Sci-fi enthusiasts should prepare to be lured in by this series entry that’s sturdier and more assertive than the first.
Huntington’s (The Rings of Elpída, 2013) sci-fi series continues, as the inhabitants of a dying Earth train youngsters to acclimate to another planet—and its mind-invading alien species.
The ringed planet Elpída was supposed to be Earth’s salvation, but an expedition centuries ago to colonize the new world was a failure. It turned out that Elpída was already inhabited by the Multitude, who exist as voices inside human minds; most people can’t handle the Multitude’s intrusion and quickly go insane. A group on Earth trains teenagers to withstand Elpída’s atmosphere and gravity, and genetically engineers children, such as Lucia, who are “hardwired” to safely hear the Multitude. Humans often converse with individually named voices within the Multitude, but it considers itself a unified collective. Some of its members, however, go rogue with their own agenda, and it becomes clear that the potential colonists may not be as welcome on Elpída as they’d hoped. This series installment, like the debut, has a tendency to reside more in the metaphysical than the tangible, which is practically a necessity, as the aliens have no physical form as far as humans know. However, Huntington’s latest has a far more palpable and engaging plot. The Multitude, for example, appears less frequently, and the bulk of the story takes place on Earth as Lucia, Isak, and others undergo simulations and training. Evelyn Feelds, who was part of the original expedition and is now accepted as one of the Multitude, is the titular emissary, and she’s often seen in flesh and blood as one of the trainees. There’s still plenty that’s more conceptual; for example, the Multitude use the word “love” almost as an honorific (“Evelyn-Our-love.”). The story also establishes its villains quite well; Shimon is a notable baddie who may turn deadly once the group reaches Elpída, and Uyol of the Multitude is distinguishable by his boldface dialogue. Huntington’s dexterity with prose is also undeniable: she describes an especially violent “sim” as “All gritted teeth and burning blood, like leaves falling in the autumn months or drops of acid rain.”
Sci-fi enthusiasts should prepare to be lured in by this series entry that’s sturdier and more assertive than the first.Pub Date: March 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1507789414
Page Count: 662
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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