Where's the farm orphan going on an adventure with his crush? Anyway, my book club picked this book I voted against it , so back I went to 90s bad guy land. I liked it more than the first time. There are some clever things with the city and the magic. And as proto-grimdark I appreciate what this did for its time. But it's so so 90s, with huge exposition dumps, weird stifled gender politics, weak religious politics, old white men with too much power, workin' parents sacrificing their kids for magic, etc etc.
Overall, if you want that old 90s fantasy vibe, there are much better picks but this is solid enough. Also, let me know if the author was secretly a monster like we now know many of the 90s fantasy writers were. View 2 comments. Aug 25, Stephen rated it it was amazing Shelves: science-fantasy , sf-alien-planets-and-societies.
Friedman is one of my favorite authors and I have never read one of her books that I haven't loved. I am in the process of re-reading her books after first reading them many years ago and I started with this one. The first book of the "Coldfire" trilogy, this book takes place on the planet Erna which was colonized by people from Earth over a thousand years ago. When the colonist first landed on Erna, they discovered the "Fae" which is a natural force that causes the though 5.
When the colonist first landed on Erna, they discovered the "Fae" which is a natural force that causes the thoughts of people conscious, subconscious and unconscious to manifest themselves physically. Thus the initial colonists were almost completely wiped out by creatures created by the Fae out of their darkest nightmares. Now, years later, the survivors live in a medieval like society where sorcerers and adepts help keep the Fae at bay. This concept of the Fae and its power to make manifest the thoughts of humans was fascinating and got me hooked on the story right away.
This is epic science fantasy at its best. Highest Possible Recommendation!!! View all 12 comments. Sep 04, Ivan rated it really liked it Shelves: fantasy , sci-fi. On second read my opinion remains mostly unchanged so does original review with exception of fixing errors I couldn't be bothered to do first time around This was great.
Main plot has been seen many times. Fellowship travels to the hearth of darkness for good cause, in this case to restore hot sorceress power.
Their travel will take them across Erna, planet who's creatures and natural laws are shaped but it's inhabitants both conscious and subconscious mind. Erna itself is biggest reason for my hi On second read my opinion remains mostly unchanged so does original review with exception of fixing errors I couldn't be bothered to do first time around This was great.
Erna itself is biggest reason for my high rating as it's one of most fascinating setting I came across. While this book is technically sci-fi Erna is colonized planet book mostly plays out like heroic fantasy, in that way it reminds me a bit of first Dune book. One big annoyance is above mentioned hot sorceress. She starts as sassy badass but as soon as she losses her power she turns into frightened damsel and becomes very annoying for the rest of the book.
She isn't annoying as some female characters in heroic fantasy can be like Vin, Ce'Nedra, Nynaeve but next to interesting fairly well flashed out characters like the priest Damian, Hunter and my favorite pleasure demon she really sticks out. Jan 04, Ben Johnson rated it it was ok. Black Sun Rising is a brilliant setting with a mediocre story. The novel sets up a variety of interesting themes but concludes its bloated story with cliches, a disappointment given the great world-crafting o Black Sun Rising is a brilliant setting with a mediocre story.
The novel sets up a variety of interesting themes but concludes its bloated story with cliches, a disappointment given the great world-crafting of C. Black Sun Rising takes place on Erna, a planet whose original human colonists were driven back to the dark ages by the mysterious energy known as the Fae.
Many humans have learned to Work it for their own uses and a few, known as Adepts, are born with the ability to both see and control the Fae effortlessly.
Ciani is one of these Adepts, but she loses her powers in an attack by a mysterious group of demons for a somewhat poorly explained reason. These three characters are all fairly one dimensional: Damien clings to black and white morality, Ciani has a thirst for knowledge that precludes morality, and Senzei just wants to be powerful. However, they are joined by a much more interesting person: Gerald Tarrant, Fae-vampire. However, the Church eventually damned all sorcerers, and so after death he will go to a hell that he has literally created from the Fae.
