Written well.

Duncan, Dave. West of January. Del Rey, 1989.
Dave Duncan was a Scott who specialized in writing sandal and sword fantasy, but in West of January he built a world without fantasy elements. Human colonists have settled on Vernier, a planet that is barely habitable. The planet’s diurnal rotation is just slightly faster than one of its trips around its primary. A Vernier day-night cycle is about two hundred years long. The result is that the sun seems hardly to move in the sky. The population crashes almost to extinction when caught in a summer noonday. It is not surprising then that much of the technology is lost and that culture has fragmented into nomadic bands and people burrowed in odd ecological niches. Over the years, the population has also developed distinct racial types. Our hero, Knobil, racially different from his group, grew up in a nomadic herding culture in an area that resembles the Eurasian Steppes. When his father is killed, he is exiled and begins a globe-spanning adventure that reminds me of the explorations of Richard Francis Burton. There are many twists and turns along the way with a quite satisfying surprise at the end. ( )

I read this the first time at least 25 years ago, when I was in grade school. I remember loving it then. This time around I would probably give it 4.5 stars. It had a rough start, and I wasn’t even sure for a while there that I wanted to keep reading. There are some really terrible things that happen to the narrator. The world has some really terrible aspects to it. And some of those aspects are more believable than others. But in the end it’s a really good story. And it concludes well. ( )

Under the hot sun that never leaves its place in the sky, Knobil grows up in a world where women are just another object and having a son is a curse. Or so he had been thinking - by the time he starts telling his story, he knows that the world is a much bigger place than he knew when he was growing up.

"West of January" is the story of Knobil - a story of a young man that leaves home and lives through a lot of adventures. Nothing really different from the thousands of books about other boys like him. Except that his world is different - a world where January is a huge piece of land (so is February and the rest of the months), where the sun does not seem to ever set (at least in the part where he is born) and where men cannot live together; a world called Vernier. A world on which a cycle is a few generations and most of the tribes don't remember previous cycles. A world where the size of the population is kept in check by natural disaster and plain stupidity on the part of a lot of the tribes.

Dave Duncan uses the journey of Knobil to build a world where humanity had settled ages ago and then forgotten who they were. The system looks almost Roman in some places, Arabic in others, plain alien in third. It is a new world that cannot go away from human nature but where none of the tribes had developed in the same way any Earth civilization had. In some tribes, women are as important as men; in some places women rule over men; in some places women are less important than the local animals. And this world had managed to invent slavery (which is inevitable - is there a human civilization that does not). And there are angels.

It takes almost the full book for Duncan to provide an explanation for the angels and the saints and the archangels and all other strange names that sound like supernatural beings to any reader. But it takes a few pages in the novel to show that these angels are different and they are not the messengers of god - because the different tribes have their own gods... and the angels are accepted everywhere. They seem to be the ones that know what is going on in the world (later Knobil will met other tribes that know.. and most of them will not use that to help their fellow human beings) and they are the ones that will make possible for Knobil to live his life the way he does (not to mention that they are responsible for him existing in the first place).

Using Knobil as a narrator narrows down what we can learn - but at the same time we see him narrating his life almost at the end of it, with a lot of later knowledge shadowing what he had felt as a young man. But at the same time it adds to the story, making it a legend told by the fire. Knobil seems to be getting from one big adventure into another; from one disaster into another - loosing families along the way, loosing his health and youth but never being quite broken.

It's an impressive world and at the same time the author manages to make it a standalone novel. Which is not a small success considering the usual span of such stories.

Note: Not for the squeamish - violence and sex are part of the world (and some quite awful things as well) and the author does not shy from them ( )

(Amy) I love Dave Duncan's books. Some of them are a little silly; none of them are exactly what one would call Serious Literature, but with very few exceptions they have all been, basically, very high-quality fluff - moderately interesting stories in exceptionally fascinating worlds about fairly real-seeming people.

A bonus of sorts is that, while he's written dozens of books, many of them are long since out of print, so it's almost like discovering new books when one comes across a heretofore-unseen old one in a used bookstore. (I do not, by and large, like ordering used books from Amazon or other such places. I have a problem with paying $4 in shipping for a book that would cost $2 or thereabouts in a used bookstore, and so only do it when I'm no longer willing to play the wait-and-see game with secondhand stores for a given book.) I actually have a small stash of old-and-unread Duncan books that I've been doling out to myself very slowly over the last few years.

As is often the case with Duncan books, the worldbuilding is what I enjoy the most, and the fact that there's a well-told story laid over the doling-out of the worldbuilding tidbits is almost incidental, though it does at least need to be enough of a story to keep me interested between world-revelations. I won't go into the specifics of this particular world's oddnesses, as I think, given the above, that would qualify as spoileriffic. I'll just close by saying that this is another on the list of thoroughly enjoyable books in the Dave Duncan oeuvre.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2008/10/west_of_january_dave_du... )