Battle plans, not ice, form the new enemy of survival. Well done.
Second in the Snowfall Trilogy, a rousing story of wilderness survival as civilization regresses when a mile-high wall of ice stretches Atlantic to Pacific and book-learning has all but vanished. (One must suspend disbelief that all books were burned for heat while hundreds of millions of people froze.)
During a future epoch, various clans and kingdoms compete for the arable land in southern North America. In Snowfall (2002), we followed the stories of Jack Monroe, once an outcast, and facially scarred Catania Olsen, self-taught doctor to the Colorado Trappers, who join to try to save the Range from the invading Crees, who are themselves fleeing invaders. Moving south through the forest, the Trappers join the Garden tree-dwellers from the Warm time. It’s a generation later than in Snowfall, and the plot begins to fill with familiar fantasy adventure elements at the cost of the original icy backgrounds, though frost and snow still strike. Jack and Catania’s son Sam leads the army of warrior people living between Mexico City and northern Mexico, and they’ve just suffered a big defeat, with worse likely on the way. Khanate nomads, led by Toghrul Khan, who sound much like the Scythians of Russia, have crossed the northern ice and conquered the West Coast. All that lies between the barbarians and Sam’s people is Kingdom River, ruled by Queen Joan. Banding with Kingdom River looks wise, and, to give his smaller nation some stature in Kingdom River, Sam marries the Kingdom’s Princess Rachel. But vast armies sweep toward the Mississippi, and when St. Louis falls, little time is left to reinforce defenses. If Queen Joan dies, will Sam be king? Meanwhile, in New England, embryos in the womb are encouraged to grow wings, not arms, and great anchorages of breastbone muscle, all toward mastering levitation.
Battle plans, not ice, form the new enemy of survival. Well done.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30008-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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