by Lewis Gannett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1996
A tale of doom from the author of the 1993 horror novel The Living One. Young Toby Swett, Boston neurotic and lonely guy, has always had a fearful fascination with disaster, personal and otherwise. He knows in his heart that the world will soon end because of two intractable problems: Third World overpopulation and global environmental abuse. It's 2001, and the US is reeling from the same stuff that made headlines in 1996: mad bombers, environmental disasters, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, organized terrorists, riots, gimcrack evangelists crying Armageddon. Then, as he's trying to gain the attention of a beautiful young woman in a restaurant, Toby finds himself in the middle of global catastrophe. He inadvertently moves a microphone that's part of the Federal Anti-Terror Bureau's attempt to track down a bomber. Shortly, all hell breaks loose. It seems that a Harvard professor and environmental extremist, Earnest Trefethen, has concluded that humanity is beyond hope and has planted atomic bombs deep under the ice in Antarctica. When the bombs detonate, the ice will melt, drowning two thirds of the planet. As it happens, a meteor, rather than Trefethen, puts the plan in motion, the full implementation of which sets off a myriad of smaller bombs using electrical impulses as random as telephone calls and transmissions on the Internet. Chaos ensues: Communities lapse into barbarism, communications fail, military operations fail to proceed—and the waters rise. Young Toby tracks Trefethen, but that maddened scientist can't save the world. Boston's Magazine Street, where Toby lives, becomes Magazine Beach. Toby does find true love, but he and the missus will have to move to higher ground. Never really plausible, but Gannett's boundless energy makes his pages streak along, and his hero's self-effacing, almost juvenile persona is engaging.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-105235-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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by C.A. Tripp & edited by Lewis Gannett
BOOK REVIEW
by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2016
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
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by Pierce Brown
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by Pierce Brown
BOOK REVIEW
by Pierce Brown
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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by Pierce Brown
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by Pierce Brown
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