Jennifer’s story feels unfinished; readers will certainly hope to follow her through to graduation.
An accomplished science-fiction writer and biology professor at a small liberal arts college draws on all her professional experience to portray a young woman’s freshman year in space.
Some years into the future, global warming and a cyanide-emitting, apparently mindless alien creature called an Ultraphyte have made the Earth nearly uninhabitable. Jennifer Ramos Kennedy, descendant of three presidents (in fact, a clone of one of them) has been groomed to lead the fight to conserve the planet’s remaining resources. Unfortunately, a genetic flaw makes public speaking incredibly difficult, and she’s devastated by the recent death of her more charismatic twin brother, Jordi. She literally distances herself from her problems by matriculating at Frontera College, located in a lushly terraformed space habitat. However, Earth politics still demand her attention, as she’s linked to several key figures in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, a hotly contested race between the liberal, science-embracing Unity party (read: Democrats) and the Centrists (a conservative, Tea Party–like faction which insists that outer space ends at the moon’s orbit). Meanwhile, the Ultraphyte problem also follows Jennifer to Frontera, forcing her from the quiet life she desires to take a public stand. Slonczewski’s worldbuilding has always gone deep; she gives the profoundest thought to how biology, culture, social structure, language, politics and economics combine to shape the future. Although the author is solidly on the side of science, she’s not blindly so: although the elite genetically engineer their children to be disease-free and brilliant, there’s a high incidence of psychological and social disorders amongst them. She’s also clear-eyed about the type of personal compromises politicians (including academic politicians) must make in order to win votes and money.
Jennifer’s story feels unfinished; readers will certainly hope to follow her through to graduation.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2956-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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