Creaky and squeaky though they may be, these tales, considered the crème de la crème in their day, retain their value as...
The third volume of stories by writers—according to editor Pohl’s introduction—officially designated grandmasters of SFWA. Though there are many more 20th-century SF authors worthy of being called grandmasters of the genre, the 15 featured here are unquestionably worthy of the designation, even if some of the 20 stories from the 5 grandmasters included this time seem a bit dusty. One can almost feel the pulp and smeary ink of the old magazines as A.E. Van Vogt (who, thanks to a good translator, was all the rage in France, Pohl says) begins his deathless “Vault of the Beast” with the three-word sentence “the creature crept.” The feverish cleverness, though, of Jack Vance’s “Miracle Workers,” a comic fantasy that lampoons WWII army movies with a battalion of spell-casting “jinxsters,” is more forced than funny. In “The Handler,” Damon Knight, known in the genre more as an editor than writer, spoofs a martini-swilling Sid Caesar–like TV star who, when thanking the little people made him successful, introduces one that is literally pulling his strings. Lester Del Rey asks if God might look after intelligent dogs in “The Faithful,” then fulminates about the hypocrisy of religious groups and their demagogic leaders in his scathing “For I Am a Jealous People.” Pohl’s work seems to have held up best, as seen in a story about a crew of space explorers who find that they must solve impossible problems, or perish, in the boldly imaginative but awkwardly titled “Gold at Starbow’s End.”
Creaky and squeaky though they may be, these tales, considered the crème de la crème in their day, retain their value as memorials to an earlier generation’s fears, hopes, and joys.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-86877-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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