A lively rumpus-room of mythology-tinged high-fantasy SF adventure.
Awaiting coronation as the long-lost, mighty king of the Milky Way, human youth Richard must dodge threats from deadly space enemies in Hickman’s sequel.
The title refers to a seemingly average teenager who carries the singular and irreproducible DNA of the spacegoing Plantagenet family, a humanoid alien dynasty who ruled and defended the many planets of the Milky Way galaxy more than 1,000 years ago. Back then, a usurper within the royal house murdered noble King Dolloff and his brethren before being assassinated himself. One survivor, the prince’s pregnant fiancee, found sanctuary on remote Earth—a “barbaric” place of dread and exile in galactic culture whose very existence is often doubted except as fearful folklore. Centuries later, in the present, Ohioan Richard is contacted by scattered supporters—including a resourceful and ever loyal Artificial Alien Life dubbed AAL, who enlightened the lad to his incredible bloodline. On the planet Krel, Richard was revealed as heir to the throne prematurely, and AAL had to place a duplicate with the lad’s oblivious family back in Ohio. The real Richard, in the galactic capital city before his coronation, must be a quick study in etiquette, diplomacy, policy, and virtual messiah-hood for billions of worshipful subjects. There are also enemies, such as the influential family of Sen. Spartacus, who want the youth killed to allow an elected democracy (in other words, Spartacus) to take control. Preparing novice Richard for his challenges includes granting superior abilities (such as teleportation) via accelerated evolution using the energy of a mystic black hole. However, these newfound superpowers are often beyond Richard’s control. Another unforeseen complication: the boy-king finding true love and passionate sex with Amber, a humanoid fox-creature from a planet called Beowulf, in a galactic culture that often marginalizes nonhuman creatures.
Hickman continues a multivolume saga that was launched with Richard: Distant Son (2022). Over the course of this novel, the author’s wide-ranging cosmology scrambles together elements of SF, high fantasy, and fairy tales; key alien species in the ensemble include such creatures as centaurs, satyrs, dragons, and winged horses. As noted above, readers should be prepared for xenosexual consensual relations as well as the fact that in addition to a healthy libido, Richard has an unusually active bladder for an SF adventurer; multiple scenes take place in his “privy” (a royal one, of course, that is guarded by a powerful AI). However, space-vulpine dating and mating tips and bathroom emergencies are only parts of the narrative, which never sits still. Amber’s single mother, Kit, happens to be a top reporter for the Galactic News Network, or GNN (not Fox News; the overall tone is not as satirical as that in a Terry Pratchett, Robert Asprin, or Jody Lynn Nye mock-epic). Assassination plots and lethal traps, grievous wounds, spaceship battles, heartache, tragedy, and miraculous resurrections comprise briskly paced episodes that alternate with scatological comedy, door-slamming farce, and demonstrations of Richard’s inherent kindness and nobility. The dialogue ranges from passably profound pronouncements to comic-book melodrama (“The beast let out an earth-shattering laugh. ‘Puny part-human, how dare you defy me’ ”).
A lively rumpus-room of mythology-tinged high-fantasy SF adventure.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985477726
Page Count: 366
Publisher: RedFoxOnHigh
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023
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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