From a beginning without explanation in the 1300s and zooming on to the far future, this story of battles and nastiness will appeal to those who like their SF on the gritty side. THE PROMISE OF THE CHILD is the first book in The Amaranthine Spectrum series. I'm not sure what I expected, but I could tell pretty quickly that this wasn't going to be a romance.
A battle for a stone keep sees machines drop from the sky and blast their way in, followed by a raiding party. In this future there seem to be more than one race of humans, some brutish and all with powerful weapons. As always there is a struggle for power. The writing style is masculine and I found it depressing that a scene can't be described without mentioning a person vomiting or a parasite on a fish. Some of the imagery is more like what I would expect from a horror book. In some lands there are still bees and in others, mechanical bees mindlessly pollinate flowers. Teleporting has been mastered, called bilocation, enabling a man to travel a light year in seconds. Oddly to me, some people still use pen and paper.
The names include Elcholtzia, Impatiens, Drimys, Briza, Corphuso, Lycaste; I found them hard to keep hold of. And that's before we get to races like the Threen, Zelioceti, Amaranthine and Melius. I was wondering how women are treated in this future, but most characters I saw were male, and women don't come out of arguments well; one woman is tossed over the edge of a waterfall and nobody complains. Another woman has a talent for drawing in charcoal. I would hope for better evidence of equality when several centuries have passed.
THE PROMISE OF THE CHILD just didn't appeal to me at any level, but I hadn't read anything by Tom Toner previously, this being his first work, and it's always good to try new authors. You may think this sounds like the ideal book for you or a friend; perhaps if you enjoyed 'Gormenghast' this would suit you. Tom Toner was born in England, which is why he has an English character with a cut glass accent in his story, and he has lived in Australia teaching art.
It is the 147th century. In the radically advanced post-human worlds of the Amaranthine Firmament, there is a contender to the Immortal throne: Aaron the Long-Life, the Pretender, a man who is not quite a man. In the barbarous hominid kingdoms of the Prism Investiture, where life is short, cheap, and dangerous, an invention is born that will become the Firmament's most closely kept secret. Lycaste, a lovesick recluse outcast for an unspeakable crime, must journey through the Provinces, braving the grotesques of an ancient, decadent world to find his salvation. Sotiris, grieving the loss of his sister and awaiting the madness of old age, must relive his twelve thousand years of life to stop the man determined to become Emperor. Ghaldezuel, knight of the stars, must plunder the rarest treasure in the Firmament—the object the Pretender will stop at nothing to obtain. From medieval Prague to a lonely Mediterranean cove, and eventually far into the strange vastness of distant worlds, The Promise of the Child is a debut novel of gripping action and astounding ambition unfolding over hundreds of thousands of years, marking the arrival of a brilliant new talent in science fiction.
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