 |
Far-Seer | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Robert J. Sawyer | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Quintaglio Ascension | Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner | ||
Dinos rule! And I mean that literally, here, as sentient T-Rexes on another planet really do rule. The society portrayed is cery well designed. It's internally consistant and logical and deep. It's only at the 17th or maybe 16th century tech level, but that just makes things more intriguing.
The world of the Quintaglio is changed forever when an apprentice astronomer receives a new instrument. A far-seer, known to us as a telescope. (Which translates from latin as a far-seer, by the way.) What he discovers from this, and what he figures out from those discoveries, will literally shake their world. And I do mean literally.
This is a wonderful and unique story. Sawyer does a great job of building a new society that is actually influenced by megapredator instincts, something that most authors neglect to take into account. It's a believable one, too, as are the characters that roam around within it. Scenes are very well described, but not in such detail that the I got bored waiting for the actual action to resume. Nor was it written in such a way that the major revelation of the novel was telegraphed ahead of time. Readers will likely still get it before the characters, yes, but we have the benefits of a few hundred years of scientific thinking (and over a decade of schooling) to tell us what's about to be discovered. Most readers will figure things out exactly where Sawyer intended us to.
The technology is well done, also, what little there is of it. It wasn't hard to let myself believe these dinosaurs were operating a major sailing vessel.
The book, besides being an interesting story, is also a useful illustration of how massive discoveries can change societies, and how the early scientists on earth must have felt as they clashed with the church. Even if it wasn't a good tale, it'd still be worth reading for that alone.
| By Title | By Author | By Rank |