Full of ideas and often intriguing, if difficult—so, just about worth the effort.
The third and presumably final installment about a hard-science space odyssey whose purpose is to help spread humanity throughout the galaxy.
Previously, our starship encountered the Bowl, a vast, steerable object that wanders space capturing and enslaving alien species to occupy its unimaginably huge living space. Having wrestled the Bowl's birdlike boss species to a standstill in the sequel, Captain Redwing and crew planted a thriving colony there. Now, the starship finally attains its original destination, Glory, a planetary system whose orbital dynamics prove artificially engineered and enormously more complex than remote surveillance indicated. The Bowl, it emerges, directed by ancient, patient alien Ice Minds, has met the Glory system's controlling intelligences before—and they are not best buds. Like its predecessors, this adventure is clotted with technical detail (what was it Twain said about never letting the facts get in the way of a good story?), nearly all of it skippable. Biologists Beth Marble and Cliff Kammash (they're an item) visit the alien planets and encounter a parade of mind-bogglingly implausible critters, some lethal, some highly intelligent, some merely ridiculous, in a narrative peppered with borrowings, often annoying, from Brian Aldiss' classic Hothouse (1962). Redwing, meanwhile, heads for a gigantic living spaceship and a meeting with Glory's weird head honcho; this offers the authors scope to write impressive exchanges wherein resourceful humans augmented by AI are not altogether overmatched.
Full of ideas and often intriguing, if difficult—so, just about worth the effort.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9240-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning.
An intrepid teen encounters the dark secrets of the elite in her climate-ravaged world in this translated work from South Korea.
Sixteen-year-old Jeon Chobahm is shocked to learn that Goh Haeri, the beloved reality TV star who happens to be Chobahm’s look-alike, just died by suicide—and also that she’s being asked to become Haeri’s secret replacement. In their frozen, post-apocalyptic world, Chobahm, like everyone around her, leads a bleak life. She bundles up daily against the dangerous cold and toils in a power plant. But now she’ll live Haeri’s cushy life in Snowglobe, an exclusive, glass-dome-enclosed community, where the climate is mild, and the resident actors’ lives are broadcast as entertainment for those in the open world. As glamorous as life there may seem, however, Chobahm quickly learns that there’s a sinister underbelly: People are killed off when they’re no longer useful, and there’s something strange about Haeri’s family dynamics. As she meets a host of new companions, including Yi Bonwhe, the heir of Snowglobe’s founding family, Chobahm discovers a devastating secret and embarks on a risky plan to expose the truth. Climate change, societal inequity, and the ethics of escaping from our own lives by watching others’ are addressed in this intelligent, absorbing book. Chobahm is a complex character inhabiting a strongly developed world, and her compassion, ambition, outrage, and sorrow ring true.
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning. (Dystopian. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593484975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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