John DeNardo has posted a review of Alan Dean Fosters’ Sagramanda over on SFSignal. He gives the book four out of five stars, and praises it for its characters and action, though feels that it has too many plot threads running in parallel for too long. Overall, though, DeNardo seems to have liked it, as he proclaims Sagramanda a “wonderful depiction of Indian culture; fast-paced; entertaining characters and back stories; excellent finish.”
But what catches my eye is his concluding remarks that “the detached threads unite into a nail-biting, Tarantino-like finale.”
There is definitely a Pulp Fiction / Jackie Brown vibe to this techno-thriller. Talking about the amorality of the characters in Sagramanda, DeNardo says, “even though most of the characters were not quite likable, their stories were consistently and thoroughly entertaining.” Yes, exactly. And it occurs to me: could it be that mystery readers and the audiences for mystery/thriller/crime films are sometimes more comfortable with morally-ambiguous protagonists than science fiction and fantasy readers? The crime genre is full of bad people fighting worse people, and Sagramanda certainly shares attributes with the many Elmore Leonard novels and their ilk, where we root for the losers going for their one big score.