This review is based on a free advance copy provided by the publisher. (It's well past the release date, but in my defense it was slightly past the release date when I received it so the whole "advance" thing was already moot.)

Spademan (not his real name) used to be a garbage man. He still is, in a way, but now the garbage he removes is human. He gets a phone call with a name and arranges payment, and his only rules are no killing kids and no listening to the back story. He doesn't care. He's just the bullet. He lives and works in and around a NYC that has been devastated by a second round of terrorist attacks, including a dirty bomb in Times Square, and which has been largely abandoned. The remaining rich residents seal themselves inside and spend their days "limning," meaning in a new sort of virtual reality Internet, with only the remaining service industry workers on the streets. Then Spademan is given a target that leads to his thinking of some new rules.

This story has everything that you need for a good noir; a hero whose morality it would be generous to call ambiguous (at one point early on he gives the reader a litany of rules he doesn't have - like only killing serial killers - and asks if they would think his being a hit man was forgivable then). A beautiful young woman who either is in trouble, or is trouble, or both. A stark city setting that's integral to the story. And plenty of violence. If I met a Sandman Slim fan who was into dystopias without the paranormal aspects too, I'd recommend this book.

Overall: A

This review is based on a free promotional copy received from the publisher.

Archetype is set in a world in which fertility rates have dropped so low that fertile women are treated as property and sold as wives. Teenage girls are raised in wife training centers and the ones judged capable of bearing children are sold at age eighteen. It's into this world that Emma reawakes after an alleged accident with no memory, but with a mysterious voice in her head and vague dreams of another life. Her husband is there when she wakes and clearly loves her, but there's another man in her dreams, and she knows that one of them must be the man she loves and the other is her bitter enemy. She doesn't know which is which.

I have mixed feelings about this book, possibly because it invites comparison with The Handmaid's Tale. (Waters acknowledges that a scene she remembers of the handmaids in training in the movie version was an influence on this book, but that she only recently read the book after having written Archetype.) If I try to forget every other dystopia I've read, this book satisfies. Emma's development as she recovers her memory also lets the reader slowly into the light about how her world works, and her love for the husband who takes care of her while she also remembers a life with another man is believable and well executed.

In comparison with other dystopias, and especially The Handmaid's Tale, however, it falls short on the social commentary scale. It may be because of Emma's abridged memory, but although we are told that wives are the property of their husbands and must be branded because they are at risk of being stolen, we are shown very little oppression. Other than a couple of brief mentions about how pregnancy is not a choice and how birth control and abortion are both illegal, the day to day lives of the women we see doesn't seem to involve many negative ramifications. There is, of course, a secret horror to be revealed, but it appears to be a reasonably unimportant part of the system as a whole. It doesn't give the sense that Emma's daily life would be restricted at all if she weren't a patient. It's clear that she could not hold a job, but she paints and sells her paintings. Is the money they bring hers? Could she conduct business on her own? Does she even care if she has any control over money of her own? Would she want to hold a job if she were allowed to do so? Are there rules about where she can or can't go without her husband? Presumably adultery is illegal since men who buy wives to reproduce will want to be sure the children are their own, but are there any other rules about interaction between wives and men not their husbands?

Although the reproduction oriented rules of society immediately made my mind go to The Handmaid's Tale, I'm not sure that Archetype is about reproductive choice, or at least about the threat of increased legal restrictions on women exercising that choice. If that's the story Waters is trying to tell, then this result would be equivalent to writing a story about slavery and only showing slaves who worked skilled trades and had the opportunity to earn money and buy their freedom. The system would still be abhorrent, but the story would stop short of depicting the full horrors possible under it. But maybe Archetype is actually a social satire in the vein of The Stepford Wives, only with the SF elements visible all the way through, less about a systematic threat to take away women's control over their own bodies and more about how women can  lose themselves to the interests of their husbands and their children, often while being complicit in it. If that's the case, then the fact that the premise is so close to The Handmaid's Tale is unfortunate in that it invites what can only be an extremely unfair comparison, but the story as it advances from there is much more effective.

I'm not sure I will really know how I feel about Archetype until after I read the second book, Prototype, which I have an ARC of but am going to try to read some books coming out sooner first to make sure I get to them before the release date. (Prototype is due out in July.) For now, the Overall Grade is B.

Archetype will be released on February 6.

I knew that this and Parable of the Sower were two books in what was supposed to become a trilogy but never did, but I couldn't remember which came first. So my husband and I were at The Strand book store on vacation, I couldn't leave without buying something, I'd been meaning to read more Octavia E. Butler, and this was the only one on the shelf. Therefore, I went ahead and bought it only to determine later that it was the second. However, it stands so well on its own that I'm a little worried that I'll be disappointed when I go back and read the first book.

