Bound Gods #3: The Shattered Sun. By Rachel Dunne. Harper
Voyager. $16.99.
Star Carrier, Book Eight: Bright Light. By Ian Douglas. Harper
Voyager. $7.99.
As Rachel Dunne’s dour, dismal Bound Gods fantasy trilogy moves to its
conclusion and Ian Douglas’ SF trilogy-of-trilogies moves to its penultimate
adventure, both authors stay true to the worlds and universes they have created
and the characters and motivations that have moved the plots of these sequences
– for better or worse. Dunne’s action-packed, often gruesome 500-page The Shattered Sun features the same
unpleasant characters as In the Shadow of the Gods and The Bones
of the Earth, the two prior novels, and forces readers to accept the notion
that the less-awful characters are on the better of the two bad sides. Dunne’s
interpretation of dark fantasy is very dark indeed, making it unusually
suitable that the plot of The Shattered
Sun involves the “Long Night,” a time of unending darkness ushered in by
the evil Twins, long-imprisoned gods who – at the end of the previous book –
returned to a measure of power by taking over the bodies of human twins.
Twinning is crucial to the entire Bound
Gods trilogy, explaining why infant twins have long been slaughtered
without mercy (because they might eventually become vessels for the evil gods)
and why two of the less-bad characters have long been in hiding under a cloud
of desperation (because they are twins who have managed to grow up). The first
two books of the trilogy involved attempts to revive – or prevent the revival
of – the fallen gods Fratarro (obviously and rather strangely named from Latin frater, brother) and Sororra (soror, sister, with one twin god’s name
having an “o” ending and one having an “a” for gender differentiation: the use
of vaguely Latin names in a world that is supposed to be utterly unlike ours is
a peculiarity of this trilogy). With the Twins’ re-emergence into what appears
to be full power at the end of the second book, the third must involve a grand
battle to defeat them, lest the world be plunged into the never-ending darkness
that is the Twins’ preferred form of existence. Why? Well, Dunne never really
says: the Twins’ sole motivation is to get back at their unseen “parent” gods,
“father” Patharro and “mother” Metherra (again from Latin: pater and mater plus the
respective “o” and “a” endings). Dunne distracts from the frivolity of the
underlying motivation by focusing again and again on the depredations of the
Twins and their followers on many characters, themselves included (some
especially powerful Twins backers pierce their own eyes so they can share the
darkness for which the Twins stand). The problem with The Shattered Sun and the whole Bound
Gods trilogy is that the Twins’ opponents are just as brain-damaged and
body-ruined as are their supporters. The antiheroic leader of the opposition, a
former priest of the Twins named Joros, is a really nasty, vicious and
duplicitous piece of work, and the people who follow him – all more or less
unwillingly – are not much better, being deeply damaged in brain, body or both.
The drug-addicted, mind-addled sorcerer Anddyr is one of the more-coherent and
more-sympathetic characters, in contrast to now-grown sewer rat Rora, a
supposedly first-rate fighter who, earlier in the trilogy, returns to her
former haunts – where her “family” members mutilate her and nearly beat her to
death in a very explicit way, resulting in her decision in The Shattered Sun to return to the same people again and yet again
be nearly beaten to death in a very explicit way that also results in several
of her companions being imprisoned and tortured. Add Scal, a mass murderer who
silently stalks and kills pretty much anyone at pretty much any time, at the
command of a deeply scarred and even more deeply vicious woman named Vatri, who
is the self-proclaimed seer of the “parent” gods, and you have a pretty
accurate picture of the “good” characters here. Eventually, since it is better
for the sun to exist than to have the world plunged forever into night, the
more-or-less-good guys win out over the less-or-more-bad ones, and Dunne
produces a very slightly positive conclusion after suitably grand and gory
battles, betrayals and general mayhem. Dunne actually writes well, but the Bound Gods trilogy is so downbeat and
depressing that readers who have ground their way through it and who prefer
anything other than the very darkest of dark fantasy will likely feel mostly
relief when the whole thing lurches to its essentially foregone conclusion.
There is also a certain amount of lurching going on in the Star Carrier thrice-trilogy as the
eighth of the nine books arrives. Ian Douglas (one of the pen names of William
H. Keith, Jr.) has been stringing plots and readers along for many, many pages
with this
interstellar/military/consciousness/religion/multiple-alien-encounters tale, in
which humanity triumphs again and again when confronted with a growing series
of supposedly superior races and technologies (the latter including its own AI
and super-AI creations). Underlying the particular form of humanity that
Douglas creates here is a series of religious wars that led to a decree called
the White Covenant, under which public displays of religion were banned, as was
proselytizing. Religious or pseudo-religious elements continue to peek and poke
their way into Star Carrier, though,
being intertwined with the whole notion of a higher consciousness, evolution,
species that have developed along lines entirely different from that of
humanity, and other typical (and typically overdone) SF tropes. At the center
of the multiple plot lines is Trevor “Sandy” Gray, a longtime military leader
and apparently a closet Christian (in the seventh book, Dark Mind, he mentally objects, at some length, to the celebration
of the winter solstice rather than Christmas). Gray both depends on machine
intelligence (as do pretty much all the characters here) and is skeptical of it
and worried that it could endanger humanity; this is nothing unusual in SF or,
for that matter, in real-world news stories. In Dark Mind, Gray took on a mission from a super-AI called Konstantin
to investigate a star system that might have a super-advanced alien race that
might help humanity fight a race of sentient bacteria that controls a wide
variety of alien species. To investigate this system, Gray had to disobey
orders from his superiors, a major no-no in military circles, but Gray did so
because he is heroic and upstanding and an all-around good guy. The result was
that Gray’s command of his starship – the America,
no less – was taken away, and he has been left without the organizational,
hierarchical moorings of his longtime military service. This, it turns out, is
exactly what Konstantin (at least the Konstantin clone aboard the America) wanted, because without a
starship to command, Gray can be sent in Bright
Light on a mission to the remote star Deneb, where Konstantin will arrange
for him to encounter yet another mysterious and immensely powerful alien
civilization that may be able to prevent humanity from being wiped out again.
Umm, no, that may again prevent humanity from being wiped out. Something like
that. Anyway, the title Bright Light
refers to an all-new artificial intelligence, although how far superior it can
be to the virtually all-knowing (or at least all-manipulating) Konstantin is
hard to determine. It is scarcely surprising that a series as extended as this
one is packed with characters and plot lines, but Star Carrier at this point seems overextended and a trifle tired.
Planet-sized brains not enough of an enemy for humans? How about minuscule
bacteria? That sort of thing: Douglas seems to be reaching for greater and
greater complexity and complication at the service of what is, foundationally,
a rather simple premise under which superior alien races nearly destroy
humanity repeatedly but are beaten back because humans, gosh darn it, just have
so much pluck and such willingness to risk everything by doing stuff they don’t
fully understand but that, by golly, actually works. It is a kind of
country-bumpkin view of humanity, and it leaves Gray and the other Star Carrier characters seeming
something less than vibrant, never mind intelligent. Still, readers who have
stuck with the series so far will find Bright
Light a solid advancement of the whole Star
Carrier sequence and will surely be looking ahead to the coming final book.
For that matter, readers who dipped into the series early – its first few books
were its best – will also look forward to the coming last entry, if only
because Douglas, who is nothing if not an adept writer, is likely to use it to
provide a suitably uplifting finale.
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