|
5.0étoiles sur 5
One of the Best Military SF Series Ever, Oct. 25 2002
This book is the first in a series of 5 books that depict a planet (Bellevue) with a human civilisation that has fallen back from a star spanning empire to preindustrial levels, roughly circa US prior to its Civil War. David Drake furnished the outline, which was laid flesh by Steve Stirling. The books are superbly written, with a plausible, complicated neo-feudal world. You can feel the dust in the air and the sweat on the skin as General Raj's soldiers trudge to battle; and thence the stench of gunpowder and voided bowels as the casualties mounted in battle. Sometimes, between battles, there are jarring scenes as people who transgress an autocrat's law are enslaved, along with their entire families. While the level of technology is roughly Civil War America, imagine instead an America where you did not have to be Negro to be a slave, and there was no restriction on a ruler's power. Where the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man is unknown. The society is closer to that of Imperial Rome. No coincidence. The hero, Raj, is modelled on Belisarius, the Byzantine general. There are lighter moments. The state religion is a worship of Computers (explicitly capitalised), based on a fragmented recollection of their power, prior to the nuclear war that brought down the earlier civilisation. Priests can be female. Fierce theological disputes arise over different interpretations of surviving computer manuals. Which were probably untelligible to begin with, anyway. Those of you who have read Byzantine history can see echoes of the nitpicking arguments that split early Christianity; arguments utterly meaningless to those outside a narrow frame of reference. Oh, speaking of Christians, here they are like Jews; an unloved minority. But there are plenty of Muslims. In fact, they are the other Great Power on Bellevue. The series revolves around the two Powers confronting each other, to decide the fate of the planet. Before you read this series, I urge that you do a quick scan of Belisarius in a good dictionary. You will get more from the series this way. The biggest problem about this series is that it is hard to find in its entirety in a bookstore. You may have to scrounge in used bookstores. It doesn't appear to have been reprinted recently.
|
