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Taking the premise of Asimov's Foundation stories seriously (or at least pretty seriously; the book has a somewhat tongue-in-cheek flavor throughout), Kingsbury shows us the galaxy roughly eighty thousand years from now, as the psychohistorians who subtly run the place by predicting and modifying the future, face the largest possible challenge to their nominally benign rule.
He does an uneven job of convincing us that it's eighty thousand years in the future. There is a good feeling of long spans of time, layers of history, events forgotten and muddled and confabulated over the centuries. No one is sure where humanity first evolved (although "Rith" is one of the leading candidates), there have been rafts of Emperors and Empires and Republics and wars and whatnot.
On the other hand nothing much has changed; nothing is very strange. This seems wrong; the world of 80,374 AD should seem at least as odd and wonderful to us as the world of 2004 would seem to someone from 1650, shouldn't it? And that doesn't happen; there's little sense of wonder or strangeness to Kingsbury's universe.
This is a reasonably common failing of writers about the future: they need to set their story far enough in the future for some particular thing to have happened (the rise and dominance of the Pscholars in Kingsbury's case), but they don't bother to (or, to be fair, can't) convincingly show all the other wild stuff what would have happened in that much time. C'est la vie.
Within those parameters, this is a fun and interesting story, with some memorable and worth-meeting characters. On the other hand, I got seriously bogged down about 450 pages in. The book is over 700 pages long, but the story only needs about half of that to be told. There are long long scenes that add little or nothing to the tale, and some of the characters are alike enough that I kept getting them confused (at least at the rather glacial pace that I read the last third of the book).
You'll probably enjoy this book the most if you have enough long stretches of free reading time to finish it within a week or so, savor the long stretches of prose, and keep the characters fresh in your mind; it's not a book that lends itself to snatches of reading time in between driving kids or ballet or being on conference calls.
Overall, though, it's a good idea pretty well executed; I can imagine it having been done better, but I don't regret the time I spent reading it.
This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.