Readers will feel brain-dead themselves after slogging through this deadly dull saga.
Grant's tapeworm trilogy concludes with an all-out war.
In the two previous books (Parasite, 2013; Symbiont, 2014), readers were introduced to Sally Mitchell, a woman rendered brain dead in an accident and brought back to life by a sentient tapeworm created by Dr. Shanti Cale. A global company distributed the tapeworms as personal medical devices, designed to control insulin, blood pressure, and other health issues. But instead of simply acting as a control, the worms burrowed into the skulls of their hosts and took them over. Sal, the tapeworm, took over the body of Col. Mitchell’s daughter Sally, and now the colonel is fighting the tapeworms while his other daughter, Joyce, is also brain dead. Sal hopes to save Joyce but also wants to get back to her fiance, Nathan, Dr. Cale’s son, a normal human who knows the woman he loves is a chimera. When Dr. Mitchell has Sal relocated to a quarantine unit in Pleasanton, she and another woman, Carrie, escape and find their way back to Dr. Cale’s lab, where Sal is reunited with the Mitchell family and Carrie is imprisoned. Eventually an evil chimera comes for them, and Dr. Cale’s faction works to find a way to defeat him and make the world safe for tapeworms masquerading as people. This third volume comes in much too long and contains page upon page of mundanely written internal monologue as Sal whines about her situation, justifies her existence, and explains the twisted science that went into making her. Sal is legions away from a sympathetic heroine, and the constant self-reflection acts as filler for a wafer-thin story.
Readers will feel brain-dead themselves after slogging through this deadly dull saga.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-38103-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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