Matt Brady's Reviews > Lamentation

Lamentation by Ken Scholes
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it was ok
bookshelves: read-in-2013, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi

Many thousands of years into the future, on an Earth scarred and fractured by multiple apocalypses, stands Windwir, greatest city of the Named Lands. Home to a powerful order of scholar-priests, Windwir gathers knowledge of the old world destroyed two millennia ago according the precepts of their mythological founder. But when Windwir itself is destroyed in a matter of minutes, the light of knowledge threatens to gutter, and all of the Named Lands, a civilisation built from the ruins of near-extinction, are dragged into war.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Lamentation at all. I can’t say it’s a bad book, and it certainly has it’s virtues. The plot rockets along at a really fast pace, and the world is somewhat intriguing. The magic(k) system is cool. The writing is very clear and easy to understand, something a lot of fantasy often struggles with. There’s plenty of action. But it all feels a little too simple. There isn’t any depth here, not with the characters, not with the setting, not with anything. Scholes typically delivers the information he wants the reader to know – this character is smart, that one is evil, this battle happened – and then moves on to the next thing. A perfect example of this is the Ninefold Forest Houses, a group of disparate towns united under one ruler. What are the names of these towns? The ninth manor. The seventh manor. And so on. That alone isn’t something that I’d get hung up on, but there’s a similar lack of ambition throughout the novel. Nothing really sticks, everything is broad strokes. It was never a chore to read, but it never once grabbed my attention, either.

Also this book committed a cardinal sin for me – CRYING ROBOTS. There’s a crying robot in this book. They call him/it a “mechoservitor” but it’s a robot. And it cries. A lot. There are few sci-fi concepts that annoy me more than emo goddamn robots. Give me killer robots. Give me smartass robots. Give me prissy English butler robots. Give me anything other than crying robots. I really, really, really hate crying robots. Especially when they cry as much as this one. You have a robot and out of all the cool awesome shit it could do, you have it act like a whiney teenager? Goddamit.

I’d be willing to check out the next book and see if there’s any improvement, because there is some promise here and because I’ve really enjoyed Scholes short fiction, but Lamentation itself was a bit of a disappointment.
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Reading Progress

May 3, 2013 – Started Reading
May 3, 2013 – Shelved as: to-read
May 3, 2013 – Shelved
May 5, 2013 –
12.0% "Intriguing setting so far. Characters are a little dull but it's early days."
May 7, 2013 –
24.0%
May 8, 2013 –
56.0% "I wish the goddamn robot would stop crying and start smashing stuff."
May 9, 2013 –
78.0%
May 10, 2013 – Finished Reading
July 4, 2013 – Shelved as: read-in-2013
February 8, 2014 – Shelved as: fantasy
February 8, 2014 – Shelved as: post-apocalyptic
February 8, 2014 – Shelved as: sci-fi

Comments Showing 1-4 of 4 (4 new)

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message 1: by sologdin (new)

sologdin is there a lot of weepy robot books out there?


Matt Brady I can only think of examples from comic books right now (Vision, Red Tornado) but I feel like it's a common trope in science fiction when you want to show a robot becoming "human"


message 3: by sologdin (new)

sologdin dude on star trek, yeah.


message 4: by Jan-Maat (new)

Jan-Maat Crying robots, urrgh. If you wanted a human you would have a human, not a robot and then programme it to be human like - what a waste of effort! Just employ a crying person in the first place.


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