Jean Auel meets Al Gore—but without Auel’s sense of drama and around-the-fire storytelling, and without Gore’s skill at...
You want climate change? Try living back in the Paleolithic, when proto-Picts prowled, icebergs melted and odd travelers from Jericho ate your store of elk meat and gawked at your daughter uninvited.
That’s the setup for sci-fi/fantasy writer Baxter’s (Evolution, 2003, etc.) latest, the first volume of a projected trilogy. (The author, it seems, will not write a self-contained book when a series is possible.) The setting is a northerly peninsula of a place called Northland, a fertile and very nice locale, “a rich, rolling landscape that extended to the south as far as you could walk.” Said peninsula, Etxelur, along with the rest of Northland, now lies under the waves, pondered by stalwarts puffing their hookahs in Amsterdam cafes, but 10,000 years ago it was the province of Baxter’s heroine, a teenage girl named Ana (shades of Ayla, of Clan of the Cave Bear fame) who enjoys bouncing about in animal hides and striking up conversations about fashion with strangers out of neighboring Albia (“We make it from reeds and bark and stuff,” says said stranger of his ensemble, shivering in what would appear to be the last of the cold weather before the Big Melt). There are things to like about a book with characters named Shaper, Ice Dreamer, Mammoth Talker and Moon Reacher, but it takes Baxter a long while to—beg pardon—warm up to his overarching subject, which is that the lowland that is Northland is ever so noticeably disappearing as the seas come lapping up ever higher, thanks to melting ice caps and other accouterments of what we’re calling climate change these days. Enter that stranger, kidnapped all the way from the walled city of Jericho, who sets in motion one of the brighter ideas of the Old Stone Age: namely, building a great wall to keep the seas out. Will our ancestral Hans Brinker save Ana and pals from the fate of Atlantis? That particular bit of denouement, you might guess, awaits another installment.
Jean Auel meets Al Gore—but without Auel’s sense of drama and around-the-fire storytelling, and without Gore’s skill at popularizing science.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-451-46418-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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