Compulsively readable military sci-fi with a strong humanist side that isn’t overwhelmed by bloodshed and doomsday weapons.
Zarzana’s (The Marsco Dissident, 2013) bravura second installment in his ongoing saga continues his broad-canvas approach to political power plays, betrayals, and invasions at the end of the 21st century.
In this novel, three factions scheme to attack or subvert Marsco, an Earth-based corporation with a virtual monopoly on software, advanced munitions, and interstellar-travel technology. The company decisively seized power from the corrupt governments of Earth in the mid-2000s. The planet is now a shattered, semi-occupied former battleground strewn with peasants known as “PRIMS,” while elites jockey for positions in Marsco’s ruling autocracy. The latter’s success is defined by finger-disc implants that signify rank, mobility, and access to Marsco cybernetworks. To many, these military-corporate rulers of mankind are no better than the fascist Continental Powers who brought on the planet’s ruin. Among the disenchanted is Anthony “Zot” Grizotti, an “iceman” who’s expert at tending humans in hibernation during long space voyages. He’s curious and incautious enough to join an alliance of secret Marsco opponents; one of them is the remaining fragment of the Continental Powers’ attack fleet, hidden in the asteroid belt, and the other is the Nexus, a fanatical, cultlike PRIMS rebel group underground on Earth. Meanwhile, Walter Miller, who was once one of Marsco’s premiere innovators, works with fellow insiders on the next generation of spaceship propulsion—a technology that’s potentially far beyond Marsco’s reach. Like its predecessor, this installment is heavy with dialogue. However, the speakers are all well-drawn characters who are either heavily conflicted or deeply committed (romantically or politically). When action arrives, it comes on like a firestorm of Tom Clancy–esque ordnance, aerospace feats, and strategy, though with considerably more introspection and less of the slam-bang video-gaming style that often makes similar material resemble a live-action cartoon. A helpful glossary of Marsco-era slang is essential, especially for newcomers to Zarzana’s universe.
Compulsively readable military sci-fi with a strong humanist side that isn’t overwhelmed by bloodshed and doomsday weapons.Pub Date: April 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5153-0202-5
Page Count: 652
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.
In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin (The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain.
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-22929-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
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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