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Review
‘Zindell is adept at conjuring the history and mechanics of a fantasy world’ DeathRay
Praise for The Ea Cycle:
‘Vividly imaginative and truly grand’ Time Out
‘An engrossing read from a great storyteller’ SFX
‘Captivating’ Bookseller
‘No one casts a better spell than Zindell’ Northern Echo
‘Remarkable for scale, ambition and a capacity to evoke sinister beauty … with the inherent strengths of mythic structure, bringing to the tale a sense of urgency and spiritual depth … heroism is not just heroic acts but an emotional space that goes with the acquisition of doomed love and mortal enemies. This is an impressive start to an interesting cycle.’ Roz Kaveney AMAZON
‘Every so often a novel comes along that threatens to redefine its genre. The Lightstone is such a novel … Zindell re-imagines the epic on a grand scale … The Lightstone shines brightly ’ DREAMWATCH
‘David Zindell’s words are like magic, which manage to capture the tiniest nuances of his landscapes and characters and bring them to life … If you want something that will make you think, that touches on elements of spirituality and philosophy and the fine lines between good and evil then The Lightstone is a winner’ WHSMITH.CO.UK
Product Description
From the author of ‘Neverness’ comes a powerful epic fantasy series, the Ea Cycle, as rich as Tolkien and as magical as the Arthurian myths. This is the climactic final volume.
The world of Ea is an ancient world settled in eons past by the Star People. However, their ancestors floundered in their purpose to create a great stellar civilisation on the new planet: they fell into moral decay.
Now a champion has been born who will lead them back to greatness, by means of a spiritual – and adventurous – quest for Ea’s Grail: the Lightstone.
His name is Valashu Elahad, and he is destined to become King. Blessed (or cursed?) with an empathy for all living things, he will lead his people into the lands of Morjin, into the heart of darkness, wielding a magical sword called Alkadadur, there to recover the mythical Lightstone and return in triumph with his prize.
But Morjin is not to be vanquished so easily…
This is the fourth and final volume of the epic Ea Cycle. The battle will be fought, mysteries unravelled, the courage of Valashu tested to its limit. The reason the Valari came to Ea from the stars will be made known.
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Customer Reviews
His Lightstone novels? They have been a sad case of diminishing returns. The opening book (Lightstone) was at least a nicely written entertainment. Yes its characters felt like knock offs from Zindell's earlier works and the plot felt too mechanical (a quest to get magic stones to confront the greatest of evils (hmmm I'm sure I've seen that in final fantasy 1-6)) but the writing was so good that for most of the long sweep of that epic I could forget these short comings and simply enjoy what I was reading. However with each successive volume it became clear that Zindell was bereft of any good or new ideas of how to continue the story. By this final one I have to admit much of what I'm reading feels like outright plagiarism. I've little doubt that his apologists will tell me that the plot elements and conceits lifted directly from Lord of the Rings are meant to be an homage to that work. I don't buy it. I'd have taken that as a reasonable view when discussing the similarity of the character of Bardo in the Neverness to Shakespeare's Falstaff, but this is going way too far for me to be so easily accepting.
As I say this is all a real pity because Zindell can write and write beautifully. He has a rare gift for truly gorgeous prose. I hope he writes again, and will read whatever he publishes, but I'm fearful that what was once the brightest talent in the speculative firmament has now burnt out.
The Neverness series rates amongst the best SciFi I have ever read and whilst I would happily reccommend the Ea Cycle series as a good read, its not really in the same league as his earlier work.
That aside, The Diamond Warriors completes Zindell's Ea Cycle, one of the very few fantasy series to deal explicitly and implicitly with themes of a spiritual nature in any depth or profundity. The cosmic-spiritual context of the Ea Cycle is exquisitely wrought and literally dwarfs most fantasy milieus, avoiding the usual extremes of the Scylla and Charybdis of modern fantasy: conventional cliche or unconventional novelty. The former ends up being a juiceless formula, the "same old, same old" of tired post-Tolkien elves-and-dragons fantasy; the latter tries so hard to be "avante garde" that it ends up being a superficial cliche in its own right, an instance of its own complaint.
While Zindell as an author may be unparalleled in the field in terms of depth of consciousness, the Ea Cycle as a story falls short of the upper echelon of modern epic fantasy classics such as Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen or George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice. Put the Ea Cycle in the next tier down with R. Scott Bakker and Robert Jordan.
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