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brucemri 's review for:
Daybreak Zero
by John Barnes
Thoroughly satisfying. Middle volumes of trilogies are hard to do well, and Barnes does a great job resolving a bunch of threads while leaving enough dangling to lure us, or at least me, on into the third volume.
One of the things I like most about Daybreak Zero is just how seriously the narrative and characters take questions of government. Law matters. The foundation of governments matters. The tension between law and immediate realities matters. A lot of sf rather glibly breezes past government as not a thing for the truly enlightened to bother with except as a tool for manipulating others. Here there are no over-men outside the need for life in society, and so the way they govern is very important.
The Daybreak trilogy as a whole is another story in what I've taken to calling the anti-cozy catastrophe genre. Things go wrong with the world that will never, ever be fixed - the billions dead aren't coming back to life and nobody's got a miracle cure about to happen for the still-very-active agents of destruction. Everyone has to keep learning how to deal with a world situation that continues to worsen even as individual communities and societies improve thanks to accumulated good work together.
If you read Directive 51, it's very much worth your while to continue on and read this too.
One of the things I like most about Daybreak Zero is just how seriously the narrative and characters take questions of government. Law matters. The foundation of governments matters. The tension between law and immediate realities matters. A lot of sf rather glibly breezes past government as not a thing for the truly enlightened to bother with except as a tool for manipulating others. Here there are no over-men outside the need for life in society, and so the way they govern is very important.
The Daybreak trilogy as a whole is another story in what I've taken to calling the anti-cozy catastrophe genre. Things go wrong with the world that will never, ever be fixed - the billions dead aren't coming back to life and nobody's got a miracle cure about to happen for the still-very-active agents of destruction. Everyone has to keep learning how to deal with a world situation that continues to worsen even as individual communities and societies improve thanks to accumulated good work together.
If you read Directive 51, it's very much worth your while to continue on and read this too.