Author: Michael R Hicks
Publisher: Imperial Guard Publishing (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!
This novel has drunk so deeply from the fountain of fantasy that it’s almost a parody. Every single place name has an apostrophe in it which serves no evident purpose. Every character name has a hyphen. The opening pages are as dense an info-dump as you will find anywhere. Every time we’re given a name for something that is neither a character nor a place, we're immediately given a translation afterwards. Why, then, give us the original name? Why not simply say it’s 'X' instead of telling us it’s 'Y" which means 'X' in English? And why say 'Cycles' instead of years? What’s the point other than pure pretension?
If we’re getting this for objects, then why not for people and places? Every word means something, so why not translate everything? Even as it was, it was tedious to have to read this, so perhaps this was a blessing. The reading process wasn't helped by the font which looked like it was typewritten and was densely packed on the page, with virtually no margin.
I know I always argue that for the sake of trees, it’s incumbent upon us to make best use of the paper for the sake of the print edition, but believe it or not, there are limits even to my fanaticism! In addition to that, every apostrophe 's', such as in "T'ier-Kunai's" had a space after the apostrophes, so it looked like "T' ier-Kunai' s". I don’t know why this was (maybe someone had done a search and replace because they wanted the apostrophe followed by a space for the place names?), but it sure didn’t make for a comfortable read.
Chapter one begins on page eleven, and by page eighteen I was already worn out by this story, having no real interest in reading another two hundred pages of info-dump. I felt like one of the steeds these characters were riding! The main character, Kunan-Lohr, has literally ridden several animals to death on his urgent charge back from the battle-front to the city, yet he hypocritically orders the stable hands to "Tend them well!" when he finally arrives!
I gave this up on page 32 because I simply could not stand to read it. Your mileage may differ.
