by Josh Leone ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 2015
A promising start to a serious-minded space-opera epic.
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In a far-future empire known as the Primacy, elites and spacefaring rogues are ensnared in a conspiracy by a top-tier mystic to elevate himself to godhood.
Author Leone’s debut kicks off a planned multivolume saga built on the conceit of the “Calling Tower,” one of those tropes that sci-fi commentators have taken to calling the “Big Dumb Object,” a crucial artifact that inspires awe. Here, it’s a deposit of a rare crystal of unthinkable purity that’s been uncovered under the Earth’s crust, sending a multifaceted spire (hence the “Tower”) aboveground. In an era wracked by near-extinction-level planetary war and strife, this miracle mineral permits the downloading and retrieval of human consciousnesses, enabling society’s elites to enjoy repeated resurrections as “Honored Returned” in continually upgraded, powerful, nanotech-enhanced bodies. Use of the Calling Tower remakes human civilization into the Primacy, a theocracy that worships the Earth as a mother goddess (for how can anything so beneficial have evolved by random chance?); it’s also a rapacious space empire, feared by countless aliens, that’s driven by the Tower-inspired credo that humanity alone has been favored by the Divine. Some 1,800 years after the discovery of the Calling Tower, Vashek, a high administrator/priest who’s been reborn so often that he’s an angelic figure, schemes to push the Calling Tower’s properties even further and incarnate himself as a noncorporeal being of pure consciousness—in other words, an amoral, lethal god. Doing this without detection requires Vashek to initiate a shadowy interstellar criminal conspiracy that readers may find a bit overcomplicated. However, the novel also tracks an entertaining ensemble of characters. One of them in particular, an ex-soldier–turned–rogue hero named Seth, has an especially Han Solo–esque vibe. The book also features world-sized spaceships and exotic extraterrestrials. If readers are left slightly wanting for further shadings of the Primacy culture, they may take comfort in the fact that there’s a sequel already in progress.
A promising start to a serious-minded space-opera epic.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-51-436348-5
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Blake Crouch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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...
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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