Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon
Series: The Entire and the Rose #1
Publisher: Pyr 2008
Genre: Science fiction
Sub-genre: sci-fantasy
Rating: 5 pints of blood
I absolutely love this cover, by Stephan Martiniere. I think it's beautiful, and fascinating. It's distinctly alien and imaginative, and even though the figures in the foreground don't appear in this city, called the Ascendancy, in the book, it's more like two separate scenes or landscapes have been merged or layered, which plays with the whole construct of the world. I'll try to explain what I mean. It's also a handsome book to hold, if heavy, with care and attention gone into every detail.
Far into our future, the world and the known galaxy is run by a bare handful of powerful corporations, the brightest people born, and machine sapients. The routes to the colonies on other planets are unstable: the K-tunnels (black holes) keep collapsing and whole shiploads of people are being lost. The company that controls the K-tunnels, Minerva, is struggling to hold onto its position and profits.
A machine sapient running a space station and stabilising a K-tunnel inadvertently stumbles across a parallel world, and Minerva is hoping it could provide a fast short-cut to humanity's colonies and further. They know nothing about this parallel world except that one of their men has been there before, but no one believed him.
Two years ago, Titus Quinn was found, disorientated and insensible, shouting gibberish, on a far-flung mining planet. He claimed he had spent ten years in another world, but had only been missing for six months. He claimed his wife, Johanna, and young daughter, Sydney, had been taken from him, but soon after being rescued, his memories vanished.
Having lost his job as a pilot for Minerva, and been discredited in the bargain, Quinn lives as a recluse by the sea, building train tracks throughout his house and wallowing in the pain of losing his wife and daughter and not being able to remember any of it - but knowing it's true.
Now Minerva is knocking on his door, blackmailing him into going back to a world they had scoffed at, to a world where something very bad happened. But for the chance of finding his wife and child, Quinn accepts.
The world he arrives in remembers him all too well, for being the first visitor from the Rose, for being a captive of the cruel and superior ruling Tarig for ten years, and for being the first person to assault one and escape. But there's more to his history here than he is told, but the memories are slow in coming. As he finds his footing once more, he realises there's far more at stake than a simple travel route for spaceships through this plane, where time is not the same, and he'll have to make the decision yet again: his home, the Rose, or his daughter.
I can't rave enough about this book. If I could give it ten pints of blood, I would. It's a beautiful blend of science fiction and fantasy, both a quest story and a political one, with familiar and bizarre characters you can really get attached to.
The prose is flawless. Smooth, elegant, precise and perfectly paced. There's control here, but also poetry. Written in the third person past tense, it has that quality that present tense has: that Here, Now quality that adds to an unpredictability that keeps you on your toes. While some books have that "long, long ago" story-telling tone, Bright of the Sky has an edgy quality that brings you right alongside Quinn and the other characters whose perspectives we enter the story from, and the danger and excitement is palpable.
Which is another thing: it's never boring. Everything in the Entire - the parallel world - is familiar and yet new, similar and yet unique. Kenyon has an impressive imagination to draw from, and her prose draws vivid images in your head. It also had a familiar feel to it, like I'd dreamed it once - which I think comes from the altered state of being in the Entire.
The Entire is a creative world, populated by sentient beings modelled from "real" worlds like Earth. The Chalin people are modelled from humans - the Chinese in particular, which race they liked the most, but they changed things. Other sentient beings are modelled from what they glimpsed of other worlds. The Tarig rule here absolutely, powerful beings that resemble insects - Mantis Lords, Sydney calls them - with their elongated, thin and narrow bodies, incredibly strong.
The Entire is their creation, and is no planet. The bright is the fiery red sky, and the vast land winds like ribbons bordered by storm walls, from which smaller branches stretch off, and smaller ones still, becoming more and more unstable. It is in these unstable places that the Tarig have created veils, so that scholars can watch the Rose and study our world. But no one has ever come through the veils before Titus Quinn and his family, and one of their laws is that the Rose shall never learn of the Entire.
This is the first book of four - the first three are already out, with the fourth due out in January 2010 - and promises a thought-provoking, gritty science fiction merged with a powerful, character-driven fantasy. I could talk forever about this book but it'd be better if you read it for yourself!
