Reviewed at SCI-FI weekly!
That fine man Paul di Filippo at SCI FI WEEKLY reviews Titans of Chaos and gives it good marks. Thank you, sir.
The money quote:
Science Fantasy is a blend that requires enormous skill to bring off. The author must mix the improbable with the probable, the fanciful with the hard-nosed, the rational with the supernatural. Luckily, John Wright is just the man for the job. In his first trilogy, The Golden Age, he proved he could write hard-core post-singularity SF. His next duology, War of the Dreaming, saw him crafting Hodgson/MacDonald-style fantasy. In this new series, he effortlessly blends the two.
Astute readers will detect flavors here of Philip K. Dick (the games with the nature of reality); A.E. van Vogt (the recomplicated shifting alliances); Roger Zelazny (the mythology mixed with contemporary slang); James Branch Cabell (the droll speech patterns of Boreas, the school’s headmaster); Clark Ashton Smith (the descriptions of otherworldly realms); A.A. Attanasio (the gnostic interplay between gods and humans); C.S. Lewis (the Narnia-style trope of teens with noble secret identities); and so forth and so forth, with more allusions that I’ve probably even overlooked.
This kind of homage-laden, deep-lineage fiction can get over-intellectual and stultifying in the wrong hands. But Wright keeps it fresh and sprightly, mainly thanks to never losing sight of the teenage high spirits of his protagonists, especially his perfect narrator, Amelia.
He has one or two minor criticisms:
Wright favors numinous Doctor Strange dimensions for much of the action. The arcane and necessarily incompletely adumbrated nature of these imaginary realms comes off second best to the scenes where the quintet mingle with humans amid concrete settings. A little more Thorne Smith and a bit less Steve Ditko would have gone a long way.
My Comment:
Authors should never, ever, ever argue with reviewers. Ever. Not ever. Especially a kind review like this, which failed to mention any of the obvious flaws of the book. Nope. Zipper the lip. Don’t say a thing. Nossir.
But, well, if you insist on me giving an opinion:
Is making something too much like the great Steve Ditko supposed to be a drawback in anyone’s mind? Ditko is my idol. In my eyes, this is tantamount to saying: “Well, Elizabeth Taylor is an attractive woman, but she looks a bit too much like Helen of Troy.”
Did I mention that the first ever comic book I read was DOCTOR STRANGE?
(Who is Thorne Smith?)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
