Despite the endless gore, the action is curiously bloodless. As an exercise in which money does most of the talking, it’s...
Second of a trilogy begun with The Extra (2010), a near-future dystopia in which “extras” are cannon fodder in live-action movies.
Much of Los Angeles has degenerated into a horrific ghetto known as the Zoo, whose inhabitants will do almost anything to escape. Big-shot movie director and coldblooded psychopath Val Margolian has developed Anti-Personnel Properties, mechanical killing machines, to hunt, battle and devour the extras. The extras that survived Margolian’s last box-office smash are now rich and have taken up residence in Sunrise, a thriving, idyllic small town populated by hearty can-do types who know how to take care of themselves. Margolian's big new idea, born partly of artistic vision and partly from a desire for revenge, involves tricking the Sunrisers into killing some cops. Once the town is found guilty of “corporate homicide,” it’s turned over to Margolian and his APPs to execute the death sentence. So ex-extras Curtis, Japh and Jool stand alongside Sunrise natives sent from central casting to battle mechanical wasps, mantises and other unpleasant surprises. Shea brings in a few fresh details to this otherwise vacuously predictable enterprise. One battle scene blends into the next. It gives nothing away to point out that there’s never a question about who will win.
Despite the endless gore, the action is curiously bloodless. As an exercise in which money does most of the talking, it’s almost as cynical as its premise. In the end, marginally more intriguing than watching paint dry.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2436-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
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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