Rococo worldbuilding and sci-fi fantasy for the adventurous reader, relayed in language and description bordering on the...
As an incredible realm sinks deeper and deeper into anarchy and warfare, a strange group of pilgrims embarks on an enigmatic mission.
Bennudriti, a professed admirer of cult fantasy writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake, makes his debut with this ambitious, fabulist sci-fi tale, the first in a series. He introduces the world of Naraia, a mix of distant past and remote future. While dirigibles and flying-fortress airships ply the skies and computer technology comes in liquid (and injectable) form, the streets and cities often devolve into wretched hives of scum and villainy. After the ruinous War of the Rupture, a corrupt society subsists under the unsteady regime of the Talgo warlord dynasty, having lost most ethical precepts of a messiah/prophet named “Salt Mystic” from 2,000 years ago (this Christ equivalent is one of the more accessible notions). Suddenly there appears a cocky troublemaker named Ring, on an esoteric quest to five unspoken destinations while warning his fellow travelers that it’s going to get “messy.” Ring recruits Misling, a young “Recorder,” whose sect follows and memorizes the deeds of the great and noteworthy to provide a full, immutable history. Misling violates the Recorder neutrality creed badly, as all-devouring nanoparticle bombs suddenly attack cities, terrifying synthetic plagues make ordinary folks homicidal lunatics, and invading hordes of a sadistic warrior nation called Red Witch suddenly appear. But the Red Witch combatants are hired mercenaries—so who is the prime evildoer at work? As events careen toward civil war, there may not even be a mastermind, just societal collapse, purges, and the culmination of age-old prophecies. Readers who want their plotlines proceeding from A to B will likely be lost in a snarl of undefined terminology and Bennudritian argot (“Although all flatrunner sailors were considered a bit mad in those days, feverishly electrostatic charges ripped from the very salt of the cotton-white flats, scouts like Munchy would be the first to tell of furious smoking skirmishes in the shimmering borderlands of his patrol”). It’s still a grand moment when digitally programmed tornadoes are unleashed as weapons of mass destruction. Good luck, however, figuring out (in this go-around, anyhow) what all the fighting and scheming is about. The title of a documentary about William Gibson comes to mind: No Maps for These Territories.
Rococo worldbuilding and sci-fi fantasy for the adventurous reader, relayed in language and description bordering on the experimental.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-55348-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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