Review: Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear
Russ Allbery
eagle at eyrie.org
Thu Nov 23 19:52:42 PST 2017
Range of Ghosts
by Elizabeth Bear
Series: Eternal Sky #1
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: March 2012
ISBN: 0-7653-2754-6
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 334
Temur is one of many grandsons of the Great Khagan. We meet him on a
bloody battlefield, in the aftermath of a fight between his cousin and
his brother over the succession. His brother lost and Temur was left
for dead with a vicious cut down the side of his neck, improbably
surviving among the corpses and even more improbably finding a
surviving horse (or being found by one). But a brief reprieve and a
potential new family connection are cut brutally short when they are
attacked by ghosts and his lover is pulled away into the sky.
Once-Princess Samarkar was heir and then a political wife of a prince,
but her marriage was cut short in bloody insult when her husband
refused to consummate the marriage. Now, she's chosen a far different
path: be neutered in order to become a wizard. If she survives the
surgery, she gains independence from her brother, freedom from
politics, and possibly (if she's lucky) magical power.
Range of Ghosts is the first book of a fantasy trilogy set in what
appears to be an analogue of what's now far northwest China and the
central Asian steppes (although the geography doesn't exactly follow
ours). There are mountainous strongholds, a large city-based
civilization in the east, a civilization with onion domes and a
different god in the west, and nomadic horse clans in the north. That
said, there's also, as one discovers a bit later in the book, a race of
huge bipedal cat people, just to be sure you don't think this is too
much like our world.
I had a hard time with the start of this book due to the brutality.
Just in the first 70 pages or so, we get a near-fatal wound that a
character has to hold closed with his hand (for pages), human
sacrifice, essentially medieval invasive surgery, a graphic description
of someone losing an eye, and then (I think a little later in the book)
serious illness with high fever. And this is Elizabeth Bear, which
means the descriptions are very well-written and vivid, which was...
not what I wanted. Thankfully, the horror show does slow down by the
middle of the book.
The opening also didn't quite connect with me. There's a lot about war,
the aftermath of war, and the death of Temur's family, but I found
Temur mostly boring. The reader enters the story in at the aftermath,
so none of the death and battle really touched me. Temur's steppe
mythology is vaguely interesting, but only vaguely.
Samarkar saved this book for me. She's pragmatic, introspective,
daring, but also risk-conscious. She pays attention and learns and
studies, and she takes the opportunity to learn from everyone she can.
The magical system she's learning also has some nicely-described
effects without being too mechanical, and I liked the interweaving of
magic with science. As she started taking charge of the plot, I thought
this book got better and better. Also, full points for the supposedly
pampered concubine (one of Samarkar's relatives) turning out to have
iron determination and considerable ability to put up with hardship
when it was required. That was refreshing.
More positive points to this book for allowing both men and women can
choose to become neutered and become wizards. Same principle, so why
not the same effect? One of the things I like about fantasy is the
opportunity to explore human society with little tweaks and
differences, and the ones that poke at gender roles and ask why we
gender something that clearly could be gender-neutral make me happy.
I wasn't as fond of the hissable villain. I think I'm getting
increasingly grumbly about books in which the villain is so obviously
evil as to be basically demonic. Maybe Bear will twist this around in
later books, but this one opens with human sacrifice, and the villain
doesn't get any more appealing as we go along. I think I wasn't in the
mood to read about someone plotting horrible dark things, keeping
hostages, and practicing black magic, particularly since Bear's vivid
descriptions make it a bit hard to tune the horrors out.
Thankfully, there isn't that much of the villain, and there's rather a
lot of Samarkar, which left me generally happy with the book and
wanting more. However, be warned that this is in absolutely no way a
standalone book. Essentially nothing is resolved in this volume; you
will need the sequel (if not the third book as well) for any sense of
completed story whatsoever.
Followed by The Shattered Pillars.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Reviewed: 2017-11-23
--
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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