Fans of Dan Brown will find this book worth a try for its action and mystical angle. Other thriller fans may just feel...
This adequate New-Age thriller, offering a vision of an apocalyptic future, is the first volume of Williams' Rising World trilogy.
In 2027, a solar flare has brought down thousands of airplanes, and a four-degree shift in the Earth’s axis has caused cataclysmic earthquakes and coastline shifts in an event called the Great Disruption. By 2069, the world is still pretty much a mess. Remnants of Washington, D.C., and Fairfax, Va., remain, along with some old Federal-style homes and select foreign cities. Key to the story are The Chronicles of Satraya, which contain such wisdom as “Pass your values on to your children, but do not be afraid to let your traditions go.” Logan Cutler, the hero, auctions off the only extant originals in order to pay off his debts, but the Wrong People want to get their mitts on them. Only the originals will do, since they possess supernatural qualities beyond the words themselves. The Chronicles tie into a plot to kill off a portion of the world’s population and turn the rest into people incapable of thinking for themselves. Can villains Simon and Andrea use a serum to “exterminate the free thinkers of the world?” Will the bad guy’s mother give him permission to shoot the hero between the eyes, or will he just give a speech instead? There is a race against the clock as the man-made disaster is set to occur at Liberty Moment on Freedom Day. The urgent deadline is standard thriller fare that generally adds to the reader’s excitement, so why doesn’t it work here? Maybe because the real disaster already happened with the axial tilt. Really, what could be worse than that?
Fans of Dan Brown will find this book worth a try for its action and mystical angle. Other thriller fans may just feel burned.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1336-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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