As promised, Asimov's 300th book comes out just before his 65th birthday, in January. Like Opus 1O0 (1969) and Opus 200 (1979), this too is a collection: selected pieces from the preceding 99 works. Asimov coyly admits to some number-fudging: the count includes co-authorings and Asimov anthologies. (No less than 54 anthologies help make up the 300 works.) But what's to quibble? It takes time and talent to edit anthologies; besides, everybody expects "prolificity" of him. So this is a feast for fans—and also a varied sampling for newcomers; more pleasing in many ways than the encyclopedic Asimov's New Guide to Science (p. 834). That volume obligated Asimov to cover all fields; here he can pick and choose from favorite things. In recent years, that means the usual sciences—astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology—as well as the social sciences, history, the Bible, science fiction, and more. There are gems: on the deadness of the moon; on icebergs; on matter/antimatter collisions. There is an amusing sample of armchair sleuthing; a quite sensitive handling of "humaniform" robots (from the latest robot volume); even an essay never before published—on immortality, and why Asimov is against it. (Perhaps, he speculates, the editors didn't like the point of view.) These last years Asimov has joined the battle against creation science, so there are good pieces on evolution, along with the tedious annotations of Genesis. There are silly limericks and not-so-funny humor bits to contend with too. With official autobiography, and also running commentary—noting background and mood, saluting or mourning friends: the ruminative as well as the energetic Asimov, already on the road to Opus 400.
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 1984
ISBN: 0395361087
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1984
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
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
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