Book 5 of the World of Tiers series
Five people have become stranded on the topsy-turvy Lavalite world. The main feature of it is its instability, with the landscape prone to shift quite suddenly.
Kickaha and his partner, Anana; Urthona and his hired thug Angus McKay, a man from Earth; and Red Orc are the five people stranded on this strangely active planet. Anana, Urthona and Red Orc are all Lords, seemingly immortal humans with advanced scientific knowledge and extremely inflated opinions of their own superiority. But at least Anana has climbed down of her high horse due to her loving connection with Kickaha, who is also from Earth.
How these five ended up stranded is not detailed. But life is harsh on the Lavalite world and the locals are primitive and dangerous. All five of the main characters end up being split up and held captive by the local tribal folks.
Urthona, who designed and populated the Lavalite world with his custom animal and plant creations and who installed the human tribes on it too, has a mobile castle there that slowly travels around the world. If any of them can get to his castle, they maybe able to find a way off the world. Anana also has a device that can open gateways to other worlds, but it is necessary to find the gateways first. Urthona and Red Orc both want the device but Anana is hanging on to it as a way to control Urthona and Red Orc.
Kickaha got separated from the others during a sudden flood and manages to make a connection with a different tribe. Anana ends up with a different group of savages. Urthona and McKay get captured together and Red Orc gets taken by a different group, who treat him very harshly. All five of the stranded people have one goal, to escape their various captors and find the a gate off the planet, and failing that, find Urthona's moving castle.
It would really help to have read the first four books in the series. Besides that, though, it just wasn't that interesting. We first get to read about Kickaha's time with the tribals that captured him in the most detail. Then Anana's ordeal. But Urthona's and McKay's are not gone into in much detail and Red Orc's just in passing. All we really find out about his captivity is that he was beaten and abused, even more than the other four.
However, I just felt like a stranger at a party where I knew no one. I never really connected to any of the characters, not even to the two heroes, Kickaha and Anana. And I got bored with reading about their struggles with the tribal peoples and began skipping those parts. Ditto their struggles with the mobile terrain. In the last part of the story, Anana and Kickaha build hang gliders and hot air balloons and we are told in detail how they do so. Descriptions of that process were about as interesting as reading a math problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment