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Chris Wooding: Retribution Falls
Gollancz 2009
I expected to like this a lot and found I mostly liked it, but it didn't quite live up to the expectations from the blurbs on the book jackets which said: "A kind of old-fashioned adventure that I didn't think you were allowed to write anymore" and "The pace is furious, the action s full-screen, the style is sharp and polished..."
Well, mostly the pace is furious and mostly it is an old fashioned adventure and I like it a lot for that, but there are a few elements I'm not too sure about.
But first let me say I shouldn't carp too much. The setting is great. A none too clean world with lighter-than-air ships. (Not so much steampunk as airpunk with some added sorcery.) I enjoyed reading it, but I would have enjoyed it more if Frey – the antihero/hero – was a bit less of a cowardly, greedy whinger for most of the book. He does go from being ready to sacrifice the crew for his own ends, to being more or less responsible for them, but you still feel as though this is not a complete sea change. He still has a way to go before he becomes true hero material. Without losing any of their idiosyncrasies, the crew turns from a bunch of misfits, to a solid group of companions, but sometimes the changes, particularly Frey's, are telegraphed a bit too much and analysed. I'd have liked to have spotted it for myself rather than had it analysed on the page.
In some ways it reminded be of how Firefly might have turned out in hands less capable than Joss Whedon's.
I liked Frey's (many) mistakes, from the obvious one of letting himself be gulled into being the one who fired the shot which exploded the Prince's airship, to the way he'd totally let the relationship with his former fiancee collapse without having the guts to do something about it before panicking and running off, leaving her at the altar.
But give it its due, it fairly rolls along with Frey and his crew lurching from one near disaster to the next. They've all got a secret to hide and it becomes obvious that we're going to find those secrets one by one through the course of the plot. Frey is set up to take the fall for an airship explosion which, itself, was a cover up for a royal assassination. He has to find the person or persons behind the plot in order to save himself and his crew.
And speaking of crew: Crake, the sorcerer, with his golem, Bess, whose identity is his secret shame; Harkins and Pinn, pilots of the outflyers, one too terrified to come out of his craft, the other too cocky to have any fear at all; Malvery, the affable but drunken doctor; and Jez, the navigator who keeps on the move because of what she is, but who might finally have found a home. Malvery is a bit of a cliché, but Jez and Crake are interesting in their own right and I hope to see them develop in future outings.
Gollancz 2009
I expected to like this a lot and found I mostly liked it, but it didn't quite live up to the expectations from the blurbs on the book jackets which said: "A kind of old-fashioned adventure that I didn't think you were allowed to write anymore" and "The pace is furious, the action s full-screen, the style is sharp and polished..."
Well, mostly the pace is furious and mostly it is an old fashioned adventure and I like it a lot for that, but there are a few elements I'm not too sure about.
But first let me say I shouldn't carp too much. The setting is great. A none too clean world with lighter-than-air ships. (Not so much steampunk as airpunk with some added sorcery.) I enjoyed reading it, but I would have enjoyed it more if Frey – the antihero/hero – was a bit less of a cowardly, greedy whinger for most of the book. He does go from being ready to sacrifice the crew for his own ends, to being more or less responsible for them, but you still feel as though this is not a complete sea change. He still has a way to go before he becomes true hero material. Without losing any of their idiosyncrasies, the crew turns from a bunch of misfits, to a solid group of companions, but sometimes the changes, particularly Frey's, are telegraphed a bit too much and analysed. I'd have liked to have spotted it for myself rather than had it analysed on the page.
In some ways it reminded be of how Firefly might have turned out in hands less capable than Joss Whedon's.
I liked Frey's (many) mistakes, from the obvious one of letting himself be gulled into being the one who fired the shot which exploded the Prince's airship, to the way he'd totally let the relationship with his former fiancee collapse without having the guts to do something about it before panicking and running off, leaving her at the altar.
But give it its due, it fairly rolls along with Frey and his crew lurching from one near disaster to the next. They've all got a secret to hide and it becomes obvious that we're going to find those secrets one by one through the course of the plot. Frey is set up to take the fall for an airship explosion which, itself, was a cover up for a royal assassination. He has to find the person or persons behind the plot in order to save himself and his crew.
And speaking of crew: Crake, the sorcerer, with his golem, Bess, whose identity is his secret shame; Harkins and Pinn, pilots of the outflyers, one too terrified to come out of his craft, the other too cocky to have any fear at all; Malvery, the affable but drunken doctor; and Jez, the navigator who keeps on the move because of what she is, but who might finally have found a home. Malvery is a bit of a cliché, but Jez and Crake are interesting in their own right and I hope to see them develop in future outings.
