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Killing Juggernaut

Name: Killing Juggernaut
Author: Jared Bernard
ISBN: 978-1-68222-404-5

by Jared Bernard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 25, 2015

Despite an overall lack of focus, Bernard’s tale still manages to retain a mournful, prophetic power.

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It’s the end of the world as we know it, and nobody feels fine in Bernard’s debut portrayal of humanity’s end.

Near the middle of the 23rd century, Earth is on the edge of complete environmental collapse. The human race has dwindled to a few straggling colonies on the edges of each continent, and there’s just one shining hope left: the 32,000 colonists on the starship Apeiron, a last-ditch effort to start anew on an “exoplanet” more than 50 light-years away. The narrator of Bernard’s novel—Patrick, a senior member of the colony on America’s East Coast and a former astronomer—stays in communication with the other colonies. As they begin to slide toward oblivion, he decides to take a dangerous trip to a large radio-telescope array and find out the status of Apeiron’s mission—a voyage that offers revelations that Patrick might have been happier not knowing. As a jeremiad against human-caused environmental damage, Bernard’s novel is often effective, working details of the biosphere’s destruction into the overall flow without holding up the narrative. Like other ecological end-time novels, such as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (2006) and Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka’s Nature’s End (1986), Bernard carefully describes what a world in the last throes of extinction might look like and shows its effects on human society, from desperate attempts to use what remains of national park systems to riots over food and water to ever-increasing swarms of refugees. However, Bernard’s novel also shares a common flaw with other, similar stories: its emphasis on worldbuilding over character development. Only Patrick appears to be fully fleshed out, serving as a beacon of reason and compassion in a world that’s seemingly run out of both. The story mainly uses the other colonists as a Greek chorus of despair, fear, and animal panic. Once the focus shifts to a book-within-a-book—a memoir of a woman who had a child with the Apeiron mission’s leader, but couldn’t go with him—the excess worldbuilding only becomes more pronounced, diffusing the novel’s focus and derailing the momentum. Patrick’s somber elegy at the end manages to preserve the power of his final words, but it underlines the relative weakness of the preceding memoir sections.

Despite an overall lack of focus, Bernard’s tale still manages to retain a mournful, prophetic power.

Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-68222-404-5

Page Count: 460

Publisher: BookBaby

Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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GOLDEN SON

From the Red Rising Trilogy series , Vol. 2

by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2015

Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...

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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

Categories:

SCIENCE FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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IRON GOLD
by Pierce Brown

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MORNING STAR
by Pierce Brown

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RED RISING
by Pierce Brown

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MORNING STAR

From the Red Rising Trilogy series , Vol. 3

by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2016

An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.

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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.