A staid, melancholy, cautionary sci-fi tale with an Orwellian, fablelike quality.
Faced with the end of his marriage, a mild-mannered man starts to question the omnipotent data-based System that regulates his society in this sci-fi novel.
Big Brother becomes Big PDA in author Davidson’s hands. In a future United Kingdom, the System is developed as a panacea to the world’s ills—an omnipotent online database, personal planner, and social network regulating all aspects of life. It monitors and communicates with its users via surgically implanted mobile units. The System’s artificial intelligence, with its prime directive to look after mankind’s security, is supposedly infallible, so nearly everyone gratefully follows its dictates, which have largely eradicated crime, poverty, and global overpopulation. (Never mind that dissenters who publicly question the System tend to disappear.) Advertising man Wallace Blair has especially close personal connections with the System; his grandfather had a part in its design, and his father currently holds a high maintenance position. Wallace is notified that his blissful marriage to Mary, a fanatical System believer, has been automatically moved to pre-divorce “Transition” status. Suddenly daring to doubt the System’s perfect judgment, he goes off the grid to delve into taboo family secrets—specifically, his grandfather’s mysterious breakdown and retreat from public life shortly after the System became active. At least, Wallace thinks he’s off the grid. Davidson seeds clues here and there that this indolent, apathetic, technology-blighted society is of a piece with the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s classic 1932 dystopian satire Brave New World, which is looking less like satire with every passing year. Furthermore, he avoids the temptation to dazzle readers with florid descriptions of sci-fi marvels and jargon. Wisely, he keeps the System thoroughly offstage and mysterious—no towering computer-mainframe headquarters, no mecha battle-troops à la The Terminator (1984)—which makes the invisible, paranoid AI even more disquieting and the society which enabled it, equally so. A good deal of the plotline, in fact, addresses the relationships between three generations of Blair men. Plodder Wallace never develops into much of a rebel, any more than Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston Smith did, which goes much against the grain of the blockbuster mentality that typifies novels such as The Hunger Games (2008). However, it’s appropriate to the elegiac, downbeat tone.
A staid, melancholy, cautionary sci-fi tale with an Orwellian, fablelike quality.Pub Date: May 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511491099
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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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