Brooks delivers a predictable, formulaic, old-fashioned space Western peopled with likable, flawed characters who gallop...
Capt. Ichabod Drift and his ragtag crew on the starship Keiko are hired by the ruthless Nicolas Kelsier, politician-turned-terrorist, to smuggle sensitive contraband onto Old Earth, but they get two-timed in a nuclear double-bluff that leaves them with only one option: deliver vengeance to Kelsier or be killed.
Brooks’ debut novel is an unabashedly derivative, cliché-driven space Western, complete with down-and-out dive bars, interstellar intrigue, high-stake gambles, and a crew with secret and checkered pasts—“seven no hopers in a rust bucket.” They're a familiar bunch of rebels straight out of the Marvel universe, Firefly, or Star Wars: fast-talking, Han Solo–like Mexican Capt. Drift, a "thief-cum-smuggler-cum-merchant-cum-bounty-hunter-cum-goodness-knows-what-else”; his crack-shot African-American sidekick, Tamara Rourke; Maori Apirana “Big A” Wahawaha; Dutchman and mostly muscle Micah van Schaken; the Chinese Chang siblings, pilot and mechanic Jia and Kuai; and one white-girl hacker, Jenna McIlroy. In a future resembling Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep but with far less nuance, Drift and his crew are wry, endearing survivors. Brooks’ work eschews subtlety; threadbare lines like “his secret had been buried in his heart like a worm in an apple” or “his eyes felt like they were made of dust” litter the narrative. While there are some inventive flourishes like the “electat, a neurally activated subdermal tattoo,” or the Circuit Cult, “an organization that championed cybernetic replacements over the flesh and blood they viewed as inherently flawed,” overall Brooks has concocted a conventional, undemanding space opera full of fast talk, action, and gratuitous violence.
Brooks delivers a predictable, formulaic, old-fashioned space Western peopled with likable, flawed characters who gallop across an entertaining page-turner, pausing infrequently for either emotion or depth.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5954-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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