Initiates will be more than satisfied by this ambitious fantasy variant on the timeworn tale of a monolithic world...
Weber (At All Costs, 2007, etc.) delivers the third installment in his ongoing Safehold saga.
In the first two books, the planet Safehold was colonized by the last remnants of humanity, fleeing an Earth destroyed by aliens. They forged a society dominated by religion, to prevent the building of new technology that might attract the alien threat. Dissenters, however, created a cybernetic being, Merlin, who awakened some 800 years later and helped the nonconforming kingdom of Charis develop technology and fight against the powerful Church of God Awaiting. In this volume, Charis and its allies battle Corisande, a Church-assisted princedom. Like its predecessors in the Safehold series, the novel paints a vast, stunningly complex political and military tapestry, with wonderful battle scenes that compensate for occasionally overlong stretches of dialogue. Weber’s portrayal of the Church and criticism of organized religion also continue to make these books interesting. That said, readers shouldn’t pick up this volume without first reading Off Armageddon Reef (2007) and By Schism Rent Asunder (2008); the glossary and list of characters bringing newbies up to speed spans 15 pages.
Initiates will be more than satisfied by this ambitious fantasy variant on the timeworn tale of a monolithic world institution challenged by reformers.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1503-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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Vampires are getting classier. Rice's formidable Lestat (given a bad press by his protege Louis in the author's Interview With a Vampire, 1976) sets the record straight with his story—from 18th-century fang-y to 20th-century rock star—all in Rice's faintly erotic, red-velvet-tasseled prose, festooned with swags of philosophical-theological expository flights, intra-vampirian warfare and sanguinary nightcaps. The seventh son of an impecunious French nobleman, Lestat, the family hunter and wolf-killer, who with his soul-mate Nicholas, another rebel, pondered the "meaninglessness" of the universe, was initiated into the Dark Gifts of the vampire in Paris. All, the "taste and feel of blood when all passion and greed is sharpened in that one desire!" But Lestat as vampire is in trouble almost immediately with the vampire establishment, since he loves living as a mortal and wants to do good. To save his beloved mother from an imminent death, there's that blood-for-blood ceremony, and zingo! Mother becomes the luscious "Gabrielle," charter coven member. She'll join him in a sectarian battle with Vampire Armand's cemetery gang, who've captured Nicholas (Lestate rescues him but later can't resist merging circulatory systems). Eventually, in narratives by Armand. and Marius, keeper of ancient Egyptian gods and vampirian annals. Lestat will learn of the vampires' complex history. It's rooted in Earth Mother cults and took on the coloration of various periods and places—hence the sectarian battling of demonic immortals. Rice dots Lestat's tale with some marvelous chillers: a giant killer-god on the march; a splendid crypt entrance before a terrified congregation; night prowls and rock-concert screams with telltale "tiny white faces" in the San Francisco audience. But worry not: vampire rules dictate that mortals are perfectly safe in Vampire Bars. A vampire bonanza in appropriate dark, humid, spider-web narrative—Rice's specialty. One giant step beyond Bela.
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NonePub Date: Oct. 31, 1985
ISBN: 0345419642
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
If nothing else, you have to giggle over how this novel’s namesake, who held vicious white supremacist opinions, must be...
Some very nice, very smart African-Americans are plunged into netherworlds of malevolent sorcery in the waning days of Jim Crow—as if Jim Crow alone wasn’t enough of a curse to begin with.
In the northern U.S. of the mid-1950s, as depicted in this merrily macabre pastiche by Ruff (The Mirage, 2012, etc.), Driving While Black is an even more perilous proposition than it is now. Ask Atticus Turner, an African-American Korean War veteran and science-fiction buff, who is compelled to face an all-too-customary gauntlet of racist highway patrolmen and hostile white roadside hamlets en route from his South Side Chicago home to a remote Massachusetts village in search of his curmudgeonly father, Montrose, who was lured away by a young white “sharp dresser” driving a silver Cadillac with tinted windows. At least Atticus isn’t alone; his uncle George, who puts out annual editions of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, is splitting driving duties in his Packard station wagon “with inlaid birch trim and side paneling.” Also along for the ride is Atticus’ childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, another sci-fi fan, whose family lived in the same neighborhood as the Turners. It turns out this road trip is merely the beginning of a series of bizarre chimerical adventures ensnaring both the Turner and Dandridge clans in ancient rituals, arcane magical texts, alternate universes, and transmogrifying potions, all of which bears some resemblance to the supernatural visions of H.P. Lovecraft and other gothic dream makers of the past. Ruff’s ripping yarns often pile on contrivances and overextend the narratives in the grand manner of pulp storytelling, but the reinvented mythos here seems to have aroused in him a newfound empathy and engagement with his characters.
If nothing else, you have to giggle over how this novel’s namesake, who held vicious white supremacist opinions, must be doing triple axels in his grave at the way his imagination has been so impudently shaken and stirred.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-229206-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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