A solid launching pad for a sophisticated alien-invasion saga for older teens and adults.
In Arthur’s sci-fi debut, humanoid aliens have arrived on Earth, offering miraculous technology, but young Jack Cousins knows they can’t be trusted.
Aliens, virtually indistinguishable from Homo sapiens, announce themselves on Earth in Las Vegas. They soon fill the marketplace with must-have toys exhibiting amazing tech that even the CIA can’t duplicate. The extraterrestrials explain they are welcoming man into the Directory, a vast federation of intelligent worlds. Their superscience soon ends Earth’s wars, poverty and disease. The aliens recruit thousands of young humans for “training” and ship them off-world to supposedly utopian destinations. Clean-cut Utah teen Jack Cousins, however, doesn’t believe in the visitors’ altruism. It turns out that Jack is the reincarnation of Tac-U-One, an alien troubleshooter secret agent who fatally crashed on Earth 16 years ago trying to expose a sinister scheme to corrupt the Directory and create a monstrous empire of slavery and exploitation. Jack becomes aware of this when he visits the site of Tac-U-One’s crash, and he embarks on a clever solo campaign against the invaders, using mind control, the media and legal maneuvering to nudge the aliens into revealing their unsavory true nature. Jack also tries to do right by his Earth family and his childhood sweetheart, Wendy, who are endangered by his resistance activities. Although the novel is geared to a YA audience, this series opener rarely talks down to its readers. Unlike other authors who have delved into the invasion genre, Arthur refreshingly avoids turning his novel into a tract on imperialism, colonialism or genocide. Indeed, notwithstanding some R-rated language and tastefully rendered acknowledgment of sex, readers may find it reminiscent of golden-age sci-fi tales of the 1950s. One detail does get short shrift in this outing: the fact that Directory society is built around the concept of reincarnation as an accepted reality. Future installments may expand upon that; the book ends with a peek at a planned sequel.
A solid launching pad for a sophisticated alien-invasion saga for older teens and adults.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466382510
Page Count: 336
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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