Kalpa Review
Dec. 21st, 2009 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So over the Solstice, I finished up Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Aglica Gorodischer and translated by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The book is a collection of short stories united by the theme that a storyteller (or storytellers) is telling stories about the various Emperors and Empresses of a vast and long-lived Empire (which is never actually named). Because the empire is so vast and long-lived, the details are constantly shifting and only occasionally does something in one story make a tangential appearance in any of the others.
The stories are all quite good. There's no one particular story that's a real stand-out, but they're all good and as a collective, they're quite sufficient to transport the reader to a storyteller's tent in the marketplace of the capital city of an ancient empire. It was a lot of fun and certainly worth checking out.
later
Tom
So over the Solstice, I finished up Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Aglica Gorodischer and translated by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The book is a collection of short stories united by the theme that a storyteller (or storytellers) is telling stories about the various Emperors and Empresses of a vast and long-lived Empire (which is never actually named). Because the empire is so vast and long-lived, the details are constantly shifting and only occasionally does something in one story make a tangential appearance in any of the others.
The stories are all quite good. There's no one particular story that's a real stand-out, but they're all good and as a collective, they're quite sufficient to transport the reader to a storyteller's tent in the marketplace of the capital city of an ancient empire. It was a lot of fun and certainly worth checking out.
later
Tom
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
eastern religions need bigger aeons
Date: 2009-12-21 05:09 pm (UTC)However, there would not be enough room for it - anywhere.
If at all related to the sanskrit word Kalpa, it makes sense that the stories would seem unrelated, since a Kalpa is a huge amount of time and no creature would exist from one to the next to remember it. You can't really have a storyline measured in Kalpas unless you're doing something absurd with time travel, but I would assume the word is used artistically to imply greatness or a vast span of time, much smaller than a Kalpa but still larger than a normal human lifespan.
The word catches my eye, which may be enough to make me grab the book if I see it. Thanks for the review.
Re: eastern religions need bigger aeons
Date: 2009-12-21 05:32 pm (UTC)Huh, my word power has improved.
That's almost certainly the sense in which it's being used here.
later
Tom