Jemisin concludes her Broken Earth trilogy (The Obelisk Gate, 2016, etc.), about a vengeful Earth whose tectonic instability can be controlled by the despised and feared orogenes.
Slowly turning to stone as a result of her contact with the Obelisk Gate, Essun nevertheless must repeat that contact to magically grab the long-lost Moon, assuaging the anger of the Earth and ending the devastating Seasons that rock the planet. Meanwhile, her estranged daughter, Nassun, has her own plan to take the Gate for herself and use it to destroy the humans who have responded viciously to the earth shaking and earth-quelling powers of her orogene brethren. Threaded throughout is the story of the stone eater Hoa, who explains his origins from several millennia earlier and how his own struggle to gain his freedom led to the Earth losing the Moon in the first place. Jemisin continues to break the heart with her sensitive, cleareyed depictions of a beyond-dysfunctional family and the extraordinarily destructive force that is prejudice. She wrestles with moral issues at an extreme level: obviously, the cruel discipline and mutilation that orogenes are subjected to violate all standards of decency, and not only is it evil, it’s simply the height of idiocy to exterminate the only people capable of calming a constantly tumultuous landscape. But how does one compassionately instill the appropriate discipline in a child who can also casually and inadvertently destroy a village? Can love survive such training? Jemisin deliberately refuses to provide easy answers: they’re simply not available, in this world or ours.
Painful and powerful.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-22924-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION | APOCALYPTIC & POST APOCALYPTIC SCI-FI | DYSTOPIAN FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles.
The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three. Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.
Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-88743-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
Categories: GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | SCIENCE FICTION
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION
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