A flawless blending of actual and potential events, aided by an engaging narrator.
In the first of their planned three-volume alternative American history, King and Bredehoft expertly plot the effects of the South’s victory in the Civil War.
This history starts with Lee’s triumph at Gettysburg, a “point of divergence” clinching the nation’s division into the USA and the CSA—Confederate States of America. The countries form competing international alliances: While the CSA partners with Germany and Britain, the USA forms tightknit friendships with France and Russia. Border conflicts erupt near Mexico and Canada, which the Yukon Gold Rush renders appealing to would-be U.S. colonizers. With Britain entangled in the “Irish Question,” Russia advancing into India and Afghanistan, and the CSA and Japan planning to attack the Philippines, the stage is set for an altered World War I in 1898. Global warfare catches most great powers unprepared, both technologically and ideologically. The CSA, however, is an able aggressor: Hoping to annex Maryland and Delaware, it leads devastating attacks on New York and Washington, leaving the capital in ruins. Indeed, this bleak picture coincides with the narrator’s present-day setting: Writing in 1963, an unnamed, former U.S. president surveys a post-apocalyptic scene while cowered in a primitive New England outpost, with New York City having been destroyed by Germany’s atomic missiles. He attempts to pinpoint where everything went wrong, inspired by “duty to make an honest accounting at history’s bar.” At first, Confederate victory may have augured a better world, but as the slave trade and the accelerated cycle of war continued, things grew worse, especially as the USA restricted freedom of speech to prevent dissent. King and Bredehoft seamlessly weave genuine and conceivable historical happenings: The Dreyfus Affair and Boxer Rebellion are juxtaposed with imagined but entirely plausible assassinations or invasions. Omissions, such as the Boer War and Lincoln assassination—he decided against seeking re-election, leaving the job to William H. Seward—come with faultless justification. Throughout, there is an impressive level of detail as the authors follow minute chronological swerves to their logical conclusions, illustrating “the highly contingent nature of history.”
A flawless blending of actual and potential events, aided by an engaging narrator.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484100943
Page Count: 588
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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