I was also particularly impressed with the way Wooding handled Frey who, when the novel opens, is a bit of an ass. Wooding does a wonderful job of drawing out the mystery of exactly who she is, dropping hints here and there in a trail of bread crumbs that inevitably leads to a big payoff. Jez, the navigator and newest member of the crew, in particular drew me in early with the mystery behind her origins.
Similarities asside Woodings characters are their own people with deep, frequently tragic, pasts who each get their moment to shine and whose growth and confrontations with their own histories provides a certain amount of emotional weight to what might have been a simple adventure tale. You also have a mysterious race of human like raiders who exist on the outskirts of the known world who are feared for their ferocity and inhuman capacity for violence and slaughter that are most definatley analagous to Reavers. In particular the Frey/Crake relationship is very, very similar to the Mal/Simon relationship and Crake himself, a fallen/disgraced son of an aristocrat on the run from something, is very much in the vein of everyone’s favorite surgeon. There are plenty of difference mind you but, for Browncoats, the parallels are there in spades not only in the obvious thematic overtones but in certain similarities between characters. I think almost every review of Retribution Falls out there has mentioned the similarity and frequent similarities to everyone’s favorite short-lived space western. Retribution Falls isn’t a novel that is going to cause major introspection but what it will due is take you on damned fine adventure that’ll have you laughing, cheering, and cursing at each twist and turn. Unfortunatley for Frey, and the rest of the Ketty Jay, things go horribly awry and the hapless crew finds themselve pursued from all quarters. Frey, who cares more about his ship than the lives of his crew, takes a job offer to rob a loaded airship and has every intention of keeping the money to himself crew be damned. Darrian Frey is the “captain” of the Ketty Jay, an airship whose crew of malcontents and rejects barely scrapes by doing odd-bits of mostly illegitimate work. The results are something like Chris Wooding’s Retribution Falls.
Take one part Firefly, one part steampunk, one part magic and shake it all up.
Orion UK, 2009 (Surprise, no US date that I’ve seen)
0 kommentar(er)
