A guilty pleasure for ancient-history buffs, and a sure hit for the goddess crowd.
King Arthur goes New Age in the latest offering from Bradley (Traitor’s Son, 1998, etc.), who has made a career of smoothing down the sharp corners of the Round Table for her matriarchal fans. Princess Eilan (that’s “Helena” to you Eurocentric patriarchs) hails from the misty isle of Avalon, where she became adept in the ancient craft and lore of the wisewomen. In love with the Roman general Constantius, she leaves Britain and elopes with him—only to be cast aside when he becomes Caesar and is forced to marry the Roman patrician Theodora. In her grief she makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she discovers the True Cross and learns of the new religion of Christianity. Eventually, her son Constantine succeeds his father as Caesar, and Helena helps him bridge the pagan and the Christian eras—changing Western history in the process.
A guilty pleasure for ancient-history buffs, and a sure hit for the goddess crowd.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-91023-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Meanwhile, all those exploding planetoids make a good argument for more STEM funding. Wise, witty, utterly well-crafted...
No slim fables or nerdy novellas for Stephenson (Anathem, 2008, etc.): his visions are epic, and he requires whole worlds—and, in this case, solar systems—to accommodate them.
His latest opens with a literal bang as the moon explodes “without warning and for no apparent reason.” When the reason finally does become apparent, it’s cause to enlist steely-jawed action hero Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D., a scientist who makes fat bread as a TV science popularizer and sucker-up to the rich and powerful. Easy street gives way to a very rocky galactic road as Doob has to figure out why the heavens are suddenly hurling mountains of space debris at Earth in a time already fraught with human-caused difficulty. Ever the optimist, Doob puts it this way: “The good news is that the Earth is one day going to have a beautiful system of rings, just like Saturn. The bad news is that it’s going to be messy.” The solution? Get off the planet fast, set up space colonies, perpetuate the human race using turkey basters—well, a “DNA sequence stored on a thumb drive,” anyway—and multiple moms, whence the title. Stephenson takes his time doing so, layering on a perhaps not entirely necessary game of intrigue involving a sly-boots “dusky blonde” of a president. When the yarn moves into deep space thousands of years from now, however, it picks up both speed and depth, for while humans are more diverse than ever (“Each of the seven new races had embodied more than one Strain”), the gap between the haves and have-nots has widened, piles of gold and golden eyes and all. Stephenson does a fine job, à la H.G. Wells, of imaging a future in which troglodytes live just outside the titanium walls of civilization, and though the setup is an old one, he brings a fresh vision based on the latest science to the task.
Meanwhile, all those exploding planetoids make a good argument for more STEM funding. Wise, witty, utterly well-crafted science fiction.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-219037-6
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
The story has it all: swords, sorcery, and pure and undying love. (Excellent illustrations, too.) Essential grounding for an...
Frodo-heads rejoice: from the Tolkien factory comes a foundational story a century in the making, one yarn to rule them all.
“I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in frustration to his publisher. “But I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded.” The story of Beren, a mortal human, and Lúthien, an immortal elf, resonates throughout the corpus of Tolkien’s work; born while Tolkien was shaking off the horrors of combat in World War I, it figures in The Silmarillion, the first of the major posthumous books, and in other of the Middle-earth books, to say nothing of The Lord of the Rings itself, when Aragorn sings of the fraught love between the two legendary figures. As reconstructed here and presented whole, the saga adds back story to much of LOTR: it explains the mistrust of Treebeard and the other forest denizens for the world of men, and it provides a foreshadowing for the whole of the canonical Rings trilogy, since it describes a kind of ur-Saruman who lusts for both power and magical jewels, setting off a chain of events that implicates Orcs, dragons, humans, elves, and all manner of other beings. Some of the tale here is in verse, done in a kind of Tennyson-esque meter: “Then Sauron laughed aloud. ‘Thou base, / thou cringing worm! Stand up, / and hear me! And now drink the cup / that I have sweetly blent for thee!' " Sweetly blent indeed. Other moments are worthy of Mikhail Bulgakov, such as Tolkien’s conjuring of giant malevolent cats, their “eyes glowing like green lamps or red or yellow where Tevildo’s thanes sat waving and lashing their beautiful tails,” and of Tennyson himself, as when Beren tells how for Lúthien’s love “he must essay the burning waste, / and doubtless death and torment taste.”
The story has it all: swords, sorcery, and pure and undying love. (Excellent illustrations, too.) Essential grounding for an epic cycle that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-328-79182-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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