Clearly a series, with this opener hard to match.
Ridley abandons his stable of losers (The Drift, 2002, etc.) and creates a female cop in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles filled with psychic mutants.
You see, this is a Marvel comics graphic novel without the illustrations: a comic-strip sucking up the old flame-dripping images of Stan Lee and the gritty pages of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight whose Batman comes out of retirement at 52 to fight endless horrid mutants crawling through Gotham. Well, every night that Soledad O’Roark goes out with LAPD’s Mtac (Metanormal Tactical Unit), which keeps superhumans in check, there’s a one-in-four chance she won’t come back. Her first night out, her fellow officer Reese gets her chest holed open by flame lobbed by a fire mutant and loses a lung. Soledad’s .9 mm cartridges turn to slag before hitting the pyrokinetic and while her personally modified Metalstorm all-electronic handgun’s white-hot phosphorous bullets do rip up the pyro freak, Soledad herself takes some heavy burns. The horror in heat-fused San Francisco first produced the freaks, who include telepaths, telekinetics, invulnerables, intangibles, impenetrables, levitators, and metal morphs. Soledad’s gun, which fires rounds varied for each type of freak, earns her the nickname Bullet. But her modified Metalstorm can’t yet take out intangibles and telepaths. All this also offers Ridley a candy shop of comic-book villains and superheroes, such as the Human Torch, to rip off and revise as superfreaks with incredible powers. A geomagnetic mutie can move earth and rock, do low-grade terraforming. Freaks like Quadrupleman walk around veiled as normals, since the Prez has issued an Executive Order: leave or die. Some hit Europe, where they wear their costumes, do superhero shtick. First, Nightshift showed up, did wonders catching perps, but then supervillains bloomed to oppose him. Thrill Kill, Death Nell—and Bludlust, whose crazy megaweapon leveled San Francisco. Soledad’s big villain: the telepath, with whom there’s no defense—not when he’s her lover.
Clearly a series, with this opener hard to match.Pub Date: May 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53093-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.
Brown is back with Book 4 of his Red Rising series (Morning Star, 2016, etc.) and explores familiar themes of rebellion, revenge, and political instability.
This novel examines the ramifications and pitfalls of trying to build a new world out of the ashes of the old. The events here take place 10 years after the conclusion of Morning Star, which ended on a seemingly positive note. Darrow, aka Reaper, and his lover, Virginia au Augustus, aka Mustang, had vanquished the Golds, the elite ruling class, so hope was held out that a new order would arise. But in the new book it becomes clear that the concept of political order is tenuous at best, for Darrow’s first thoughts are on the forces of violence and chaos he has unleashed: “famines and genocide...piracy...terrorism, radiation sickness and disease...and the one hundred million lives lost in my [nuclear] war.” Readers familiar with the previous trilogy—and you'll have to be if you want to understand the current novel—will welcome a familiar cast of characters, including Mustang, Sevro (Darrow’s friend and fellow warrior), and Lysander (grandson of the Sovereign). Readers will also find familiarity in Brown’s idiosyncratic naming system (Cassius au Bellona, Octavia au Lune) and even in his vocabulary for cursing (“Goryhell,” “Bloodydamn,” “Slag that”). Brown introduces a number of new characters, including 18-year-old Lyria, a survivor of the initial Rising who gives a fresh perspective on the violence of the new war—and violence is indeed never far away from the world Brown creates. (He includes one particularly gruesome gladiatorial combat between Cassius and a host of enemies.) Brown imparts an epic quality to the events in part by his use of names. It’s impossible to ignore the weighty connotations of characters when they sport names like Bellerephon, Diomedes, Dido, and Apollonius.
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-425-28591-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.
Self-assured, entertaining debut novel that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic.
The world’s not big enough for two wizards, as Tolkien taught us—even if that world is the shiny, modern one of the late 19th century, with its streetcars and electric lights and newfangled horseless carriages. Yet, as first-time novelist Morgenstern imagines it, two wizards there are, if likely possessed of more legerdemain than true conjuring powers, and these two are jealous of their turf. It stands to reason, the laws of the universe working thus, that their children would meet and, rather than continue the feud into a new generation, would instead fall in love. Call it Romeo and Juliet for the Gilded Age, save that Morgenstern has her eye on a different Shakespearean text, The Tempest; says a fellow called Prospero to young magician Celia of the name her mother gave her, “She should have named you Miranda...I suppose she was not clever enough to think of it.” Celia is clever, however, a born magician, and eventually a big hit at the Circus of Dreams, which operates, naturally, only at night and has a slightly sinister air about it. But what would you expect of a yarn one of whose chief setting-things-into-action characters is known as “the man in the grey suit”? Morgenstern treads into Harry Potter territory, but though the chief audience for both Rowling and this tale will probably comprise of teenage girls, there are only superficial genre similarities. True, Celia’s magical powers grow, and the ordinary presto-change-o stuff gains potency—and, happily, surrealistic value. Finally, though, all the magic has deadly consequence, and it is then that the tale begins to take on the contours of a dark thriller, all told in a confident voice that is often quite poetic, as when the man in the grey suit tells us, “There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53463-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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