Publisher: Pyr 2008
Genre: Science fiction
Sub-genre: sci-fantasy
Rating: 5 pints of blood
I absolutely love this cover, by Stephan Martiniere. I think it's beautiful, and fascinating. It's distinctly alien and imaginative, and even though the figures in the foreground don't appear in this city, called the Ascendancy, in the book, it's more like two separate scenes or landscapes have been merged or layered, which plays with the whole construct of the world. I'll try to explain what I mean. It's also a handsome book to hold, if heavy, with care and attention gone into every detail.
Far into our future, the world and the known galaxy is run by a bare handful of powerful corporations, the brightest people born, and machine sapients. The routes to the colonies on other planets are unstable: the K-tunnels (black holes) keep collapsing and whole shiploads of people are being lost. The company that controls the K-tunnels, Minerva, is struggling to hold onto its position and profits.
A machine sapient running a space station and stabilising a K-tunnel inadvertently stumbles across a parallel world, and Minerva is hoping it could provide a fast short-cut to humanity's colonies and further. They know nothing about this parallel world except that one of their men has been there before, but no one believed him.
Two years ago, Titus Quinn was found, disorientated and insensible, shouting gibberish, on a far-flung mining planet. He claimed he had spent ten years in another world, but had only been missing for six months. He claimed his wife, Johanna, and young daughter, Sydney, had been taken from him, but soon after being rescued, his memories vanished.
Having lost his job as a pilot for Minerva, and been discredited in the bargain, Quinn lives as a recluse by the sea, building train tracks throughout his house and wallowing in the pain of losing his wife and daughter and not being able to remember any of it - but knowing it's true.
Now Minerva is knocking on his door, blackmailing him into going back to a world they had scoffed at, to a world where something very bad happened. But for the chance of finding his wife and child, Quinn accepts.
The world he arrives in remembers him all too well, for being the first visitor from the Rose, for being a captive of the cruel and superior ruling Tarig for ten years, and for being the first person to assault one and escape. But there's more to his history here than he is told, but the memories are slow in coming. As he finds his footing once more, he realises there's far more at stake than a simple travel route for spaceships through this plane, where time is not the same, and he'll have to make the decision yet again: his home, the Rose, or his daughter.
I can't rave enough about this book. If I could give it ten pints of blood, I would. It's a beautiful blend of science fiction and fantasy, both a quest story and a political one, with familiar and bizarre characters you can really get attached to.
The prose is flawless. Smooth, elegant, precise and perfectly paced. There's control here, but also poetry. Written in the third person past tense, it has that quality that present tense has: that Here, Now quality that adds to an unpredictability that keeps you on your toes. While some books have that "long, long ago" story-telling tone, Bright of the Sky has an edgy quality that brings you right alongside Quinn and the other characters whose perspectives we enter the story from, and the danger and excitement is palpable.
Which is another thing: it's never boring. Everything in the Entire - the parallel world - is familiar and yet new, similar and yet unique. Kenyon has an impressive imagination to draw from, and her prose draws vivid images in your head. It also had a familiar feel to it, like I'd dreamed it once - which I think comes from the altered state of being in the Entire.
The Entire is a creative world, populated by sentient beings modelled from "real" worlds like Earth. The Chalin people are modelled from humans - the Chinese in particular, which race they liked the most, but they changed things. Other sentient beings are modelled from what they glimpsed of other worlds. The Tarig rule here absolutely, powerful beings that resemble insects - Mantis Lords, Sydney calls them - with their elongated, thin and narrow bodies, incredibly strong.
The Entire is their creation, and is no planet. The bright is the fiery red sky, and the vast land winds like ribbons bordered by storm walls, from which smaller branches stretch off, and smaller ones still, becoming more and more unstable. It is in these unstable places that the Tarig have created veils, so that scholars can watch the Rose and study our world. But no one has ever come through the veils before Titus Quinn and his family, and one of their laws is that the Rose shall never learn of the Entire.
This is the first book of four - the first three are already out, with the fourth due out in January 2010 - and promises a thought-provoking, gritty science fiction merged with a powerful, character-driven fantasy. I could talk forever about this book but it'd be better if you read it for yourself!