To avoid this, he murders his family to make a pact with ambiguous dark forces that grants him eternal life and devastating powers in exchange for life as a literary cliche. Damien hates Tarrant with a religious passion but needs him as a weapon in his quest to help Ciani. He is forced to compromise his stark moral judgments, and enters areas of gray morality kicking and screaming.
Likewise, the narrative needs Tarrant as a foil for the relatively simple characters to play off of, and as the only interesting character in the story. But as the story develops Tarrant loses his mystique. He becomes more and more Dracula as his nature is explained, and the instances in which his powers are limited in order to generate tension feel contrived.
Tarrant preserves his grip on what little humanity he has left by clinging to a personal sense of honor; he is the Honest Abe of vampires, for he will not tell a lie or go back on his word. His adherence to his self-imposed code is the primary way that the narrative justifies his involvement with Damien and his companions, but this mostly feels artificial.
At one point in the story Tarrant is badly hurt and needs to drink blood in order to heal himself. He has also sworn not to hurt Ciani. Hence the awkwardly contrived predicament. I say, make him drink her blood. Make him go crazy and attack her. Kill her, for all I care like all the other characters, Ciani not especially likable. It feels more cheap substitute than effective strategy. Certainly the characters develop and change, but it could have been accomplished in a more efficient and effective way.
As might be apparent from the preceding paragraphs, I enjoyed the set-up for this novel but was let down by the execution. The book primarily deals with the cliched theme of the corrupting influence of power, and near the end the book becomes almost pedagogical in this regard. Where is the division between humanity and ecology when nature can manifest human fears and desires, and when evolution is driven by human perception?
I want an evil character who stays evil. I want Damien driven to the brink of insanity, maybe over the edge, and then I want to see how he responds. With Black Sun Rising, author C. Friedman transports us into a world of darkness, where your fears can manifest themselves to haunt and hunt you. Erna is a planet humans from earth reached via spacship and settled onto.
This sounds like SF, but is just a backdrop for a dark fantasy novel. The society wasn't able to hold up to the level of progress of a spacefaring people. So, the atmosphere is more of a gothic victorian world.
Think Bram Stoker's Dracula and you have a good picture. Eevryday life is affected by eartquakes, that are way more frequent than on our planet, the cycle of three moons and the omni-present earth-fae, particle-like creatures that can be manipulated to do magic. But the darkness is not only invoked by the setting, it comes right down to the characters.
There is Reverend Damien Vryce, whose love for the adept Ciani will bring him to the point, where he has to ask himself how far he is willing to go to help Ciani in regaining her memory that was taken by a demon. Ciani herself has to struggle with the loss of her power and memory and needs to find a way to go on. Then there is Senzi, Ciani's business partner and friend, who longs to have power comparable to Ciani's. And finally we have Tarrant, the dark Hunter with the mysterious past and a vast amount of power.
All of those are being confronted by one question: How far will you go to fullfill your deepest desire? The answers to this question is what makes this book so dark and bittersweet. I enjoyed this book a lot, although there were a few dragging parts I could have done without.
The book ends in a good place and provides a glimpse of what to expect in the next installment. This was a rather strange book. It is a fantasy story that has a basis in sci-fi. What do I mean? The story takes place on the planet of Erna. Humans had colonized Erna during the Space travel age. But, Erna was a strange world. The fey, magic, is powerful here. People's nightmares or dreams can come alive. This led to the destruction of the technology and now, thousands of years later, man uses the fey.
But it is an uneasy relationship. The fey creates dark forces and feeds on humans. Some huma This was a rather strange book. Some humans, Adpets, can channel the Fey.
But the story starts with the dark tale of the Neocount. A brilliant and learned man, called the "Prophet" by the Church, had fallen to the darkness. Into this we are introduced to Damien Vryce, a holy warrior of the Church, who has come to the Patriarch for a special mission. In time he will meet a beautiful Adept, Ciani, who will be attacked by one of these demons. Vryce must join forces with the dark forces of the Hunter to try to win back Ciani's memories. No more spoilers.
