I’d never heard of this or the author but, spying it in a second-hand bookshop I was intrigued enough by the title to buy it.
It turned out actually to be pretty impressive and enjoyable. The setting is a variant on the Dying Earth of Vance or Wolfe; in this dystopian far future, Earth’s brightest and best long ago deserted it for the stars, and during the years since then, humanity has regressed into decadence, barbarism and superstition, surrounded by the artifacts and technology of a civilization they no longer understand. Weather control satellites went wrong and divided the earth into zones of burning heat and freezing cold.
Our (anti-)hero is Phaid, a hapless gambler and sometime card-sharp whom circumstances have placed on the fringes of civilization. In the first part of the book, Phaid must make it back to the city he calls home, in the second he discovers that going back may not have been such a good idea after all.
Farren’s creative energy is simply a joy to behold. We see the colossal crawlers and marikh trains, we get the deliciously demented and sadistic prison; the White Tower with its very special form of execution, we get the colourful artists’ quarter and the insectile ice-ships.
He takes a rather dark, pessimistic view of humanity and as a result, the book is rather grim, particularly in the second half, but it’s lightened up with some tongue-in-cheek humour, particularly from the irreverent Phaid and his occasional sidekick Streetlife.
I do have some concerns about the plot; without giving too much away, the main villain goes to great lengths to make Phaid and others jump through hoops and get pushed from one place to another place, all culminating in… well, something that he could have done from the very beginning, as far as I can see. Admittedly, the protagonist doesn’t really understand what went down any better than the reader; he was always just a pawn, but this does seem to ring faintly of a cop-out. Of course, it does match the general tone of the book, where everyone is scrabbling in the dirt and never having a clue what’s going on.
One of the most interesting things about the book, and certainly one that made it, despite its size, extremely gripping, is the use of tension. If Phaid is doing well, something bad is about to happen to him. It gets so you prefer the parts where bad stuff is actually happening, because when Phaid seems to be succeeding, you’re just bracing yourself for something horrible to occur (and it will). Most of the time, Phaid is simply bounced helplessly between the two extremes, with little or no input from him.
It was a very entertaining read. I’ll definitely be looking out for more by the author