Stick with it—there will be surprises, just not the ones you were expecting.
Turtledove (Coup d’Etat, 2012, etc.) delivers the fifth installment in his latest series—a final volume is promised—developing an alternate-history version of World War II.
This widescreen Technicolor what-if began with Turtledove’s 2009 novel Hitler’s War, which portrayed a World War II starting with a 1938 German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Real history and Turtledove’s imaginary version continued to diverge thereafter, as Britain and France allied themselves with Nazi Germany to battle the communist Soviet Union. The U.S. goes to war with Japan while avoiding the European theater, and in Spain, fascist Nationalists with German backing wage trench warfare against mingled Communists and Republicans allied with free Czechs and independently operating Americans and British. Now, however—and we’ve only reached 1942—following an anti-fascist coup, Britain has joined with France to open a western front against Germany. Again, the number of plotlines and characters can be bewildering: frontline soldiers on the European western and eastern fronts, sailors and marines on Hawaii, Japanese pilots in China, civilian Americans and German Jews, Ukrainian partisans and Czech snipers, among others. Inevitably, major historical figures merely rate a mention or die offstage in plausible fashion. Patience is a necessary virtue when reading Turtledove’s slow, knowledgeable, scattershot saga, and any earlier impressions of his building toward some earth-shattering conclusion are shown, here, to be quite incorrect. Instead, Turtledove embeds many small, subtle hints—to reveal them would be to give the game away—that his real objective is to paint, brush stroke by brush stroke, a postwar landscape quite different than the one that prevailed in the real world.
Stick with it—there will be surprises, just not the ones you were expecting.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-52468-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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