Though the Korean War hasn’t generally been regarded as a major departure point in human history by alternate-world...
Second part of the alternate-world-war trilogy (Bombs Away, 2015) whose entirely plausible conjecture was: what if President Harry Truman had used nuclear weapons during the Korean War?
Well, here he did, disastrously instigating a nuclear war. Atomic bombs have already devastated cities in China, Russia, and Europe, and on America’s west coast. Despite a few set pieces showing us the world’s leaders (though not as they formulate their decisions) and politics outside the war (the specter of McCarthyism), Turtledove once again develops his narrative via a substantial cast of ordinary people, both civilians and military, and their particular circumstances. Fascinating concurrences emerge. In Germany, currently occupied by Soviet invaders, Luisa Hozzel, the wife of a WWII Wehrmacht soldier now fighting alongside the Americans, gets sent to a Siberian labor camp. By contrast, Marian Staley and her daughter cope with life in a refugee camp outside now-radioactive Seattle. The members of Boris Gribkov’s Soviet bomber crew spend their free time drinking vodka and thwarting the political police, while Bruce McNulty, an American bomber pilot stationed in England, tiptoes toward romance with a widowed British pub owner. Elsewhere, other characters familiar from the first book experience action in the European and Korean theaters, some finding themselves allied with former enemies while others fight against opponents who once were comrades. In still other places less affected by the bombs and the battles, some semblance of normal life prevails. Even if he’s not creating completely memorable personalities, Turtledove’s patented, highly effective methodology—a steady sequence of sharply etched passages allowing him to accrue telling detail around each individual actor—ensures readers become attached to them and invested in their futures.
Though the Korean War hasn’t generally been regarded as a major departure point in human history by alternate-world theorists, Turtledove’s surmise reminds us just how dangerously unpredictable the nuclear option remains.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-39073-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
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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