The Doors You Mark Are Your Own

Set in the aftermath of a “Great Calamity” that destroyed entire nations and spoiled the world’s water supply, this futuristic epic evokes numerous other post-apocalyptic tales without breaking any new ground. Its large cast of characters includes many personality types common to the subgenre: Mayor Adams, a warmongering politician with dictatorial ambitions; two brothers, Marcik and Nikolas Kovalski, who rise to prominence in the national army and drift into the revolutionary underground respectively; and Adrian Talbot, an idealistic medical student whose work takes him into the ravaged Outer Provinces, where feuding armies of the Seven Cities battle each other for dominance. The predictable arc of the narrative disperses these and other citizens of Joshua City (“the greatest of the Seven Cities”) on personal adventures, and then draws them back together toward the novel’s end. Ellliott and Clement manage to keep the plot on track, but fans of dystopian fiction may feel that they’ve read this all before. (Mar.)