Definitely worth a try for Turtledove fans and armchair warriors in general.
Alternate-world warrior extraordinaire Turtledove (Last Orders, 2014, etc.) delivers the opening barrage of a new speculative conflict: What if President Harry Truman had ordered nuclear weapons to be used in the Korean War?
He might well have done so. Gen. Douglas MacArthur certainly urged him to. Here, asserting that Stalin would not retaliate and didn’t have that many atomic bombs anyway, MacArthur persuades Truman to strike Chinese cities in Manchuria. It proves to be a disastrous miscalculation. The USSR immediately attacks cities in Britain, France, and Germany. Escalation follows retaliation, and before the world’s leaders have quite grasped what's happening, a nuclear war is underway. Those familiar with Turtledove’s distinctive method, however, know the focus will remain on ordinary characters and how they cope with their particular circumstances. This time they fall naturally into three groups. There are the pilots who drop the bombs, such as Air Force 1st Lt. Bill Staley and Boris Gribkov of the Soviet Union. Combatants on the ground include, in Europe, ex-Wehrmacht man Gustav Hozzel and Soviet tank man Konstantin Morozov, while infantry Lt. Cade Curtis becomes stranded behind enemy lines in Korea after his platoon gets wiped out. And there are civilians who must find ways to survive nearby atomic blasts. Seattle housewife Marian Staley hasn’t seen her husband for more than a year. Washing machine installer Aaron Finch of San Francisco captures a downed Soviet flyer. World War II widow Daisy Baxter owns a pub near Norwich. Ihor Shevchenko labors on a Ukrainian collective. And ethnic Russian Vasili Yasevich helps clean up Harbin. Readers who savor the patient accumulation of detail around each one will find it easy to become thoroughly addicted.
Definitely worth a try for Turtledove fans and armchair warriors in general.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-553-39070-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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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