Æstival Tide

Weird, slightly too dark and disconnected for me, although I hadn't realised it was part of a series. Set in the far future humanity as gone to space, but has splintered into tribes and factions on Earth, and the resulting wars have left few survivors. Some of those are gathered in a vast domed city, ruled by a family currently comprising of three sisters and a disgraced brother. Their whims and fetes dictate the life of the few thousand who shelter there. Favourored privileged few indulge in the ruler's games - the current fashion is for dream interpretation - whilst the rest labour to keep the city functioning. ALl fo the druge work is carried out by re-animated corpses, but there are still many menial tasks.

We follow a few key show more players as a time of crisis develops in the city. The son of the current Architect, who controls the robots that keep the domes intact; a part-time healer who is in favour after medicating one of the ruler's migraine; a hermaphrodite dream interpreter, fallen on hard times. Not a lot of the city makes sense initially, the inhabitants have been there so long they don't remember how or why it came to be, and many deliberate distortions or evasions have occurred over the centuries. The whims of the ruling family are as bizarre as one might expect. The main focus is the upcoming celebration of aestival time - the grand decade occuring occasion of opening the main doors to the terrifying wonder of Outside, something none of the inhabitants experience at any other time, and all believe to be mortally dangerous. This year however there seems to be a great storm approaching heralded in dreams and prophecies, something that no-one takes seriously because the domes have never failed ot shelter them before. Even the twisted warning of the variety of distorted gene-constructs, some of them truly ancient, can cause no more than unease.

Bizarre and disturbing it does all pull together to make sense in the end, but I found it all a little bit too far from my comfort zone to really appreciate. None of hte characters are normal. Indeed 'normal' is not really something that is known anywhere in the book, and without that anchor to contrast the experiences against, it all too overdone. There's something of the feel of China Melville's work in it, and I didn't much like that either. show less

While not on a level with her later work, this is an entertaining novel. Set in the same apocalyptic future as Winterlong, there is little direct connection between the two. Only Margalis Tast'annin plays a significant role in both. As in Winterlong, multiple threads seem to run independently before coming together later in the book; both novels come to a climax during a festival. Reive and Hobi are engaging, if often hapless, protagonists. My major complaint is that the surviving characters are left hanging at the end of the book. Perhaps there will be some resolution in the third book; if not, pretty unsatisfying.

A story of life when life has little worth, where people are revived from the dead but don't have any will and where the end of the world as people know it is at hand.
Dragged a fair bit for the first about 200 pages and then picked up and became more readable. Not my kind of thing.