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Chess gives us Hel's summaries, rather than raw text from the fictional Pyronauts, but she's invented a book that feels like it should exist, and could have been written in a slightly different 1920.Īfter finishing My Hero Academia, one of my coworkers recommended I try Avatar, and I'm glad she did! If I had known how much I'd like Avatar earlier, I too might have contributed to the wildly successful Kickstarter. The titular pyronauts, of this book within a book, are men dressed in environment suits, armed with flamethrowers, who burn away the infected plants to prevent the alien spores from spreading. In it, Martians come to Earth in peace, bearing gifts of wonderous technology, but by accident, they also bring infectious microorganisms that lay waste to our plantlife, including our crops. Hel is obsessed with the science fiction novel The Pyronauts, which tells a story like a reversed War of the Worlds mixed with Fahrenheit 451. We closely follow Hel, short for Helen, and some of her friends. Famous Men Who Never Lived tells about the 100,000 refugees who come to our world from a parallel Earth that diverged around 1910 and experienced a different 20th century. I mentioned before that I wanted to read this one, and last year I finally did. Anderson's world is mind-expanding to imagine. The Tauran's are essentially made up of 'left handed' molecules compared to both humans and Ishtarans what nourishes one is basically indigestible to the others. But their gut bacteria survived, and from those evolved new multicellular life, and eventually new sentience. Their astronauts came to Ishtar a billion years earlier and all died out. Tauran life originally came from a planet that orbited the red giant before it got too big and too hot. There's also a third type of life on Ishtar, one that only lives in the otherwise uninhabitable regions, except during the fire time. The most common Ishtaran plant is called 'lia', which I imagine looking like sansevieria. The handfuls of Terran crops are the only food on Ishtar the humans can eat, and soil that grows one planet's native plants can't grow the other's. We get at least two factions of humans, two of the Soviet-analog aliens, two very well developed groups of Ishtarans, a half-dozen viewpoint characters, great worldbuilding around the ecological and cultural effects of the trinary stars, and especially great worldbuilding around the biology and ecology of Ishtar. I'm impressed by how many ideas Anderson manages to pack into a 200-ish page novel (compared to the 300-400 that's standard today). The plot is essentially a tragedy - a conflict on Ishtar that could be averted isn't because of politics on Earth. At the outset of the book, the humans on Ishtar are forbidden by Earth to continue their plan so they can make ready in case they get pulled into a conflict started by humans on another alien planet, one with no indigenous life, where the human colony's conflict with the colony belonging to a second alien species has metastasized to the point where both homeworlds are involved, in what feels like an analogy to the actual Cold War. Humans have a small colony on Ishtar and are trying to use their technology to help the native civilization survive the titular 'fire time' - in every previous era, nomadic peoples from the planet's hottest regions migrate and sack the cities, which alongside predictable flooding and agricultural failures has always led to the collapse of the sedentary governments. The planet Ishtar is in a trinary system, with one star like our sun, one inconsequential dwarf, and one red giant on an extreme elliptical orbit that exposes Ishtar to a century of much hotter weather once every millennium. None of the book's tentative romances are ever consummated, but several characters go to rather extreme extremes to enact their political beliefs, or empower themselves, or just do what they think is right.įire Time has another weird ecology. Sophie and mouth start only peripherally connected, but the actions of one inevitable affect the other. Now she runs with some daring black market traders who sell contraband back and forth between the feuding cities. The other protagonist, mouth, is the lone survivor of tribe of nomadic people who traveled the entire length of the small globe. The experience is traumatic, and for the rest of the book that trauma is never far from the surface.

Airborne kingdom nomads orrery how to#

She only survives because she discovers how to communicate with some of the Night side aliens. They play at political revolution, and Sophie ends up taking the fall when the police come looking for someone to execute. One is a working class girl, Sophie, with an obvious crush on her upper class friend. City must be, I think, an example of what critics derisively refer to as 'squeecore'.