The intricate but sprawling and chilly opener of a trilogy entitled The Fionavar Tapestry—from an author whose claim to fame is that he helped Christopher Tolkien edit J.R.R.'s Silmarillion. After a lecture, five friends from the University of Toronto meet Loren, a mage of the world Fionavar, and his sidekick Matt the Dwarf. The friends agree to visit Fionavar to participate in the Summer Festival. But they arrive in Fionavar to find the land of Brennin afflicted with a severe, magical drought. The High King, proud, stooped old Ailell, refuses to sacrifice himself upon the Summer Tree to break the drought, since his irresponsible younger son Diarmuid is more interested in wine and women that in statecraft, and his elder son has been banished for treasonously volunteering to sacrifice himself in Ailell's stead. Meanwhile, Brennin's chief mage Metran has fallen into treacherous ways, threatening the efficacy of the five magical wardstones that confine the supreme evil being Rakoth Maugrim to a dungeon beneath Mount Rangat. The five visitors, then, soon become involved in these and other plots. Psychically gifted Kimberley Ford becomes a Seer. Brainy Kevin Laine joins prince Diarmuid's warriors. Guilt-ridden Paul Schafer is accepted as the sacrifice on the Summer Tree, whence he hopes to invoke the Tree-god and bring rain. Supplying the muscle, big Dave Martyniuk, separated from the others during the crossing, falls in with the mounted warrior Dalrei. And sweet Jennifer Lowell is captured and borne off by evil beasties to face horrid tortures at the hands of Rankoth Maugrim himself. Direful, portentous stuff, with a cast of thousands, a blur of scenery, and patchy dramatics: impressively wrought but overcomplicated and coolly unengaging.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1985
ISBN: 0451458222
Page Count: 383
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
This gorgeous novel is a must for more than just Tolkien fanatics.
Christopher Tolkien presents the final piece in a trilogy of Middle-earth stories his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, did not live to see published.
In what he assures us is the last installment, Tolkien returns to edit his father's work (Beren and Lúthien, 2017, etc.), this time with the tale of the secret city of Gondolin. Ulmo, the great sea god, visits a wanderer named Tuor and tells him his destiny: "O Tuor of the lonely heart, I will not that thou dwell for ever in fair places of birds and flowers....Now must thou seek through the lands for the city of the folk called Gondothlim or the dwellers in stone, and the Noldoli shall escort thee thither in secret for fear of the spies of Melko." Tuor makes it to Gondolin, where he marries the king's daughter and has a son, Eärendel. Meanwhile, the evil Melko, whom Ulmo was so worried about, is scheming to find the hidden city and destroy it. When the city's location is given up in "the most infamous treachery in the history of Middle-earth," a great battle ensues, and despite Tuor's valor, Gondolin falls. The history of Middle-earth is so intricately detailed and fully imagined, readers are lucky indeed that Christopher Tolkien is such an excellent editor. With a full glossary, additional notes, a family tree, and a list of names with descriptions, it is easy to keep track of who is whose son (Lord of the Rings fans will be pleased to note that Eärendel is Elrond's father) and which races of elves and orcs and goblins are which and live where. Tolkien also takes great care to explain where each version of the story comes from and pieces together its evolution, giving much-needed context. All this makes it easy to enjoy the tale itself, which is beautifully written, with lyrical descriptions of Ulmo, Gondolin, and even the dragons and Balrogs that devastate the city. Even the battle sequences are somehow lovely. The tone here is more like a fairy tale than the main Ring cycle, which is perfectly suited to its shorter length.
This gorgeous novel is a must for more than just Tolkien fanatics.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-61304-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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