Some readers may find the conclusion messy and unsatisfying, but that’s part of Turtledove’s argument: War often is.
Turtledove (Two Fronts, 2013, etc.) delivers the final installment—and there’s room for a maybe in there—of his series developing an alternate-history version of World War II. Without aliens interfering.
From our perspective 70 years later, we're accustomed to thinking of WWII’s outcome as being inevitable. Not so, says Turtledove. What if, for instance, the Spanish Civil War had dragged on? Imagine, then, a 1943 where fascist Nationalists backed by Nazi Germany wage trench warfare against Republican communists assisted by independently operating Americans and Europeans. Further suppose that in 1938, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Britain and France had allied themselves with Nazi Germany to battle the communist Soviet Union. By 1943, however, following an anti-fascist coup, Britain and France now face Germany across a western front entrenched in Belgium, while in the east, the Soviets push the Germans back inch by bloody inch. Avoiding European entanglement, the U.S. tussles with Japan in the Pacific, where, after a quite different Battle of Midway, American paratroopers find themselves stranded, forbidden to leave the island due to Japan’s active biological warfare campaign. In Münster, a churchman protests against Nazi treatment of defectives (though not Jews), prompting skeptical, war-weary Germans to revolt against the hated blackshirt overlords. The action switches among frontline soldiers and airmen on the European western and eastern fronts, the mid-Pacific, civilian Americans and German Jews, Ukrainian partisans and Czech snipers, German tank and submarine crews, and a gratuitous cameo from Albert Einstein. Disdaining broad brush strokes, Turtledove’s focus on the characters serves to fill out the big picture with patient, nitty-gritty detail. It’s all quite plausible, sure, and armchair warriors will have much to ponder.
Some readers may find the conclusion messy and unsatisfying, but that’s part of Turtledove’s argument: War often is.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-52471-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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