The Edge of the World
(category: fantasy)book 1 of Terra Incognita by
Kevin J Anderson
published by Orbit in 2009Nick read a new book, in March 2010
Nick's rating: 6 out of 10
Nick's opinion:
About half way through this book I began to think, Will anything ever happen? Yes, there were people getting in trouble, getting almost out of trouble, getting killed... but so what? Then I realised what was missing: plot! Yes, there was quite a bit happening but it was hard to believe it -- because there was no coherent thread; it was leading... apparently... nowhere. Ten different people having ten different adventures, in a shared world. (When I say "adventures", well, some chapters could be summarised as, "This character carried on what they were doing in several previous chapters.") To be fair, it was fairly interesting. Luckily, however, there were no characters who I really cared about: people tended to be killed suddenly. But who cared? There were no characters that I even liked, not even amongst those who survived to the end of this book. There are two major civilisations, the "Europeans" and the "Arabs". They go to war due to a series of accidents -- a good point to be made -- and the war escalates due to the unthinking religious intolerance on both sides. Each side then sets out to explore the world -- with the main aim of finding more people to draw into their war. What a miserable premise for exploration! What's worse, the explorers act like a bunch of kids on a picnic: minimum planning, no backup resources, no guards in the isolated desert camp, no disaster planning... The problem is, this is not a novel. It's a soap opera -- with no main characters, no key objectives, no single challenge to be overcome. Just a lot of inter-related threads with the only possible end to a thread being the death of every character involved. Though if further books are still selling, I can see the children stepping forward to avenge imagined wrongs against their parents. If you want to fill in some time with light entertainment, read this book. If you want a novel -- with plot and characters and logic and conflict and resolution -- try something else.
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