Larry Ketchersid really likes Here, There & Everywhere,
“Chris Roberson is a fellow Texas author whom I have not yet met. I will soon seek him out and buy him a Shiner and a Tequila to discuss this and his other novels. I am always impressed when a writer pens something that is so obviously outside of their experience, and for Mr. Roberson to write from the perspective of Roxanne Bonaventure as a young girl, teen, moving through the other stages of womanhood, takes excellent powers of observation.”
Great review. I may have to pick this one up.
If you do, I can’t guarantee you won’t be hooked. All Chris’s worlds share characters, so you can’t eat just one…
Lou, I like your analogy of Chris “channeling his inner teenage girl”. I wonder what Chris thinks?
And Angela, thanks for your comments on my review. Chris’ book is quite enjoyable, very escapist.
Larry
Hey Larry – Chris does it again in a novel we’re bringing out from him in late 2008, but while you wait, he’s still got Paragaea and Set the Seas on Fire out now.
I just received Set the Seas on Fire from Solaris. Definitely looking forward to it.
Please let me know what you think. I haven’t received mine yet (though one is on the way) so I haven’t read it. I think that with Chris, it takes a book or two to see what he’s doing, and then suddenly the patterns and connections start to come together. I suspect that his next Solaris book, The Dragon’s Nine Sons is the one that breaks him out to a wider readership, as it’s a kick-ass alternate history space opera with Aztecs on Mars and it’s packaged to look like a Peter Hamilton book. I haven’t read that yet either, but am dying too, as I’ve read most of the Celestial Empire shorts and novellas that preceded it. (I bought the first one and had a hand in the PS Publishing novella as well.) I’m holding onto End of the Century till his gotten a few more novels on the shelf, because it’s sort of a “Rosetta Stone” of his Myriad (as well as being the equal in scope to something like Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, which which it coincidentally shares elements of structure, plot, and scene – there was something in the zeitgeist, I tell you.) Anyway, Chris needs to have enough of his body of work out there that when End of the Century hits, readers can rush off on and explore all the little tangents as they open up and expand in other novels. I do think that EofC stands alone, and for people coming fresh, they can read it in the same way that you read something like Alan Moore’s brillaint Tom Strong series, in the sense that Tom Strong is presented “as if” it’s had a century of continuity from issue one. In Roberson’s case, there is this wealth of continuity, some published, and some still to come, and I want to get enough of it on the shelf before bringing out his Rosetta Stone. I suspect, too, that Roberson would do really well in comic books and in animation (I’m thinking something like the underappreciated Gargoyles).