An excellently plotted and paced SF tale that also engages the heart.
In this futuristic debut novel, the confluence of several lives at a secret society’s dinner party leads to revelations in a society that’s covering up an ugly reality.
Gren Moritz is the newly elected Chief Minister for the Nations of Rivennia, and the first from Varcega. Varcegians believe in tradition; they eat farmed meat and practice arranged marriages (Gren’s wife, Lorelei, was carefully chosen by his grandparents). Gren’s main platform is “protecting humanity from the rise of ultrahumanism,” but his initial bill may prove controversial—it proposes sterilization for anyone planning gene enhancement treatments, ensuring that unwanted mutations can’t spread. Gren’s not the only one in charge. Rivennia has a monarch, but the science-worshipping Human Order, with its Supreme Leader Igor Voychenko, appears to wield the real power. At a dinner Gren reluctantly attends, he’s introduced to the Liffdom Lodges, Voychenko’s amoral secret society. Gren’s pressured to play a game, wagering on the date of Queen Brynhilda’s death. His competitors are also newcomers: washed-up supermodel Primula Zhang, now the face of fast-fashion brand Skitto, and a low-level government resource analyst, Sam Rosendale. Sharing painful personal secrets, Primula and Sam closely bond. When the date Primula chose passes without the queen’s demise, Primula disappears, and Sam, with the chief minister’s help, attempts to expose the dangerous truth of where she went, and why. In a self-assured debut, Urencio creates an inventive, fascinating world. Lacunfort, the metropolis Gren and Lorelei inhabit in the Year 500, contains wonders; a screen overhead mimics a sky, with more layers of the city stacked on top—as surprised country-girl Lorelei notes, “like a pile of pancakes!” Bots are fully incorporated into the society, performing hospital work, extinguishing fires, even powdering Gren’s face before his talk-show appearance. For transportation, capsulas speed through vacuum pneuducts. The characters, major and minor, are as carefully crafted as the setting. Urencio has a particularly deft and empathetic touch with those often overlooked, whether they’re a marginalized trans man; or aging, like Gren’s hardworking, self-effacing assistant; or the frail queen, though a “living relic,” who also elicits respect. The queen’s advice to Gren is wise: “The single most important trait [for a politician] is detachment.”
An excellently plotted and paced SF tale that also engages the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781919276410
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sunrise & Rooster Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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