Lord of Sands of Time Fits 100,000+ Years into 198 Pages
So the story of Lord of Sands of Time, the other Haikasoru book available now, is about an army of androids fighting alien invaders with a lot of time traveling. Sounds familiar?
I think the two books are probably as different as so-called light novels can be. I’m not really sure if Lord (for short) is a light novel, but at any rate it doesn’t read like one. It reads like a dense, easy-to-read time traveling type science fiction. It is as easy reading as time traveling can be, I think.
It’s tight. It fits a lot of twists and turns, character development, good backstory to go with those characters, and a worthwhile plot for once. I think it’s tough to not find all that Lord offers enjoyable.
Which is to say if I’m going to nitpick the book, it would be from what is missing. For the sake of pacing and length, Lord does what many good anime does–creativity through recombination. You won’t find too many sentences dedicated to describe the science fictional landscaping, both what the eyes could see in an exotic world and what new science has brought upon the reader. What we’re left with are key words, familiar concepts, tropes and economy where extravagance might do better. I like this; spare me the long, wordy imagery that might or might not goad my imagination somewhere, while eating up my ever-dwindling attention span. At the same time some moments might be more epic than actually described, and it feels a bit too light and overly plot driven.
What was surprising, for me, was how much sense the way the story handles its parallel universes. It’s one of those things that is hard to do, yet doesn’t particularly lend itself to creative SF solutions. In the novel, it was achieved through…leaving it alone and later put together via its somewhat nonlinear narrative. “Resolution through plot” is probably not the best way to explain it, but works for me.
Lord also spared a lot of that cinematic framing that some might find enjoyable in All You Need Is Kill. It was mostly preoccupied in moving the scenes forward with some grand but simple description of the world, may it be ancient Japan or deep space. The description of the alien threat was rather sparse, too, leaving us mostly in the dark sans the functional aspects. Surely it is on purpose, but the reason why is unclear until after I gave it some thought after finish reading it.
Lord of Sands of Time gives us faceless invaders and generic time warps, perhaps, but these hard SF and anime visual cues made this relatively epic journey possible to be read in 3 hours. The end result is an intense trip that actually came close to feel like as if hundreds and thousands of years have gone past by the time you turned the last page. Through the way, the story retains enough thematic substance in its carefully-yet-quickly-weaved fabric to make you at least think about the big picture at the end, should we put on the brakes and take a breather at a familiar deus ex machina.
Compared to the Alastair Reynolds book I’m working on now, Lord of Sands of Time is totally “light novel” -class reading. And it is well. Don’t get hung up on the name; if you want a nice punch-out SF read and only got a few hours budgeted, this is a killer deal…if the $15 price tag doesn’t turn you off, that is.
I was curious about these books when they were first anounced, but then completely forgot about them. I really should pick one up, even if only to support more SF lit. I’d be interested to see your review of Revelation Space (personally, Chasm City is my favorite of Reynold’s stuff).
well, i probably won’t write a post for Revelation Space. I’m about 10% into the book and I really have no real opinion on the book. so it’s no guarantee that i’ll keep on reading more in the series…
Light novels are light, and that’s what I like about them. I usually skim posts on things I’m not familiar with because I kinda like reading books blind, but I’ll probably pick this up next time I’m on Amazon. Besides, I’ve read embarrassingly few SF novels anyway.
Me too, in terms of embarrassingly few SF novels read. But at the same time I think this is why I would be interested in SF light novels, as it adds something a lot of classic SF novels don’t have.