Inventive, profane and action-packed, with a wiseass, resourceful hero.
A smart-mouthed young smuggler is tasked with a dangerous assignment in this steampunk-flavored adventure novel.
After a calamity called the Breaking, Earth is no longer a solid object but a group of loosely connected landforms called Rocks hanging above the Dustball below. In the slums of Hanging Town—created after a gravity disruption turned one Rock upside down—Dizzy Whiteman, 18, makes a scant living doing odd jobs, mostly illegal. A foulmouthed, wisecracking daredevil who’s a tad sensitive about his short stature, he rides a steam-powered vehicle akin to a motorcycle, helped out by his older sister, a gifted mechanic. Dizzy’s skills gain attention, and he’s intimidated into joining a pirate ship and helping retrieve valuable artifacts related to the Breaking. He’ll need all his wits, courage and skills as a fighter and flier to avoid becoming anyone’s pawn and to survive several exciting, perilous adventures, including going undercover into Purgatory, the sort of prison where no one comes out alive. Don’t be put off by the novel’s overweening introduction (mirrored in its afterword), which claims that this is “the type of book that strangles its readers remorselessly before smacking them in the face just for the hell of it.” Actually, Dizzy’s courage, curiosity, humor, decency and love for his family define him as much as his smart mouth. While the action is virtually nonstop—fight scenes range from hand-to-hand combat to grand naval battles—the book also takes time to consider this future world’s culture, politics, art, architecture and people, as Dizzy’s adventures take him to palaces, dive bars, pirate hangouts and more. A hero who isn’t all height and muscles is also a nice change, though he’s nevertheless a tough fighter. That said, the book’s wonderfully vivid descriptions can turn into purple prose—in particular, adjectives galore—and a firmer editing hand would help.
Inventive, profane and action-packed, with a wiseass, resourceful hero.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492173168
Page Count: 556
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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