A truly remarkable, character-driven dystopian novel.
In this final installment of Schneider’s SF trilogy, friends try to steady their spiraling lives as mid-21st-century Earth falls into chaos.
Kat Keeper knows she’s the reason the network, which has effectively replaced the internet, is broken. As one of the leaders of the Resistance, she’d tampered with it to bring it down, although she hadn’t intended for it to fail all at once. At least there’s a chance for her and a tech-savvy pal to rebuild a “safe, independent network” for the Resistance. However, MIND, the evil company that the Resistance aims to overthrow, still manages to control the fractured remains of the network and releases “disinformation vids” that make Resistance members look violent. In the meantime, the world, without the network, experiences power outages and loss of climate controls (like measures for blocking the harmful sun). As the disarray continues, Kat leaves New York and travels to San Francisco to help Ravven Vaara, her friend and Resistance co-leader. Ravven has been hearing orcas’ messages and speaking to them in visions; evidently, the queen orca wants to teach humans how to be better. Is this really happening, or is Ravven, as a Receiver (like Kat), simply hearing other people’s thoughts? While on the Westcoast, Kat meets Renzo Kundera, an architect and urban planner who only complicates her life further. Over in New Zealand, Nora2 is positioned as a worthy successor to the CEO of MIND after the deaths of her bosses in a spaceship explosion. But one of those boss’s consciousnesses is stored in a cube, and after being revivified, it resumes the company’s greedy attempts to harvest people’s memories.
Schneider’s story zeroes in on the individuals within this bleak future world. Kat’s trip to San Francisco, where she’d lived two years earlier, opens up a past she left behind—it dredges up memories of her late husband, her company that others forced her out of, and her relationship with MIND’s diabolical co-founder and creator of its same-named artificial intelligence. Kat attributes human traits to her beloved bot Michel, whose voice calms her and whose “feelings” she’s eager to protect. There’s an abundance of chic tech, including a hovercycle and a Secluder (essentially a burner phone). Nora2 is a fascinating amalgamation of this narrative’s advanced technologies and stellar character development. The number in her name indicates the silicon substrate embedded in her brain (the lower the number, the more expensive the mod). While the implant boosts her support and ambition, Nora2 is still a mistreated personal assistant saddled with a megalomaniac consciousness that thrives in an oval-shaped MindVessel. As the story progresses, the sense of danger increases as MIND’s disinformation campaign continues and the company more directly targets Kat (and even Ravven’s inventor boyfriend). Subplots move in unexpected directions, from the orcas, who chat with Ravven during her meditative visions, to Kat’s potential romance with Renzo, who has an unusual bond with his twin brother. The ending more than satisfies as a trilogy finale, delivering a rich, contemplative denouement that readers can muse on.
A truly remarkable, character-driven dystopian novel.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798999107428
Page Count: 358
Publisher: FutureX
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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