An exciting start from a fresh talent, offering emotional and political complexity plus plenty of interplanetary action.
An intricate plot for revenge drives this far-future SF political thriller, a debut novel that is also the first of a trilogy.
The planets of the Treble are ruled by the Kindom, a religious order, and the wealthy First Families. Esek Nightfoot, a cruel, vicious, and sociopathically self-interested Cleric and First Family scion, cut off all career opportunities for a brilliant student called Six, challenging them to do something “extraordinary” to impress her into taking them as a novitiate. Six’s “extraordinary” act was to leave school before graduation and begin collecting evidence that exposes the Nightfoots’ complicity in a genocide. Esek has pursued Six for years, often with the uneasy assistance of Cleric Chono, a far more pious person who feels loyalty both to Six, a former schoolmate, and to Esek, who once pulled Chono out of a sexually abusive situation. Their quest eventually leads to Jun Ironway, a gifted hacker who holds a piece of the data implicating the Nightfoots and also has her own dark history with both Esek and Six. Does Esek want to kill Six, as her family’s matriarch demands, or make good on her promise to make them one of her novitiates? Or does she have something else entirely in mind? As the political situation of the Treble becomes more unstable, the chase careens toward a violent and shocking endgame. The narrative jumps around in time, fully filling in past events that are initially referenced in the present-day story. At first this seems unnecessary and confusing, but as several staggering twists emerge, it becomes clear that the choice is utterly necessary and the confusion might actually be the author’s method of obscuring a key revelation. The reader may figure out that revelation before it explodes in the text but will likely be surprised by a good part of what follows. The author also does an excellent job of applying what are typically high fantasy or historical fiction tropes (the tension between religious and secular entities, the unrest over the hereditary passage of power, and the fraught relationship between mentor and student) to high-tech science fiction (perhaps Dune was an influence?).
An exciting start from a fresh talent, offering emotional and political complexity plus plenty of interplanetary action.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-316-46332-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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