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 is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
