened, humans transformed by a virus into omniscient cyborgs. Sven acquires a squad of his own but, after desperate fighting, realizes he’s been betrayed: The entire action is a feint, the soldiers mere sacrifices in an incomprehensible power struggle. Worse, most humans in the galaxy live peacefully, ruled by the super-advanced, hive-minded U/Free. Sven’s unswerving sense of honor clashes with his steadfast loyalty to OctoV: Can he and his tiny squad survive overwhelming odds, and, if so, at what cost?
Brutal, ugly, visceral and enthralling: the finest military science-fiction debut in years.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-345-49827-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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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