A smart, absorbing, and inventive time-travel tale.
In this sci-fi debut, guardians of the time stream inhibit a physicist from completing his experiment, which leads to a catastrophic future event.
Caltech physicist Dr. Ezekiel “Zeke” Levine is on the verge of achieving absolute zero, but someone evidently stops him. His memory is initially fuzzy when a stranger leads him out of his lab and through a portal. This man, Ben, has brought Zeke to the Chronosphere, a place that’s “outside of time.” It’s here that chronologists monitor the time stream and try to amend calamities, like saving some—but not necessarily all—people from a 17th-century plague. It seems that a massive, potentially apocalyptic occurrence down the time stream is the eventual result of Zeke’s experiment. But removing the physicist from his timeline and destroying his notes haven’t prevented a future entropic effect: a glimpse ahead shows a galaxy that appears to be deteriorating. So Headley Grantham, head of the Council of Chronos, assigns Zeke the task of finding a way to rectify the entropy. As part of his training, Zeke joins the chronologists, including historian Dr. Siroush Isfahani, on a mission to the mid-1300s. This ultimately prompts Zeke’s hypothesis: the entropic effect may be caused by the chronologists’ contaminating the time stream, with their constant traveling putting time particles (or chronotons) in the wrong place. Most in the Chronosphere aren’t keen about Zeke’s notion. But when the chronologists realize another group may have its eye on them, they’ll have to face the possibility that the dismal future could very well be their fault. Tameron fills his book with several genuine surprises, from the future event the chronologists blame on Zeke to the introduction of Aurora Quinn, a woman in the 14th century who’s apparently versed in time traveling. Readers will surely detect similarities between this story and well-known works like Doctor Who and Star Trek. The author even acknowledges these for comic relief: Zeke jokingly calls the chronologists “Time Lords” and later quips, “Dammit, Jim…I’m a nerdy physicist not a master spy.” Nevertheless, Tameron injects his narrative with creativity even when tackling genre staples. There are playful references, for example, to the butterfly effect (traveling to a particular time period sparks a seemingly unrelated change centuries later) as well as the popular idea of going back in time to kill Hitler. Theoretical discussions are, of course, in abundance, and this provides the focus over sci-fi trademarks such as otherworldly tech (a scanning device merely resembles an iPhone). Scientific dialogue often includes terms common to the characters (for example, gluons and other particles) but perhaps not to readers. In a hilarious moment, Siroush stops Zeke from elucidating subatomic particles. “Yes, yes,” he assures the physicist. “I know what bosons are.” Still, all that discourse revolves around solving mysteries, which extend to Zeke’s hunting for details on time-travel pioneer Kamien Zdanie and maybe uncovering something nefarious at the Chronosphere. A gratifying ending leaves room for a continuation, and with an indication that this is Volume One, a series likely awaits.
A smart, absorbing, and inventive time-travel tale.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4996-1329-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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