A fast-paced space adventure with intriguing sci-fi elements and compelling characters.
A mysterious threat is about to complicate Calvin Range’s quest to find the hidden pieces of a superweapon.
On his spaceship, the Azure Frost, Calvin is searching the universe for the 10 missing segments of a superweapon that will defeat the Goremog, a race of murderous beings who believe it is their divine right to rule the universe. Wood’s sci-fi novel is the second book in the Ruins of Arlandia series, and the first installment, also called The Ruins of Arlandia (2013), is required reading since Wood doesn’t spend any time rehashing previous plot points, explaining who or what the characters are, or describing the details of the larger universe. Having attained the first two segments of the superweapon in the previous book, Calvin continues his mission alongside Astra, princess of the planet Aleria, and Ion, an intelligent robot. Calvin locates the third segment on a damaged freighter ship, but he also finds two other things: the lone survivor, Dev, and the Dark Terror—Goremog-engineered robots with living flesh, claws and razor-sharp teeth. Wood’s action-packed narrative features wonderfully tense moments, including the exploration of the deserted freighter and fleeing from an exploding spaceship. The MacGuffin-like search for the segments makes for a rather thin plot, but the narrative suspense more than makes up for it. After an accident aboard the Azure Frost, Calvin escapes with Astra and Dev to an abandoned planet, its inhabitants missing; it quickly becomes clear that the Dark Terror are the reason life has left the planet. Soon, Calvin and company realize a fourth segment is hidden on the planet, and to retrieve it they must battle their way through the Dark Terror. Wood’s cinematic narrative achieves an enjoyable balance between plot and character. Often finding themselves in frightening peril, the characters feel rounded and real, and their reactions and heroics drive the story. The Dark Terror, a chilling enemy, infuse the novel with an ominous sense of constant danger, hovering in the shadows of the story, ready to attack at any moment. With the Dark Terror army on their heels, Calvin, Astra and Dev must make it to the planet’s star port in order to escape with their lives and the fourth segment. But, with their far-reaching hold on the universe, the Goremog-engineered robots don’t intend to give up: Just when Calvin and his friends think they’ve escaped the Dark Terror, they land right in the Goremog’s grasp.
A fast-paced space adventure with intriguing sci-fi elements and compelling characters.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490517308
Page Count: 140
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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