Brimming with action, repartee, intrigue, comedy, magic, and irony, with impressively well-rounded characters and a dash of...
Volsky’s new Victorian fantasy takes place in the same world as The White Tribunal (1997) but otherwise is unconnected. In Low Hetz, Mad King Miltzin’s lowborn sorcerer, Nevenskoi, has discovered a green-flamed entity composed of sentient fire. To the sorcerer, Masterfire represents a possibly decisive weapon against the brutal, oppressive, and dangerously expansionist Grewzian Imperium. But Miltzin, oblivious to the peril, refuses to sell the secret or allow Nevenskoi to disseminate it; instead, he decrees the Grand Ellipse, a crazy race through all the civilized countries of the world, by any available means of transport, the winner to be showered with gifts and accolades. Disgusted, Nevenskoi allows word of his discovery to leak out. The government of Vonahr, anticipating a Grewzian attack forthwith, grasps that the winner—especially a female winner—of the Grand Ellipse will be ideally placed to bend the amorous Miltzin’s ear, and so decides to sponsor a contestant: anthropologist Luzelle Devaire, independent, intelligent, and utterly determined to win. Among the other contestants will be Luzelle’s ex, the irritating aristocrat Girays v’Alisante, and Overcommander Karsler Stornzof of the Grewzian army. Honest, forthright, and compassionate, Stornzof resembles not at all his wicked uncle Torvid, who will stop at nothing to sabotage Stornzof’s rivals. All this, and the race hasn’t even begun yet.
Brimming with action, repartee, intrigue, comedy, magic, and irony, with impressively well-rounded characters and a dash of feminism: a spine-tingling, heartwarming delight.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-10804-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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