Book Review: The Sun-Maker (The Fall and the Fire)

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

An impressive, sweeping sci-fi featuring a diverse cast in search of truth, safety, and a better world

A few generations after “The Fire,” when the earth was near totaled by a barrage of meteors, Jona has taken on the career of a highwayman, a drunk, and a lecher. When he robs five year old Baia and Baia’s father Moti of their scrounged supplies and the solar batteries that power their E-Bike, Jona sets off a chain of events that lead to a deeper understanding of the world they live in with its cities like Five Points and its mythicized underwater communes populated by the “Sun Gods.”

Author Michael T. Miller builds a complex world here, a world that is different to each of the many characters. While Baia and Jona were raised in the barren surface world, Asha Vasant was raised in the safety of “The Hives,” one of several multilevel man-made-island colonies built to sustain survivors of The Fire. Asha lives a life of ease with her fiancé. Her father is even an esteemed member of the council of eight, the rulers of the Hives. Obi Zi lives a life of relative ease in The Hives too, equipped with an AI implant that allows a superhuman processing of data. Katsuo, another prominent character, works for Gauntlet, the Hives’ private security firm. And Lucas, also prominent, is a lowly maintenance worker. While, for much of the book, these characters’ lives are disparate with little-to-no hint of how their paths may cross, Miller moves from personality to personality, building a larger understanding from several points of view and weaving their lives inextricably together.

Sections of the book are titled with names of the characters they involve. Even with this distinguishing between characters’ stories, the multiple point of view characters can become confusing at times, but the character building and the different purviews and social classes clear up much of the convolution. 

As the world unfolds with all its conspiracies and corruptions, the goals of each of the characters align. Such a character-heavy novel is a risky endeavor, but Miller does not lose his reader; he feeds them the same clues that he feeds his characters, slowly evolving a plot filled with complexity and revealed with clarity. 

The Sun-Maker masterfully weaves together a number of threads and shows growth in each individual. All characters learn more about the world they live in, which also reveals to them their status in the power structures that control their lives. 

While Miller’s novel could be called a compelling book of action and adventure, a real page-turner and virtually unputdownable, I found it to be so much more. The Sun-Maker is a revelation of how much bigger the world is than the small portion we can already see and a treatise on the importance of empathy and understanding for the strangers we may meet.

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