The Burning City [Paperback]

Tep's Town is a structured community in the Los Angeles Basin. There are Lords at the top, Lordkin in a vague middle and the kinless at the bottom. The kinless wear a rope noose [to indicate the possibility of lynching for disobedience?] around their necks as a sign of their status. They haul the water, cut the wood and provide just about everything the Lordkin wish. The Lordkin "gather" a term translated in the book as "steal" - "confiscate" would do as well. What has held such a chaotic society together long enough to build towns and trade routes remains unexplained.

One Lordkin, Whandall Placehold ["freeman", one presumes], is a "street-smart" kid who accidentally visits an aristocrat's home. He almost falls in love, but his hormones aren't yet up to the task - he's only nine. Still, the event provides Whandall with a new view of that element of society. He gains greater insight into the bottom rung, as well. Especially when he encounters "the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen".... She's ensconced in a hidden compartment of a wagon with other kids, road dust and certainly the excrement of their extended journey. That condition is blithely ignored - by the authors and Whandall alike, leaving our Hero smitten, but not besmirched. His olfactory powers being minimal, his magical powers are correspondingly ample. He has a god, Yagen-Atep, at his call. Y-A is hot stuff - and Whandall can fire up whole communities with his spirit.

The resulting conflagration sends Whandall, along with his nubile, but unconsummated love, on the road. Giving up his life of privileged idleness, Whandall follows the trade routes and expands his knowledge and experience. Keeping his pyromaniacal deity at bay, he takes up a quest imparted by a wizard, Morth. That this wizard is from Atlantis is one of the more jarring notes in this book. We have The Ice, redwoods in LA because the Times reported them, and a greenhouse-full of obnoxious plants. But, "Atlantis"?? Morth, anticipating later reality, succumbs to "gold fever" a la the Forty-Niners, but the gold is magic and the "fever" the madness of possessing its power. Is that power on the wane? is the big question here, and Whandall, as a protagonist, struggles to find out.

There are worse fantasy books than this one, but not much. The authors, who have excellent SF and "real world" credentials, seem to have tried to incorporate too much from both here. The mixture is a marginal success because their prose skills are highest quality. They've tried to break from traditional [i.e., Tolkienesque] fantasy, but it doesn't quite work. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada] Read more ›