Comes up a little short on certain genre elements, but the pace and ambience are rock-solid.
In the distant future, a pair of skilled individuals seek a man harboring incriminating info on powerful men.
In Chauncey’s (The Hidden Society, 2017, etc.) sci-fi tale, set in the 31st century, Lyle Morton’s been working at the Department of Information for over 20 years. But Lyle isn’t his real name. After stumbling across dangerous information in the Hong Kong office, he faked his death to protect his family. Resurfacing and getting a job at the headquarters in Crown City, the capital (near Denver) of the United World Government, Lyle slowly and furtively compiled the classified info. Saved on a glass crystal, the particulars are damning to men in power known as the five, who’ve committed atrocities to maintain their positions in the United World. Aware of what someone’s stolen, the five, led by Paul Simpson, enlist two former employees to get it back: tracker/hunter Lee Adams and hacker Evelyn Summers. But their search is monitored by the five’s minions, who’ll most likely kill them once they find Lyle. But Lee and Evelyn hope to team up with Lyle and use the information against the five. Chauncey’s futuristic backdrop smartly feeds into fears of today—a lack of privacy; Lee and Evelyn go to great lengths to disable various tracking chips or devices. And though the five’s evil plot isn’t hard to figure out, especially with an early hint, the inevitable reveal makes the baddies suitably methodical. Some tech and corresponding jargon, however, is off. Com-cells (computer-cells) don’t differ much from smartphones, and characters use “download” for any information transfer, including uploads. Regardless, there’s plenty of action (someone’s pursuing someone else for much of the narrative), while possible dissension among the five only adds to the overall unease.
Comes up a little short on certain genre elements, but the pace and ambience are rock-solid.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-6976-3
Page Count: 626
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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