Black Sun Rising by CS Friedman
Black Sun Rising by CS Friedman
Coldfire Trilogy #1
Rating: 10/10
Reading and reviewing this book was a bit difficult because I read it in high school and remembered the series being very good and was worried it wouldn't hold up to the mental image I had of it. I was wrong. If anything, it was better.
The setting is a mixture of SF and fantasy. The fae is a force native to the planet Erna, colonized by humans about 1500 years before the story. The fae can be Worked by humans, performing diverse tasks such as aiding healing, protecting a town from the planet's frequent earthquakes to engineering plant and animal life. The fae is not a benevolent force--it makes nightmares a physical, deadly thing.
The story centers mostly around two men. First is the Hunter, Gerald Tarrant. Tarrant sacrificed his wife and children for immortality and power, becoming a vampire who feeds off fear. In the millenium of his unlife, countless women have been sacrificed to feed his hunger. The other man is
the priest Damien Vryce. Damien is a priest trained in the use the fae in Church approved applications. He is very devout and believes in his religion. Ironically, another title Tarrant has is the Prophet. The vampire, before he sacrificed his family, laid the foundation of Damien's faith. The clash between Damien's faith and what the Prophet is one of the major conflicts in the story.
Another major character is Ciani who had her memories taken shortly after Damien met her and started to fall in love with her. To restore her memory, she and Damien set out on a dangerous journey into the wilderness populated by the rakh. The rakh are the species that the colonists thought were the most intelligent and the fae molded them into sentience. When Tarrant joins the party, Damien sees the vampire changing Ciani at a fundamental level and the priest is powerless to stop it. Even though he hates losing the Ciani he knew, Damien still welcomed Tarrant's aid and let Tarrant feed off of him so that the best chance of Ciani's memory returning would occur.
Science fiction is known for its ability to make the reader reevaluate his perspectives and Friedman is a master at this. The best example of this is when Tarrant induced a nightmare in Damien. The nightmare had Damien in the middle of a fight with guns, people around him dying. The priest tries to Work the fae to heal the injured but he can't see or access it. The weapons were working without the huge risk of the fae causing them to backfire and injure the wielder. This is the end goal of Damien's faith, to have Erna's people not at the mercy of the fae, both the beneficial and detrimental uses. Damien never thought having his wish granted, in a world like lost Earth with no fae was a nightmare because he lost the beneficial uses of the fae he had no access to in his nightmare.
CS Friedman is one of the greatest and most thought provoking authors writing today, writing science fiction that is compelling with vivid characters and a compelling setting. The first volume of the Coldfire trilogy shows this.