The Black Railsea Prism

I think I am not going to read another China Miéville novel again, for a very long time.  This was the second of his novels that took me weeks to get past the introduction and get into the novel.  I loved the story and when I was finally hooked the story bled out in a few days & I was done, but including the first quarter I must have read at no more than ten pages a day; the same was true for UnLondon.  Still I have never read an author who could blend SciFi & fantasy together so well that you could not tell which genera the novel fit correctly into.  This was SciFan at its, well, not greatest.  If it were really great I would have gotten into it and drained it of its content in a couple days. Opps I did not mention its name, Railsea.

Railsea, I was not sure what to make of it at first.  I thought I was a fantasy version of Moby Dick, transpose the sea for a wide plain, the ships for trains on a sea of rails heading in all directions, sometimes hundreds in one direction, & moles with whales.  Giant whale sized moles.  Killer bunnies the size of elephants, owls that make mythical Rocs seem hatchlings.  Add a sprinkling of technology that turns the sail trains, the steam trains and the diesel trains into matchbox technology.  

There are two stories, the mad Train Captain looking for the Ivory Mole who bit her arm off & a story of a young boy looking for the end of the world.  As in life not all stories can be finished.  I think the reason why it took me so long to get into the book was that the word & was the most common word & it was replaced by this symbol "&"; I became frustrated with this format.  

On the other h&, it did put to rest that theory that all human languages are built to be read at the same speed, no matter if they are shock full of information dense characters or lengthy drawn out character strings.

The second book I read was over twice as long and I plowed thought it in a couple of days.  I just finished reading it, The Black Prism, by Brent Weeks.  I just noticed that there was a map at the front which I missed completely.  The story was very cool.  Magic is pulled from light and can be crafted to do certain things depending on their colour.  There are seven colours so seven magics.  Sub-Red, like our infrared, is invisible and is about heat.  Red, is about rage and passion. Orange is about swaying emotions.  Yellow is about mass and strength.  Green is about life and wildness.  Blue is about order. Super-Violet or to us ultra violet, also invisible, is about subtleness.  There are people who can't use any magic and there are people who can use one, a few that can use two, less that can use more than one and only one who can use all.

Brent Weeks wrote a very nice story with nested plots between multiple characters with complicated backgrounds and differing agendas.  The main character, on top of everything else is lying to everyone, but despite this fact is the most honest and good person in the world.  Why he is lying and the consequences go back to the distant past when he was but a child.

To say that it was gripping, would be an understatement, I read 720 pages in less than 60 hours in clouding sleeping time, work and commitments.  Oh but you might want to read it after the trilogy has been finished . . ..