An energetic but familiar New Age sci-fi/fantasy adventure.
In this debut novel, a young, bright, and good-looking creative worker at a video game company copes with New York City after a recent breakup.
Depressed, pressured by his bosses at Enigmatic Adventures, and alone except for his cat, Norton, Derek Evans decides to sign up for a medical study of a new antidepressant pill. But it seems that the study is fraudulent, conducted by a dubious figure named Harry Pembroke, who is murdered right after Derek ingests the drug. And as Derek tries to return to his everyday life, taking an interest in his lovely co-worker Allie “G” Giancana, the “God Virus” concealed in the experimental medicine takes hold in his DNA. As his DNA is altered, Derek finds himself changing in incredible ways—out-of-body experiences, telepathy, and more all become regular occurrences as his ordinary humanity is replaced with extraordinary new skills. Allie becomes infected with the “God Virus” through contact with Derek, and they both discover that Pembroke was killed by dangerous people in the underworld and intelligence communities who want these new abilities only for themselves. The easiest way to steal these powers is to extract them from Derek’s and Allie’s brains by force—but that won’t be easy now that they are superhuman. The conflict escalates and more and greater cosmic (and sometimes comic) revelations await on every page. Somewhat picaresque, with hints of Tom Robbins here and there, Voyager’s tale is fast-paced and has many entertaining moving parts. The characters and dialogue are fun despite being somewhat glib. While the subject matter will be recognizable to anyone exposed to “self-actualization” belief systems, this does not ultimately detract from the action in the story. But Voyager sometimes indulges in mystically tweaking the reader (“Lying against a dune, Derek and Allie lounged in the sand, wordlessly chatted, and ate”). And connections between the New Age idea of “indigo children”—“becoming indigo” in the novel—and the author’s pseudonym can be overly direct.
An energetic but familiar New Age sci-fi/fantasy adventure.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5192-4887-9
Page Count: 424
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2017
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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