A terrific fulfillment. Charmed fans will relish it.
Last entry in the Snowfall Trilogy featuring realistic fantasy, military-based cultures, and Smith’s power of immediacy with people, sense of place, detail, and sensory presence.
In Snowfall (2002), a future Ice Age builds a mile-high wall of ice across the northern states from coast to coast, with only the tips of a few skyscrapers rising above the ice. Jack Monroe and the Trappers lose their Range when a band of Crees massacres them, the Crees themselves being driven from their homeland by other marauders. In Kingdom River (2003), the man-against-nature theme fades before the history of clans warring for arable land. Jack Monroe’s son Sam leads an army of warrior folk who live between Mexico City and northern Mexico. Then come the Khanate nomads led by Toghrul Khan, who have crossed northern ice from Russia and conquered the West. Monroe bands with Queen Joan of big Kingdom River, along the Mississippi, marries Joan’s daughter, Princess Rachel, and together the two rebuff Khan, although now in New England a psychic folk is mastering human bird-flight. Twenty years later, in Moonrise, King Sam and Queen Rachel, who have ruled in peace, die when their ship founders in the Gulf Entire. Their son, the Crown Prince Newton, is murdered, and Bajazet, his adopted brother and the son of Toghrul, finds himself battered about by varied tribesmen fighting the New England psychics—and weird, carnivorous, huge, four-legged half-human creatures that eat men. Pursued, Bajazet is taken in by the Moonrisers, Made-folk from Boston who rise at night, and he joins their flight north. Will he have a romance with the Made fox-girl Nancy? What of bewinged Patience who Walks-in-air? The trilogy at last returns to the great Wall and the vertical terrors of ice-climbing. Baj and the Made-people must face the ringing bells of the Boston-town regiments before Baj and Nancy and their friends set sail from Boston harbor for Europe.
A terrific fulfillment. Charmed fans will relish it.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30009-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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