Zero stars.
A near-future spy thriller set in space from Star Trek’s Shatner (Leonard, 2016, etc.) and prolific co-writer Rovin (The Sound of Seas, 2016, etc.).
In 2050, the FBI governs outer space, and 80-year-old Samuel Lord has been appointed as associate deputy director of Earth operations on the space station Empyrean. Not long after he takes command of the station, Dr. Saranya May arrives with an ominous claim: her research has been stolen from her lab base on the moon. Before Lord can even begin to sort out what’s happened to May’s research, a tsunami devastates the coast of Japan—one that strikes without warning as one unnatural wave. At the same time, the Chinese space station has gone suspiciously quiet, and Lord begins to suspect that May knows more than she’s letting on. Lord and his crew must quickly unravel the mystery of this catastrophe before another can strike. The book retains the bland feel of a TV drama, something like NCIS: Space Station. Although it has an ethnically diverse cast, they’re little more than window dressing surrounding the white male lead. Lord’s second-in-command is Adsila Waters, a young Cherokee officer whose genetically engineered body is able to change gender at will. Although she should be the book’s most interesting character, instead she’s woefully underdeveloped. Although the authors describe her as “pan-gender,” there’s nothing fluid about it—it’s just a binary switch between two stock options: a woman with an “hourglass figure” and “frank sexual allure” or a man who’s “less emotionally invested in any problem.” Her entire back story seems to be composed of little more than worn-out cliches of Native Americans as magical, noble savages—at work, for example, she listens to the piped-in sounds of desert winds and osprey cries, and during off-hours, she sits in a bar and wonders “whether the spirit of the owl and cougar were indeed guiding her.” Worse still, Lord’s boss frankly admits to Lord that Adsila is only on the space station as a “concession to the diversity cops” so that he could be appointed.
Zero stars.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1155-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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