Panoramic and fascinating, if sometimes vexingly discursive.
Third in the series (The Long War, 2013, etc.) exploring the idea that alternate Earths exist and can be visited simply by “stepping” into them.
The discovery of the Long Earth by folks with a natural ability to step, and its subsequent opening up to everybody by means of a simple device, resulted in a diaspora. The original Earth, known as Datum, still has its troubles, and this time, the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone explodes to catastrophic effect, hastening the dispersal of Datum’s population. The building of airships equipped with rapid-step devices means various Earths thousands or millions of steps from Datum can be reached. U.S. Navy Cmdr. Maggie Kauffman receives a commission to explore beyond Earth 200 million and in the process discover what happened to a previous expedition that never returned. The inventor of the stepper device, Willis Linsay, invites his daughter Sally, a loner and a natural stepper, to join him on an expedition to explore the Long Mars—where, he deduces, somewhere among the alternate Marses there will be intelligent life. And Lobsang, the supersmart AI who generally keeps an eye on things, suspects the emergence of a superior species of human. These highly intelligent individuals call themselves the Next, refer to regular humans as dim bulbs, tend to antagonize everybody and seem to originate in a particular location on one of the distant Earths. Foreseeing an inevitable conflict, Lobsang asks natural stepper Joshua Valienté to investigate. For series fans, the technique is familiar enough: a sprawling, meandering narrative whose purpose is less to amaze and entertain than to inquire about humanity itself and how attitudes and approaches to existential questions might or might not change.
Panoramic and fascinating, if sometimes vexingly discursive.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229729-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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