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Banner of Souls
by
Liz Williams
One of Spectra's most imaginative and talented authors now takes us on a phantasmagoric journey into a strange future fueled by haunt-tech: a technology which works by harnessing energy from of the realm of the dead. But who are the mysterious race known as the Kami who brought haunt-tech to earth? Saviors from another world, or something else entirely? And how does the...more
Mass Market Paperback, 464 pages
Published
December 18th 2007
by Spectra
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A good read, and less confusing, in many ways, than Winterstrike which I've just finished. I do take issue with Williams'less than appropriate knowledge of machinery and weapons- and Earth being flooded to the extent that Tibet is an island simply isn't realistic- there isn't enough water on the planet, with all the icecaps melted, to submerge the continents. Parts of Australia have never been under water in the entire history of the Earth, 4.6 billion years. How can the European Alps turn into ...more
I had a hard time reading this book. It's one of the few science fiction books where I couldn't hold my suspension of disbelief.
Forget the haunt-tech bringing the spirits of the underworld back to life to serve in machinery. I'll buy that, I'll buy a time travelling 9 year old, I'll buy that all the males are dead and that people on Mars believe that they colonized Earth rather than vice versa.
But. This is a civilization which can jump from Pluto to Earth, and they don...more
Forget the haunt-tech bringing the spirits of the underworld back to life to serve in machinery. I'll buy that, I'll buy a time travelling 9 year old, I'll buy that all the males are dead and that people on Mars believe that they colonized Earth rather than vice versa.
But. This is a civilization which can jump from Pluto to Earth, and they don...more
You very rarely encounter, even in science fiction, technology sufficiently advanced as to seem magic. Most of us use tools daily without understanding how they work, so a rocket-ship or laser-pistol isn't really very different, if you know what it does. Banner of Souls is a bit like what might have happened if the person who interrupted Samuel Taylor Coleridge mid-way through Xanadu had given him two tabs of acid and sent him straight back to his desk.
The science in this book mana...more
The science in this book mana...more
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Excellent gothic-sf set in the Winterstrike universe but earlier timewise.
It was easier for me to get into this novel since I read first Winterstrike so I was familiar with haunt-space, kappas, the Matriarchies of Mars and the general setup of that universe.
While Earth is mostly water and relatively backward, the Matriarchy of Memnos on Mars is all powerful, though the distant, secretive and tech-advanced Nightshade planetoid at the edge of the Solar system is s...more
I'd been meaning to read Liz Williams's Banner of Souls for quite a while now, and only now just got around to it. It was worth the wait, by and large.
The most attention-getting thing about the book is definitely the fact that it's set in a distant future where the solar system is populated by an entirely female society--but that isn't even the point of the plot, so don't go in expecting it to be an anti-male screed. It isn't. What the plot is about is how the Martian warrior Dreams-...more
The most attention-getting thing about the book is definitely the fact that it's set in a distant future where the solar system is populated by an entirely female society--but that isn't even the point of the plot, so don't go in expecting it to be an anti-male screed. It isn't. What the plot is about is how the Martian warrior Dreams-...more
This was.... an ambitious story - possibly too ambitions - but I will give it this: It's the first time I have ever seen a man-hating, racist, genderist, speciesist, bad humored, standoffish woman portrayed successfully as a heroic character.
In a world where the male half of just about every species is considered obsolete and unnecessary, several women journey out to save humanity in a mind bendingly alien world. If you can last long enough through the alieness, I found the story to...more
In a world where the male half of just about every species is considered obsolete and unnecessary, several women journey out to save humanity in a mind bendingly alien world. If you can last long enough through the alieness, I found the story to...more
Although I liked this book. I found it was a hard read. I was constantly putting it down for days on end to read other books, only coming back to it when I was done the others. Knowing now that there are other books based in this "universe", I'm not sure if I will return to it again or not.
Recommended for a book group I'm in, I had to bail out at page 78. I didn't care about the one dimensional characters - I was forcing myself to pick it up and taking great pleasure in putting it down. Life's too short.
Nicholas Whyte
added it
http://nhw.livejournal.com/377382.html[return][return]Basically very good. Teetered on the edge of being too complex for late-night reading (I seem to have spent most of the last week feeling very sleepy) but I managed. Far future setting, almost all characters are women (hardly any men left alive), vibrant Mars vs failing Earth, nanotechnology, advanced military tech and also raising the dead. Will buy more by her.
I love strong heroes, and Dreams-of-War will remain one of my favorites. She is skilled, determined, and armed with some of the coolest weaponry I've come across in fiction. Williams is so good at setting up adventure that I wonder where she's been all my life. She is one of the few writers that I can favorably compare to the likes of Iain M. Banks and Dan Simmons. Thus far, "Banner of Souls" is my favorite from her growing repertoire.
A bit uneven book but still different enough world,characters to be a good read.
Not the best choice if you haven't read Liz Williams before. She shows still potential with the two books of her i have read.
Not the best choice if you haven't read Liz Williams before. She shows still potential with the two books of her i have read.
Hard to get into. Too descriptive- sort of Farscape kind of super alien stry. Too many ailiens to keep track of without a golossery or something.
Very cool book. All female worlds. Travel between earth and mars.
Meril
marked it as to-read
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Liz Williams is a British science fiction writer. Her first novel, The Ghost Sister was published in 2001. Both this novel and her next, Empire of Bones (2002) were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.[1] She is also the author of the Inspector Chen series.
She is the daughter of a stage musician and a Gothic novelist. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. She has ...more
More about Liz Williams...
She is the daughter of a stage musician and a Gothic novelist. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. She has ...more
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