Steppe

A clansman from the East Asian steppes is snatched into the future moments before his death, "Heaven Can Wait"-style. In this case, though, his benefactors aren't a newbie angel but a couple of game addicts looking for some direct knowledge of historical events - kinda like "Back To The Future II", but the other way around. Instead of finding a dope who will spill the beans and play along docilely, they find a warrior who quickly finds an advantage and takes it. Takes it all the way to the bank after finding the perfect role to play in the Great Game...

This was really enjoyable, especially the first half. During the second half it started to drag a little. I guess this book never took off, since I looked up whether any sequels were written, and there weren't. It would have been a good series, I think.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/561956.html

Our hero, a ninth-century Uighur, is yanked far into the future by players of a massive interactive game called Steppe, in which the history of Central Asia is simulated between the years 841 and 1227 at a rate of a game year for every real day that passes. The author takes the opportunity to regale us with much history transcribed painstakingly from Rene Grousset's Empire of the Steppes (thanks to Mike Schilling for that tip-off).

Well, one has to be honest and admit that neither the plot, nor the setting, nor indeed the characterisation are quite as well-rounded as the couple depicted by Boris Vallejo on the cover, whose relevance is as minimal as their clothing. (Note how the gentleman holds his show more long upright pointy thing in one hand, and clutches another weapon at groin level with the other.)

For some reason, rather than have the whole game of Steppe a computer-generated environment, Anthony chooses to try and rewrite the Central Asian landscape into a space opera setting, so that the horses are spaceships, rough terrain equates to nebulas, camps are actually on planets. It's not as well done as he managed in the five-volume Bio of a Space Tyrant series (and that set rather a low bar to exceed, featuring as it did the bizarre decision of Turks and Greeks to settle on the same asteroid when they had the whole solar system to choose from, purely so that they could reproduce the Cyprus situation in space).

It's never clear whether the characters are supposed to get marks for recreating the historical record or deviating from it, and this is where Anthony really does run into difficulty with writing a decent story; he cannot choose between history lesson and plot. (A cantankerous afterword complains about his treatment by his publishers.) The women of the future are apparently "unversed in the refinements of pleasure" (this phrase is actually used), but fortunately our time-travelling hero is around to put them right by doing it the old-fashioned Turkic way.

Perhaps not the best book I've read all year, but I did at least find it much easier going than Dhalgren. show less

an amusing little tale, the proponent finds himself extremely confused through most of it, thus so do we.... but a good story remains a good story.

We have waited decades now for the next installment in this game - guess it will never come to be, which is to bad, it would have been an intersting genre to explore.