Empress of Eternity

LE Modisett, Jr is, it turns out, a beloved and prolific author. Though I hadn't heard of him until Kevin got me one of his recent books, Empress of Eternity, for Christmas. It turns out this is probably not the greatest entry point to his work. Although that may be for the best, since I do not have time to follow another author right now. I'm never going to work through my to-read list as it is.

It's not that this book is bad. But it is difficult. It had a very steep learning curve, throwing the reader into three different cultures, each with their own only slightly-related techno jargon. The book flips between three different timelines, with barely enough pages for the reader to get used to one before the story switches to another. It helps that the three stories proceed mostly in parallel, but it still took a lot of brain power to sort through everything and keep the characters straight.

In the back half of the book, the timelines start bleeding into each other, and the ways they paralleled each other earlier become more important to the story as a whole. It's interesting to see everything come together. But it would have been better if I'd come to care about the characters or gain more than a surface understanding of the societies they inhabit. The whole book, and especially the ending, felt rushed. Ultimately it seemed to be all flash and no depth, which made for a quick, but not wholly satisfying read.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more