God's Review
Feb. 1st, 2011 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
So I just finished clipping through God's War by Kameron Hurley. It was really good.
So you've got the world of Umayma which appears to be a terraformed world settled by a variety of colonists. These colonists are all some stripe of Islamic and most could trace their ancestry back to the Middle East or North Africa. So, as often happens, people bring their problems with them and set up in religious/ethnic enclaves and promptly start fighting one another. This results in blighted desert areas and a stagnation of technology.
The technology, incidentally, is fantastic. It all works off of bugs -- the viral kind and the insectile kind. Genetically-gifted people are magicians and can manipulate the bugs to produce a wide range of technological effects. This whole bit of world-building is really well done and neatly threaded through the main story.
Anyway, you've got Nasheen, a country ruled by women who send their young men off to fight against Chenjan, a country ruled by men. Among the Nasheen troopers you have the Bel Dames, heavily modified secret agents whose job is to kill Nasheen deserters -- not because they're deserting, but because they might be carrying any number of lethal contagions and must be prevented from returning home to become a bio-hazard that takes out a city.
So there's Nyx, a former Bel Dame who did a little work on the side and got kicked out. Now she's working as a bounty hunter with a rag-tag crew of misfits. Then the Queen of Nasheen calls on Nyx to do a job for her -- retrieve an off-world alien who's gone missing and might hold the key to ending the long-standing war.
So I really loved a lot of the world-building in this. I liked the fact that they didn't spend a lot of time in tiresome exposition about what was going on, they just toss you in and expect you to keep up. They fill in some of the gaps as you go along, others they let you puzzle out on your own. I never felt too confused or frustrated by any of it. Fascinated is the word I'd use.
Nyx makes for a pretty good protagonist. She's got a bit of that self-destructive streak which is a Thing To Be Overcome along with the ol' Learns To Trust Others bit, but it's handled well and Nyx and her teammates are interesting, well-drawn. The fights are all pretty well-done, especially the boxing. Boxing appears to be something the author enjoys so it makes an appearance here. Luckily, you're not buried under boxing minutia.
This was a pretty good story, I'd be happy to see some more of them either following Nyx or simply set in the same world (actually, I might prefer the latter over the former). Certainly worth a look.
later
Tom
So I just finished clipping through God's War by Kameron Hurley. It was really good.
So you've got the world of Umayma which appears to be a terraformed world settled by a variety of colonists. These colonists are all some stripe of Islamic and most could trace their ancestry back to the Middle East or North Africa. So, as often happens, people bring their problems with them and set up in religious/ethnic enclaves and promptly start fighting one another. This results in blighted desert areas and a stagnation of technology.
The technology, incidentally, is fantastic. It all works off of bugs -- the viral kind and the insectile kind. Genetically-gifted people are magicians and can manipulate the bugs to produce a wide range of technological effects. This whole bit of world-building is really well done and neatly threaded through the main story.
Anyway, you've got Nasheen, a country ruled by women who send their young men off to fight against Chenjan, a country ruled by men. Among the Nasheen troopers you have the Bel Dames, heavily modified secret agents whose job is to kill Nasheen deserters -- not because they're deserting, but because they might be carrying any number of lethal contagions and must be prevented from returning home to become a bio-hazard that takes out a city.
So there's Nyx, a former Bel Dame who did a little work on the side and got kicked out. Now she's working as a bounty hunter with a rag-tag crew of misfits. Then the Queen of Nasheen calls on Nyx to do a job for her -- retrieve an off-world alien who's gone missing and might hold the key to ending the long-standing war.
So I really loved a lot of the world-building in this. I liked the fact that they didn't spend a lot of time in tiresome exposition about what was going on, they just toss you in and expect you to keep up. They fill in some of the gaps as you go along, others they let you puzzle out on your own. I never felt too confused or frustrated by any of it. Fascinated is the word I'd use.
Nyx makes for a pretty good protagonist. She's got a bit of that self-destructive streak which is a Thing To Be Overcome along with the ol' Learns To Trust Others bit, but it's handled well and Nyx and her teammates are interesting, well-drawn. The fights are all pretty well-done, especially the boxing. Boxing appears to be something the author enjoys so it makes an appearance here. Luckily, you're not buried under boxing minutia.
This was a pretty good story, I'd be happy to see some more of them either following Nyx or simply set in the same world (actually, I might prefer the latter over the former). Certainly worth a look.
later
Tom
