Mostly predictable, but no less of a page turner for all that.
Beginning a sort of prequel series to Dietz’s Legion of the Damned cycle (A Fighting Chance, 2011, etc.), these are the far-future exploits of what is currently known as the French Foreign Legion.
Humanity has established a galactic empire and come into conflict with aliens. Emperor Alfred Ordanus is working with Carletto Industries to develop affordable cyberbodies—hence a sort of immortality—for everyone. Alfred’s sister Ophelia, however, has other ideas. Using her deadly synth warriors, she assassinates Alfred and ruthlessly sets about eliminating all of Alfred’s supporters, including the unsuspecting Carlettos. On planet Esparto, Lady Catherine Carletto luckily survives a bombing at an official function. Friendless and desperate, Cat has only one chance: She must vanish. And the Legion is the only organization that will accept her without asking awkward questions about her real identity or the ugly knife wound she sustained to her face. In other ways, too, the Legion is an ideal sanctuary for new recruit Andromeda McKee. It will toughen her up and teach her survival skills, such as how to kill and how to plan, while allowing her to remain concealed while she nurtures her desire for revenge. So, on various planets, the Legion turns socialite Cat into soldier Andromeda. What she doesn’t yet know is that Ophelia has a long list of people to be murdered by her all but indestructible synths—and Cat Carletto is number 2999. Don’t expect much of a plot, but Dietz develops his characters adequately within the limits of the story—and the action rarely lets up.
Mostly predictable, but no less of a page turner for all that.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-425-25625-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
A new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.
The past isn’t even past—but the one postmodern fictionalist Levin imagines is stranger than most.
Levin turns in a big, futuristic shaggy dog tale, except that the dog isn’t so shaggy. In fact, it’s a rather tidy, lovable little critter called a Curio, or “cure,” a sort of emotional support animal that lends itself to all kinds of bad treatment. In Levin’s future—or past, that is, since most of the action ranges between the early 1980s and the early 2010s—the technological advances we’ve become used to are absent: There are no iPhones, no internet, no Facebook. You’d think that such lacunae would make people feel happy, but instead strange forms of life have been concocted, with inanimate objects capable of feeling and voicing discontent and pain as well as acquiring some of the traits the humans around them possess. Levin’s hero in this overlong but amusing story is an alienated memoirist with the science-fictional name of Belt Magnet. But then, everyone in this story has an unusual moniker: Lotta Hogg, Jonboat Pellmore-Jason, Blackie Buxman, and so forth. His cure has the name Blank, “short for Kablankey, the name I’d given it, at my mother’s suggestion, for the sound of its sneeze.” By the end of the story, even though Blank is a mass-produced laboratory thing, the reader will care for him/it just as much as Belt does—and will certainly be shocked by the horrible things some of the characters do to the inanimate and lab-born things among them. Says a guy named Triple-J, brightly, “Let’s use those Band-Aids to Band-Aid a cure to the slide at the playground, throw some rocks at it from a distance, and see if something revolutionary develops—some new kind of Curio interaction that doesn’t end in overload, and that we never would have expected to enjoy.” If Levin’s point is that humans are rotten no matter what tools you put in their hands, he proves it again and again.
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54496-2
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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