A truly extraordinary SF saga of epic scope.
The second installment of Evans’ Songs of the Sage series continues its narrative of a future society divided by IQ scores.
This genre-blending story—equal parts apocalyptic SF, arcane mystery, and mainstream thriller—is set in the early 22nd century, when the world’s population is separated into social classes based on intellect, with the lowest labeled the “Unskills.” A great many people fall into this category, and they’re “uncertified for work”; in an increasingly automated world run by artificial intelligence, some feel that Unskills are “useless eaters” holding humankind back from a glorious destiny. When a global pandemic quickly afflicts more than a billion people—all of them Unskilled—High Commissioner Lilith King, Interpol’s Special Representative to the United Nations, is brought in to investigate. King, whose own family line is murky, has unexplained powers that allow her to detect powerful beings—and she uses them to begin to unravel a nefarious conspiracy that, if successful, could lead to “the single greatest act of genocide in the history of the world.” Accompanied by Dr. Kace Westwood—whose Unskilled brother was murdered by radicals—she embarks on an investigation that leads them from the catacombs underneath Paris to the rainforests of South America to enclaves in the Swiss Alps. What they uncover is unimaginable, involving doomsday cults, interdimensional rifts, and alien invasion. Grand-scale storytelling of this type is immensely difficult to do well, but Evans masterfully twists together multiple storylines with ease. The pacing is relentless throughout, as is the action, with jaw-dropping set-pieces that rival any in a Mission: Impossible movie. But the two elements that make this novel stand out are its deep character development its thematic profundity. Evans portrays Lilith so insightfully—especially her brutal backstory—that readers will feel a close connection to her, and the novel’s not-so-subtle commentary on the dangers of blind faith in technology and authority is powerful indeed.
A truly extraordinary SF saga of epic scope.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781739996246
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nephilim Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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