Another solidly engrossing installment, where the aliens are really just a sideshow: What we’re witnessing is how and why...
Second entry in the prequel series (Earth Unaware, 2012), set many years before the deeds of the Ender's Game novels.
In China, young genius Bingwen ponders an Internet file seeming to show hostile insectlike aliens. The file was distributed by Victor Delgado, last survivor of a space mining family destroyed by those same invaders, in a futile and desperate effort to warn Earth of the approaching menace. Instead, Victor’s treated like an unimportant minor criminal, while his evidence is ignored. Lem Jukes, meanwhile, heir to a powerful space mining corporation, with whom Victor tangled in space, reaches Earth just days ahead of the alien vessel. He knows precisely the danger the aliens represent and intends to use the situation to wrest control of the business away from his coldly indifferent father, Ukko. Despite everything, the authorities decide the Formics probably aren’t hostile and send an official delegation into space. The Formics contemptuously blow the delegation to atoms and launch massive projectiles toward the planet. Mazer Rackham of New Zealand’s Special Air Services happens to be in China on a training mission when the projectiles arrive and transform themselves into vast invulnerable fortresses, against which the Chinese defenders are helpless. Capt. Wit O'Toole’s Mobile Operations Police desperately seek a way to enter China and join the battle against the Formics. The sections that feature highly intelligent, self-reliant children—Card’s trademark—are as excellent as ever; elsewhere there’s plenty of solid action, well-developed characters and prose that’s often disappointingly clumsy.
Another solidly engrossing installment, where the aliens are really just a sideshow: What we’re witnessing is how and why Ender’s child armies came to be.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2905-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
