A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Meanwhile, all those exploding planetoids make a good argument for more STEM funding. Wise, witty, utterly well-crafted...
No slim fables or nerdy novellas for Stephenson (Anathem, 2008, etc.): his visions are epic, and he requires whole worlds—and, in this case, solar systems—to accommodate them.
His latest opens with a literal bang as the moon explodes “without warning and for no apparent reason.” When the reason finally does become apparent, it’s cause to enlist steely-jawed action hero Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D., a scientist who makes fat bread as a TV science popularizer and sucker-up to the rich and powerful. Easy street gives way to a very rocky galactic road as Doob has to figure out why the heavens are suddenly hurling mountains of space debris at Earth in a time already fraught with human-caused difficulty. Ever the optimist, Doob puts it this way: “The good news is that the Earth is one day going to have a beautiful system of rings, just like Saturn. The bad news is that it’s going to be messy.” The solution? Get off the planet fast, set up space colonies, perpetuate the human race using turkey basters—well, a “DNA sequence stored on a thumb drive,” anyway—and multiple moms, whence the title. Stephenson takes his time doing so, layering on a perhaps not entirely necessary game of intrigue involving a sly-boots “dusky blonde” of a president. When the yarn moves into deep space thousands of years from now, however, it picks up both speed and depth, for while humans are more diverse than ever (“Each of the seven new races had embodied more than one Strain”), the gap between the haves and have-nots has widened, piles of gold and golden eyes and all. Stephenson does a fine job, à la H.G. Wells, of imaging a future in which troglodytes live just outside the titanium walls of civilization, and though the setup is an old one, he brings a fresh vision based on the latest science to the task.
Meanwhile, all those exploding planetoids make a good argument for more STEM funding. Wise, witty, utterly well-crafted science fiction.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-219037-6
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
A confident beginning with the promise of future installments that can’t come quickly enough.
A scholar of Byzantine history brings all her knowledge of intricate political maneuvering to bear in her debut space opera.
The fiercely independent space station of Lsel conserves the knowledge of its small population by recording the memory and personality of every valuable citizen in an imago machine and implanting it in a psychologically compatible person, melding the two personas into one. When the powerful empire of Teixcalaan demands a new ambassador, Lsel sends Mahit Dzmare, hastily integrated with an imago the current ambassador, Yskandr Aghavn, left behind on his last visit home, 15 years ago. Once arrived at the Empire’s capital city-planet, the Jewel of the World, Mahit faces the double loss of Yskandr: Sabotage by her own people destroys the younger Yskandr copy within her, and she learns that the older original was murdered a few months ago. Bereft of the experienced knowledge of her predecessor, she will have to rely on all she knows of the sophisticated and complex Teixcalaanli society as she struggles to trace the actions that led Yskandr to his tragic end and to ensure Lsel’s safety during a fierce and multistranded battle for the imperial succession. Martine offers a fascinating depiction of a civilization that uses poetry and literary allusion as propaganda and whose citizens bear lovely and sometimes-humorous names like Three Seagrass, Five Portico, and Six Helicopter but that can kill with a flower and possesses the military power to impose its delicately and dangerously mannered society across the galaxy. Love and sex are an integral aspect of and a thing apart from the nuanced and dangerous politicking. This is both an epic and a human story, successful in the mode of Ann Leckie and Yoon Ha Lee.
A confident beginning with the promise of future installments that can’t come quickly enough.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18643-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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