Subject: Review: _Black Sun Rising_, C.S. Friedman

From: [email-masked] (L. P. Burka)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 1994 18:56:50 GMT

[Spoilers:  There's probably one in here somewhere.]

I didn't like this book.

This isn't to say it's a bad book--someone liked it enough to
recommend it to me, and it has an interesting premise, even if the
execution is somewhat poor.  The book is just sort of lame.  The dark
and enticing Michael Whelan cover pic just makes it that much more
disappointing. 

The premise of _Black Sun Rising_ is that a cold-sleep colony ship
landed upon the planet Erna about 1200 years ago.  The planet is
convulsed by seismic activity and occult energies that the colonists
call the _fae_.  These energies may be shaped by by those who are born
with or acquire through study the talents to direct its fickle powers.
The fae is useful to augment technological devices as well (in this,
the book resembles _The Practice Effect_ by Brin).  However, the fae
is also responsive to human fears.  A sorcerer who isn't sufficiently
focused, or who has doubts, may cause this turmoil to manifest as
physical demons that need to be hunted down and killed.  Over 1200
years, the planet has acquired lots of demons, as well as gods, benign
or malevolent.  Large-scale attempts to tame the fae have tended to
backfire, and some of the humans who tried it became nastier than
anything they fought.  The kinds of fae most responsive to demonic
fallout are also the most sensitive to sunlight, so they are only
thick enough to be dangerous in the dark, when the sun, the galactic
core, and the three moons aren't overhead to disperse them.

Now let's cut to the chase.  What didn't I like about this book?

For one, the characters are uninteresting.  There isn't much
distinction between their voices, though they each have separate
passions (or lusts).  In fact, I keep getting the feeling that the
characters were supposed to be in a rehashed Viet Nam screenplay and
got lost on the way over.  When the author attempts to subject the
characters to the pains and sufferings, physical and spiritual, that
are supposed to provide 'growth' (and incidentally titillate those of us
who like reading bloodthirsty, sadistic stuff), the tortures don't
come across as pruriently interesting, sensual or disturbing, only
repetitive.  The characters aren't solid enough to bleed convincingly.

The dialog is also repetitive, to the point that I kept wondering if
the author accidentally leaned on the cut and paste button a few times
and dropped the same anguished philosophical debates subsequent pages
without noticing.  This may also be a sign of poor editing.
[Incidentally, I found one obvious typo, 'then' for 'than.'  I suppose
one typo in 600 pages is pretty good, but by then I was disenchanted
enough to want to nit-pick about it.] 

Even the curses are lame: 

	"The Hunter can take his Forest and shove it," Damien said
sharply, "How do we get to this black fortress of his?"
	They were silent for a moment, stunned by the force of the
blasphemy.  

They're stunned.  I'm bored.  The prose style is also buried in
gratuitous adverbs, and Friedman suffers from that deadly disease of
science fiction writers everywhere, namely the use of earth technology
terms and metaphors that mesh poorly with the pseudo-renaissance
atmosphere.  In 1200 years, the colonists should be able to come up
with something else.  For most of the last 1/3 of the book, I was
reading the first sentence of every paragraph and skipping the rest,
and I don't think I missed anything important.

I would like to address some annoying structural flaws.  Interesting
characters that appear at the beginning and look like they're going to
be significant don't show up again.  One of the big villains of the
piece doesn't turn out to be anyone we know already, and doesn't have
a personality beyond villainy.  Important issues are left unresolved.
We know this is because the author must be planning a sequel, but I
keep wondering if clumsiness is the real cause of these flaws.  And if
this is sequel fever, it takes a lot of responsibility for the weak
ending.

OK, so I finished it.  Maybe now I'll go throw it across the room.

%A      Friedman, C. S.
%T      Black Sun Rising
%I      DAW
%C      New York
%D      1991
%G      ISBN 0-88677-527-2
%P      586pp
%O      $5.99