As good or better than its predecessor: promise impressively fulfilled.
The second installment of Chakraborty’s stunningly rendered Middle Eastern fantasy trilogy (The City of Brass, 2017), which can absolutely be read independently of the first book.
The setting is Daevabad, a legendary Eastern city protected by impervious magical brass walls and ruled by King Ghassan, whose Geziri ancestors overthrew the Daevas and captured Suleiman’s seal, which tempers magic. To this bubbling pot of tensions, the powerful djinn warrior Dara conveyed young Daeva healer Nahri; in the process they developed feelings for one another. Five years later, Nahri has much to ponder. During the tumultuous events with which the previous book culminated, Ghassan’s younger son, Ali, whom Nahri considered a friend, killed Dara and defied his father, an act for which he was exiled—a euphemism for "condemned to death." Ghassan forced Nahri to marry Ali’s elder brother, Muntadhir; the union is childless thanks to potions Nahri secretly consumes, yet, oddly despite those five years of marriage, the couple seem to know very little about each other. She chafes under the restrictions imposed by the increasingly cruel and arbitrary Ghassan, who’s threatened to slaughter the city’s Daevas unless she cooperates. So she doesn’t know that Ali, with his djinn’s ability to survive in the desert and magic conferred by the fearsome water-spirits known as the marid, still lives, nor that Dara has been summoned back to life and now is embroiled in a conspiracy to overthrow the Geziri and reclaim the city for the Daeva. Against the city’s richly immersive backdrop of suppressed and often contentious racial, familial, magical, and religious alliances and divides—although Chakraborty tends to forget how bewildering these can be, even with the helpful glossary—the conflicts, ambitions, schemes, and treacheries build powerfully toward what’s rapidly becoming the author’s trademark: a truly shattering conclusion.
As good or better than its predecessor: promise impressively fulfilled.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-267813-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This is quintessential Gibson: gonzo yet cool, sharp-edged, sophisticated—but ultimately, vaguely unsatisfying.
While placed firmly in the sci-fi genre of his earlier works, Gibson's latest retains the social commentary from his more recent novels (Zero History, 2010, etc.).
Most Gibson plots essentially concern a race for a particular piece of information—one side seeks to possess it, the other to suppress it. (Although to be fair, isn’t that the plot of most thrillers?) What sets each book apart is the worldbuilding that surrounds that plot kernel. This time around, it’s particularly intriguing. Flynne, a young woman living in a poor, rural American county (probably Southern, though it’s never specified) in the near future, believes she’s beta testing a video game, witnessing the “death” of a virtual character in an urban high-rise. In fact, Flynne has gotten a view into a possible London existing decades in the future and has seen an actual woman get murdered. The two timelines can exchange information and visit each other virtually, via the androidlike “peripherals” of the title. That ability is enough for various future factions to hire killers to go after Flynne and her family or to protect them from that fate, as well as to change the events of her timeline sufficiently enough to ensure that it will never become that future, where, despite considerable scientific advancement, a cascade of disasters has eliminated the majority of human and animal life. Gibson’s strength has always been in establishing setting, while his characters tend to seem a bit blank and inaccessible; for example, alcoholic Wilf’s constant attempts to reach for a drink read more like an annoyingly persistent quirk than a serious psychological problem. Gibson seems to leave his characters’ motives deliberately obscure; due to that and his tendency to pour his energy into the chase, not the goal, the story’s resolution basically fizzles.
This is quintessential Gibson: gonzo yet cool, sharp-edged, sophisticated—but ultimately, vaguely unsatisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-15844-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
How much you enjoy this is in direct proportion to how much trouble you think we’re all in. Sleep tight.
An outcast in a supposedly utopian future tries to figure out what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. Join the club.
Well, sure, why not? Kling, the author of a bunch of texts about living with a kangaroo that got translated into a podcast and then turned into three books (all in German, so Google Translate is your friend), enters mainstream author mode with this bitter satire of consumer culture and the modern political sphere. In this kind of book, there’s typically an ordinary guy to represent us, the reader—think Arthur Dent as opposed to Ford Prefect in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Our main guy here is Peter Jobless, although the point of view bounces around all over the place. Welcome to QualityLand, where everything, from your stuff to your love life, has been optimized for you by algorithm. If you couldn't tell from his moniker, Peter is a bit of a screw-up, just coming off a long-term relationship with Sandra Admin, who’s happily dumped him based on the admonishment of QualityLand's dating service, QualityPartner, which matched them up automatically in the first place. Black humor abounds: There's John of Us, the political candidate who happens to be an android, and TheShop, which essentially serves as the company store for the world. The interstitial bits—news bulletins, guidebook entries, and the inevitable comments section—are particularly funny and give context to QualityLand's odd rules and tics. Despite the novel's comic approach, the nature of the narrative is heavily political, holding up a black mirror to our own troubled times. In addition to the pitch-black political satire, the novel's portrayal of economic inequality highlights a problem that wreaks havoc on our own lives. The characters aren't particularly likable and the narrative is a bit unhinged, but these days, a little comic relief might do us all some good.
How much you enjoy this is in direct proportion to how much trouble you think we’re all in. Sleep tight.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3296-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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