Preview Moonrise 3
In Smith's gritty conclusion to his trilogy (_Snowfall_; Kingdom River) set during an ice age 600 years from now, young Prince "Baj" Bajazet, formerly the adopted scion of the royal clan that rules the lower Mississippi Valley, is on the run. His foster parents have been murdered in a bloody regicide committed by local turncoats but engineered by the evil genetic engineers of New England's Boston. Bostonians have for years kidnapped women from various primitive tribes throughout the continent and bred them to produce half-human, half-animal chimeras for use as slave labor. The chimeras call themselves Moonrisers, and the Bostonians secure their loyalty by holding their mothers hostage in gulag-like breeding pens within the city. Patience, an escaped Pen-mother, joins the prince and others in an effort to overthrow Boston's regime of mad science and sordid apartheid. Smith's elided future-speak prose is often lyrical, but at times becomes convoluted to the point of obscurityâ€"especially when combined with his frequent use of extended scene-setting flashbacks. Nevertheless, he manages to evoke a feeling of alien otherness in this American landscape weirdly transformed by a fall from technological grace. With echoes of Hoban's Ridley Walker and Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, this one should appeal to readers who like their post-apocalypse tales brutal and poetic.
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Moonrise follows snowfall (2002) and Kingdom River [BKL My 15 03] to conclude a trilogy about Earth during a future ice age, with humanity divided into tribes and ruled by feudal nobility. Bajazet, a khan's son adopted by a victorious king, is the only survivor of a coup d'etat that kills the rest of his family. He escapes and, in seeking revenge, becomes part of a great scheme to overthrow the reign of Boston and its manipulative scientists. Thrown into the company of moonrisen--people genetically engineered by Boston as part human and part animal--Bajazet is carried along in their plans to destroy Boston's hold on them and the so-called savage tribes, whose women Boston scientists use to bear genetically altered soldiers. Bajazet may be just a pawn, but his role in the attack on Boston is telling, and he learns a great deal about the moonrisers and himself in the process. The book's ending lacks finality, opening the possibility of new beginnings for the frozen postapocalyptic world Smith conjures. Regina Schroeder
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