High-quality, multifaceted sci-fi blending ecological and religious themes in an engaging manner.
An alien transmission grants a maverick tycoon the knowledge to create wormhole technology that could revitalize a dysfunctional Earth.
After a disastrous global financial collapse, visionary entrepreneur August Bridges (of a company called Mirtopik) partially revived the world economy with a cryptocurrency called the “eco,” based on offsetting greenhouse gases and global warming. But his other pet project—which isn’t embraced by his treacherous Russian partners—is to elevate mankind by establishing radiotelescope contact with advanced aliens and asking for the secret to faster-than-light travel. His dream seemingly comes true when a faraway aquatic civilization transmits blueprints of instantaneous travel via space-time wormholes. But soon afterward, those same aliens are engulfed by a black hole when their method fails. They manage to transmit a final, dire warning to Earth, but that message is suppressed by shadowy forces on Earth. Winburn’s plot follows the vainglorious Bridges and several other key players—a Tibetan monk orbiting Neptune, a driven exobiologist on Mars trying to save the only native ecosystem, a young woman rising in the ranks in Mirtopik security—who are all conflicted about or acting as pawns in the deployment of Bridges’ hazardous scheme. Another key player is a jazz-loving clone whose barely legal status as a human entity seems to drive him to play an extreme game of manipulation and deceit. Debut author Winburn consistently impresses with a thoughtful 22nd-century saga that draws on such common sci-fi tropes as interplanetary corporate skulduggery, first contact with aliens, and the unintended effects of groundbreaking tech—all done before by others but here quilted together into a transfixing narrative. Some may find the sequel-hook open ending to be a letdown after such an inspired launch; others may wonder if it fulfills the occasional Buddhist precepts in the story’s multicultural mosaic, which deny neat, simple wrap-ups. In an introduction, the author explains how his own Buddhism flavored the novel; the resulting book isn’t a heavy religious tract, but the density of its ideas and themes could fill many a meditation.
High-quality, multifaceted sci-fi blending ecological and religious themes in an engaging manner.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945604-19-5
Page Count: 532
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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