A very strange story that ends up being rather good. I really loved the anti-hero nature of The Hunter. By far one of the best characters. The Neocounts intentions, as well as his dark sense of honor, make him a superb character. The story is complex and the way in which the fey works is rather well done. A very interesting world and a rather unique outlook for a fantasy setting. At some point, I shall have to pick up the second book of this series-primarily to find out what The Hunter is up too.
It has an interesting "world system". I don't think the term "magic system works well here as it all has to do with the planet or world on which the action takes place. To say more would of course entail spoilers. This book might be more accurately called "science fantasy" rather than epic or high fantasy as it's built around the assumption of an e Okay This book might be more accurately called "science fantasy" rather than epic or high fantasy as it's built around the assumption of an earth colony that arrived on this planet and then had to deal with the forces on and of the world of Erna that they were in no way equiped to understand or handle.
I found this book at times to be of the "neither fish nor fowl" variety to some extent. I liked the idea s that it's built on and the world building though I'm not sure the introduction to this world and it's specialness was done all that well. It's an attempt to inculcate the needed details into the narrative without doing a lot of plot exposition atop the storyline, plot and dialogue. A good way to do things when it works.
A great deal of the plot is that humans are "still after all this time" trying to understand and learn to work with the plant's forces.
I found that while I got to know the people in this book the only one I really "liked" all that much was the priest Damien. I was never drawn into the "feeling" I think I was supposed to have for the others. This was the third time I'd set out to read this book.
On both prior occasions I laid it down and got involved in reading other things and just, never got back to it. I'm always into more than one books at a time and , true to what happened before I got into a few others and this one just didn't "cry out to me" to get back to it. I did as we are reading it in a group and as I said, it's "pretty good".
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Loved each and every part of this book. So her latest is for anyone who cares for its kind of quest-romance. Hauntingly memorable protagonists, high drama, and vivid world-building mark the beginning of what promises to be a magnum opus of the imagination.
A priority purchase for fantasy or sf collections. The style is lyric and fanciful, with arresting imagery…classic high fantasy. On Phaze, he must master magic to survive. And if he used any magic at all, his friends were determined to kill him at once!
By: Piers Anthony. Surrounded by secrecy, it is home to the wildest dreams and darkest nightmares. Incredible amounts of money have been lavished on it. The best minds of two generations have labored to build it.
And somehow, bit by bit, it is claiming the Earth's most valuable resource - its children. By: Tad Williams. Once a member of the king's personal guard, Guillot dal Villevauvais spends most days drinking and mourning his wife and child. He and the Prince Bishop have never exactly been friends, and Gill left the capital in disgrace five years ago.
So why him? And, more importantly, how is there a dragon to fight when the beasts were hunted to extinction centuries ago by the ancient Chevaliers of the Silver Circle? By: Duncan M. On Earth, Hari Michaelson was a superstar. But on Overworld, he was the assassin Caine. Real monarchs lived and died at his hands and entire governments were overthrown But now Hari, stripped of his identity as Caine, must fight his greatest battle: against the powerful corporate masters of Earth and the faceless masses who are killing everything he loves.
The first book in C. Cherryh's eponymous series, Foreigner begins an epic tale of the survivors of a lost spacecraft who crash-land on a planet inhabited by a hostile, sentient alien race. From its beginnings as a human-alien story of first contact, the Foreigner series has become a true science fiction odyssey, following a civilization from the age of steam through early space flight to confrontations with other alien species in distant sectors of space.
It is the masterwork of a truly remarkable author. The Left Hand of God is the story of year-old Thomas Cale, who has grown up imprisoned at the Sanctuary of the Redeemers, a fortress run by a secretive sect of warrior monks in a distant, dystopian past. He is one of thousands of boys who train all day in hand-to-hand combat, in preparation for a holy war that only the High Priests know is now imminent. By: Paul Hoffman. Mountain of Black Glass is the third volume of Tad Williams 's highly acclaimed four-book series, Otherland.
