In Wells's new fantasy (The Element of Fire, 1993, not seen), the Ancient Mages nearly destroyed the world with flame and lava a thousand years ago, leaving a vast desert of rock and sand dotted with mysterious jutting Remnants. At the desert's edge, the eight ascending tiers of the city Charisat range from grinding poverty in the eighth tier to, at the topmost levels, the serene wealth enjoyed by the ruling Elector, the noble Patricians, and the Warders with their advanced mental powers. Khat of the sixth tier is a ``kris,'' a humanoid of a race created by the Ancients to be capable of surviving the worst the desert has to offer; with his human partner, Sagai, he deals in Ancient relics. Now, the Master Warder, Sonet Riathan, owns an Ancient text that describes relics that he believes may be assembled into an arcane engine that'll augment his powers manyfold. So he orders an assistant Warder, Elen, to hire Khat to locate these relics. Wary and mistrustful, beset by his own problems, Khat agrees, only to discover the involvement of another Warder—the powerful but mad Constans. Indeed, there seems to be a conspiracy that extends to the highest levels. And, while various aspects of the conspiracy unfold, Khat's life is repeatedly endangered as he tries to understand the true significance of the relics. Riathan, it emerges, has made a bargain with an Inhabitant of the West, a creature of dreadful potency. In return for the power he craves, Riathan will open an Ancient doorway through a Remnant, allowing the ghostlike, predatory, and uncontrollable Inhabitants to escape into the world from their own doomed reality. What Khat, Elen, and Constans grasp—and Riathan refuses to accept—is that the Ancient near-destruction of the world was caused by their struggle to repel a previous invasion of Inhabitants. A bravura performance, to which no summary can do justice: compellingly plotted, stunningly original in concept, and glowing with utterly convincing detail.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85686-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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