Fascinating universe and vivid, engaging characters.
Sounds intriguing. Mind you, feudal aristocracies in space can be interesting, if you've got Byzantine politics to go with it. Look at Dune...
What's Pearl about then? Presumably not a city-sized spaceship?
Definitely not! 8-) I've just finished it, and I really like it. I kept on expecting it to fall into well-worn SF tropes, and it kept on pleasantly surprising me. I don't really want to give examples of the surprises, because that would spoil it.
The scenario in the book is that it's a couple of centuries hence. There's cyberpunkish technology, but that's just part of the background, which also involves mega-corps and eco-terrorism. Our Heroine is a cop who is a month away from retirement. And suddenly she's assigned to a mission to go off to another starsystem, 75 years away (cryo, no FTL, 150 years round trip) to find out what's happened to a colony of Christian Fundamentalists whom everyone assumed had perished, but apparently they haven't. And then when she gets there she finds that the humans aren't the only ones there... three intelligent alien species, and not all of them like each other, and the humans caught in the middle... But it wasn't the politics that appealed to me, it was the characters.
I'm going to buy the sequel tomorrow.
I borrowed The Curse of Chalion ... Have you read that?
Oh yes. I liked it a lot, because I really liked the main character. I didn't find it plodding at all, I'm at home with archaic language -- in fact, I find it jarring if something which is set in a feudal landscape has modern language. It was an intriguing bit of world-building too, since it wasn't your bog-standard fantasy world (most fantasy worlds are either superficially Christian or rampantly pantheistic, and this was neither). I didn't like "Paladin of Souls" as much, mainly because Cazaril wasn't there!
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Sounds intriguing. Mind you, feudal aristocracies in space can be interesting, if you've got Byzantine politics to go with it. Look at Dune...
What's Pearl about then? Presumably not a city-sized spaceship?
Definitely not! 8-)
I've just finished it, and I really like it. I kept on expecting it to fall into well-worn SF tropes, and it kept on pleasantly surprising me. I don't really want to give examples of the surprises, because that would spoil it.
The scenario in the book is that it's a couple of centuries hence. There's cyberpunkish technology, but that's just part of the background, which also involves mega-corps and eco-terrorism. Our Heroine is a cop who is a month away from retirement. And suddenly she's assigned to a mission to go off to another starsystem, 75 years away (cryo, no FTL, 150 years round trip) to find out what's happened to a colony of Christian Fundamentalists whom everyone assumed had perished, but apparently they haven't. And then when she gets there she finds that the humans aren't the only ones there... three intelligent alien species, and not all of them like each other, and the humans caught in the middle... But it wasn't the politics that appealed to me, it was the characters.
I'm going to buy the sequel tomorrow.
I borrowed The Curse of Chalion ... Have you read that?
Oh yes. I liked it a lot, because I really liked the main character. I didn't find it plodding at all, I'm at home with archaic language -- in fact, I find it jarring if something which is set in a feudal landscape has modern language. It was an intriguing bit of world-building too, since it wasn't your bog-standard fantasy world (most fantasy worlds are either superficially Christian or rampantly pantheistic, and this was neither).
I didn't like "Paladin of Souls" as much, mainly because Cazaril wasn't there!