A truly unique reading experience combining elements of science fiction, fantasy, and techno-thriller, it is a rich epic tale in which virtual reality could prove the key to a whole new universe of possibilities for the entire human race - or become the exclusive domain of the rich and the ruthless as they seek a technological pathway to immortality.
High in the Snowflake Mountains sits the Edificant Library, a place of scholarly study for priests, bards, and others. Now from the hidden vaults beneath the library a devastating curse is unleashed, and a young cleric must battle the terrifying creatures set loose by a malevolent, consuming essence that's been released, before his own brethren turn against him.
Cadderly must put his studies to the test and enter the catacombs far below to save his brothers and himself. By: R. In many ways it is humankind's most stunning achievement: a private, multidimensional universe built over two generations by the greatest minds of the twenty-first century.
But this most exclusive of places is also one of the world's best kept secrets, created and controlled by an organization made up of the world's most powerful and ruthless individuals, a private cartel known - to those who know of their existence at all - as The Grail Brotherhood. In the wake of the Storm King's fall, Ineluki's loyal minions, the Norns, dark cousins to the Sithi, choose to flee the lands of men and retreat north to Nakkiga, their ancient citadel within the hollow heart of the mountain called Stormspike.
But as the defeated Norns make their way to this last haven, the mortal Rimmersman Duke Isgrimnur leads an army in pursuit, determined to end the Norns' attacks and defeat their ageless Queen Utuk'ku for all time.
The beautiful planet Pern seemed a paradise to its new colonists - until unimaginable terror turned it into hell. Suddenly deadly spores were falling like silver threads from the sky, devouring everything - and everyone - in their path. It began to look as if the colony, cut off from Earth and lacking the resources to combat the menace, was doomed.
By: Anne McCaffrey. The once-utopian Chasm City - a domed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planethas been overrun by a virus known as the Melding Plague, capable of infecting any body, organic or computerized.
Now, with the entire city corrupted - from the people to the very buildings they inhabitonly the most wretched sort of existence remains. The stakes are raised when Tanner Mirabel's search brings him face to face with a centuries-old atrocity that history would rather forget. By: Alastair Reynolds. Kamala, a peasant woman, has claimed the powerful sorcery of the Magisters - the ability to draw on the power of the human soul without dying for it- as her own.
But in her rise to power, she finds herself hunted by the brotherhood, and flees to a land where spells are warped by a fatal curse. It is a land that even Magisters fear. Caine is washed up and hung out to dry, a crippled husk kept isolated and restrained by the studio that exploited him. Now they have dragged him back for one last deal.
But Caine has other plans. Those plans take him back to Overworld, the alternate reality where gods are real and magic is the ultimate weapon.
There, in a violent odyssey through time and space, Caine will face the demons of his past, find true love, and just possibly destroy the universe. The Coldfire trilogy tells a story of discovery and battle against evil on a planet where a force of nature exists that is capable of reshaping the world in response to psychic stimulus.
This terrifying force, much like magic, has the power to prey upon the human mind, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams, and indiscriminately giving them life.
This is the story of two men: one, a warrior priest ready to sacrifice anything and everything for the cause of humanity's progress; the other, a sorcerer who has survived for countless centuries by a total submission to evil. They are absolute enemies who must unite to conquer an evil greater than anything their world has ever known. There is nothing like a great fantasy series, one that invites you to bring yourself into an inventive world unlike our own.
And a masterful fantasy audiobook can further enhance that feeling, taking an engaging reading experience and amping it up to the realm of total immersion. Marked by brilliant narration and perfect character voices, a stellar audiobook series takes an already amazing fantasy saga and transforms it into an unforgettable adventure. The story took me by surprise in that I was not expecting a 'new' spin on such a controversial subject: Religion.
You have a group of colonists effectively stranded at the outer edge of the universe on a planet that literally takes their hopes and fears and make them real.
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