The latest book in the Emberverse was released Tuesday. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but I’m looking forward to it.
Has anyone gotten a chance to take a closer look at it?
I, for one, hope they don’t spend too much time in CUT country. I read somewhere that this trip is a triquel, and unless there is another set of three books after this one, I hope they get to Nantucket by the end of this book and the next book is a crossover between our heroes and the Nantucket that disappeared into the past.
(I’d rather the crossover be a whole new set of books. I’d love to see their reactions to the like of gunpowder, flight, etc).
I will say though, Rudy still annoys the crap out of me and I wish he would die, but other than that I’m still reading the books with bated breath, and I can’t wait for the next one to be released.
No idea how good it is - I’ve absolutely avoided reading the sample chapters on Stirling’s website - but I was a bit disappointed with TSL. For me it was a bit too obvious it was the first of the series with a cliff-hanger ending. Incidently, there are going to be four in the series, not three - *The Sword of the Lady *and *The High King of Montival * are scheduled to come out in 2009 and 2010 but I have not seen anything about a further trilogy after these.
I finished it a few days ago. I thought it was a bit disappointing…some stuff happens, but nothing at all gets resolved and it mostly seemed like filler.
BTW, they do NOT get to Nantucket…they don’t even get past fucking WISCONSIN.
Hopefully he can pull this out in the next book, because this one was a bust all around.
That was what I was afraid of - nothing will be resolved until the end of The High King of Montival. I’m almost tempted to file SOG away until I have the complete set :dubious: but I’m far to weak willed.
That’s exactly why I hate him! Ever since he was introduced Stirling tried to make him too likable. He has no flaws whatsoever. None. And it’s annoying.
I just wish he would die every time I read about him.
I want to pick this up soon, but a heavy school load is going to prevent that. So this and Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (which also came out last Tuesday) will be sitting there mocking me until the semester is over.
I’ve read all of the previous books and I hate them and love them at the same time.
They have a GREAT plot idea and I find the whole back story fascinating. But they are SOOO badly written. I end up skipping paragraphs and pages of bla bla bla just to find out what happens. I want someone else to write those books.
And it completely turned me off that there is a scene totally stolen from ‘Lonesome Dove,’ to the extent of whole sentance that are almost identicle.
I want to just read a plot summary or somthing, so I can know what happens without having to slog through his dreadful prose.
I’ve read three stories (well, two novels and one story) by S.M. Stirling which describes how to kill an elephant with one shot by shooting it between two particular wrinkles on it’s trunk. I sort of expect it now, but I guess the Emberverse stories would rule it out (haven’t read those, seems like a dumb premise). I’m sure he’s got plenty of talk about people defecating as they die though, right?
Yes, he describes how a real-life big game hunter would kill elephants shooting it there. The elephant that is killed, however, takes several shots before dying.
Lots of things sound like dumb premises until you actually read them.
I read the Nantucket books that are supposed to be connected somehow to the “Emberverse”, and though stylistically they weren’t very good, it was an interesting premise and one I could suspend disbelief for - essentially, in speculative fiction I can handle one seemingly impossible ‘magical’ occurrence to set up the premise, in this case the transportation of a circular section of modern Earth surrounding Nantucket to the Bronze Age. Everything else was just extrapolation from that one change.
The Emberverse books asked too much…a sudden change of the laws of physics over the entire Earth that somehow makes internal combustion, gunpowder, electricity, and even steam engines no longer work without having ANY effect on biological processes or anything else not connected to human technology. It was just felt like he wanted to tell a story where the world was reduced to a medieval technological level with no explanation at all as to why. I haven’t read from any of the later books, but from what I’ve read about them, there is still no explanation as to how that was accomplished. If the laws of physics are going to be enforced so arbitrarily (Electricity still conducts in nature but not in man-made items made from the same conducting materials? Gunpowder doesn’t burn but cells still catalyze chemicals?) admit that a wizard did it or the whole world is in an arbitrary simulation of the real world.
The series isn’t over and he’s about to go further into the source of what caused it. He has gone into possibilities about why certain things work and others don’t. But I forgot…you haven’t read them.
I don’t have the book in front of me, but it had to do with the idea that you can build up pressure to a certain point, but not beyond that. Beyond that point, the energy - rather than becoming potential kinetic energy, useful for pushing a piston or propelling a bullet - becomes heat energy, which slowly dissipates.
They went into something about electricity and why it works in living things, but I would have to go through all the books and look for it and I really don’t have the time right now.
I’m about halfway through it and finding it slow going. As this series has moved into the later books, I’m having a much more difficult time with it than with others.
Exactly, and why not? Put it down to Alien Space Bats or whatever - as the author Stirling can set up a universe with whatever fundemental laws he wants and then explore the consequences.
In the first trilogy (DtF, TPW, & AMAC) he does a pretty good job of this. However improbable the Change may be he provides a fairly self-consistent explanation of the new conditions and how they allow biology and the level of technology he wants but no more. (I think most of the discussion on this is in TPW but I haven’t gone back to check.) Ultimately it doesn’t matter if somebody pokes a hole in one of the explanations - he’s the Creator, he can just rule “It aint so…”
I think my trouble with The Sunrise Lands and Scourge of God (I guess, my copy has not yet arrived ) is that Stirling appears to be working up to some sort of explanation for the Change. I wish he had stuck to just saying “It happened. Live with it” and gone on exploring how the surviving societies developed.
I like the Emberverse stories, but my god the man needs an editor.
The books as written could be done in about 300 pages or so and give a nice fast read, but instead they drag on to about 400-500 (iirc) and the stories lose some of their punch imo.
My brother currently has my copy of The Sunrise Lands so I havent read that as yet, but by the end of the first Trilogy I was hoping that it was Juniper that was going to die rather than Havel.
Hell I wouldn’t have minded if the entire McKenzie clan caught Ebola & Bubonic Plauge just to make sure that they were all wiped from the story, so I guess it doesn’t bode well that Rudi seems to be just as annoying.
) is that Stirling appears to be working up to some sort of explanation for the Change. I wish he had stuck to just saying “It happened. Live with it” and gone on exploring how the surviving societies developed.