Olamina is struggling to build a community and a new faith called Earthseed in a post cataclysmic California in which the government is in the process of being taken over by a fundamentalist denomination known as Christian America, education has become a luxury or something that must be arranged privately, and the poor routinely find themselves sold into slavery, and all of it is frighteningly believable. I can't comment on how possible it all seemed when it was first published, but thirteen years later it strikes me as one of the most prescient books that I've ever read. Earthseed teaches that God is Change, the only lasting truth, and that people can shape Change just as Change shapes them.

And yet, as dark as the book is, so full of violence and despair, it ends with hope. Olamina begins to find supporters at the end of the book's main timeline; in the farther-future timeline, in which her daughter pieces together bits of her mother's journal along with occasional additions from her father and her uncle in order to tell the story, we are told that Christian America is now just one denomination among many. Although Olamina's daughter explains from her experience that a CA family might believe that a woman who moves out of her parents' house before marrying is more or less a prostitute, there's no law that keeps her from doing so. She's not the property of her father until she becomes the property of her husband, and neither does a male guardian have to manage her finances or own/rent the place where she lives. In short, America did not go the way of The Handmaid's Tale. And if the chaos just sort of passing and normality returning might seem narratively strange, without the drama of massive resistance movements, it also seems quite natural in its way that the country would just reject the CA movement when it became clear they did not have the answers.

Butler said that she planned to write a third book about the Earthseed communities who colonize other planets. Although I wish that there was much more of her work to read and that she was still alive and writing more of it, I actually do not miss the opportunity to read that particular book, and it makes perfect sense to me that Butler turned her attention to writing Fledgling instead. We know that Olamina herself did not go to the stars. Her story is over, and over so perfectly that I'm afraid any more might detract from it.

Overall Grade: A+

This review is based on an advance copy provided by the publisher.

Some seven hundred years or more in the future, the human race has colonized the galaxy, but has divided itself into "colors," castes which determine everybody's job and place in society. Darrow is a Red, the lowest of the colors. Although some High Reds serve the other colors while working among them, he is a low Red, digging below the surface of Mars, unaware even that the planet is already habitable and that others are enjoying the fruits of his labor. Then his wife, Eo, is killed, and Darrow is recruited for a mission to infiltrate the Golds, the highest ranking color.

I had trouble getting a read on the audience for this book. Darrow is sixteen when it begins, but he has been married for several years, so his life experience makes him more of an adult than a teen, the same way that the heroines of fantasy novels with psuedomedieval settings are often teenagers by today's standards but functioning as adults in their world in a way that don't exactly make them YA books. I've seen it compared to The Hunger Games, for the obvious reason that both are dystopias featuring arena combat, but a Suvudu blog post from August 7th listed books of social science fiction to read while waiting for Red Rising that included all of the classic dystopias from 1984 through The Handmaid's Tale, and while I enjoyed most of those books as a teenager, nobody would say that any of them are YA books. On the other hand, while the book is brutal, much of it lacks the philosophical depth that I would expect from an adult book.

Darrow, having undergone a long and excruciatingly thoroughly described process to be able to pass for a Gold, makes it into The Institute, in which the students are drafted into twelve houses, each represented by an Olympian god, which fight until one has conquered all the others. It seemed to me that it took rather a long time for Darrow to come around to the conclusion that it would be more effective to win supporters and make alliances rather than attempting to gain power through brutality. There's also rather a lot of rape in the book, most of it as a weapon of war. Although Darrow eventually attains a position in which he can punish rapists within his House, it had been going on as an apparently normal part of the process at the Institute regularly before then, with one member of a faction of the house having to tell another (referring to the women captured by the leader of another faction) "what if they were our girls?" as if the fact that they are human isn't self evident reason that stopping a serial rapist shouldn't be the first order of business. There's also very little discussion of the Pinks, a color which seems to consist primarily of sex slaves. Adding in the fact that there are only two significant female characters in the book, one of whom dies well before we meet the other, and there is an awful lot of sexual subjugation of women and comparatively little evidence of women with power and agency of their own.

There is a reasonable adventure story here, but so far the psychology is lacking and it has a serious case of Smurfette syndrome. Red Rising will be released on Jan. 28, 2014.

Overall Grade: C

The Suvudu blog post referred to can be found here: http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2013/10/get-ready-for-the-dystopian-world-of-pierce-browns-red-rising.html