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Title: The Promise of the Child
Subtitle: Volume One of the Amaranthine Spectrum
Author: Thomas Toner
Narrator: James Patrick Cronin
Format: Unabridged
Length: 18 hrs and 46 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-01-15
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sci-Fi: Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
It is the 147th century. In the radically advanced posthuman worlds of the Amaranthine Firmament, there is a contender to the Immortal throne: Aaron the Long-Life, the Pretender, a man who is not quite a man. In the barbarous hominid kingdoms of the Prism Investiture, where life is short, cheap, and dangerous, an invention is born that will become the Firmament's most closely kept secret. Lycaste, a lovesick recluse outcast for an unspeakable crime, must journey through the Provinces, braving the grotesques of an ancient, decadent world to find his salvation. Sotiris, grieving the loss of his sister and awaiting the madness of old age, must relive his 12,000 years of life to stop the man determined to become emperor. Ghaldezuel, knight of the stars, must plunder the rarest treasure in the Firmament - the object the Pretender will stop at nothing to obtain. From medieval Prague to a lonely Mediterranean cove, and eventually far into the strange vastness of distant worlds, The Promise of the Child is a debut novel of gripping action and astounding ambition unfolding over hundreds of thousands of years, marking the arrival of a brilliant new talent in science fiction.
Members Reviews:
Great writing shows immense potential; execution a little lacking
I'm honestly not quite sure what I think. I felt about this a lot like I did about Anne Leckie's ANCILLARY JUSTICE -- as if I should have loved it but somehow didn't. To be clear, I liked it better than Leckie's book by a fair margin, if only because it's more in my wheelhouse: a science-fantasy, written well and with full ambition on display.
Nonetheless, a lot in here just dragged on. From the imagery, which was compelling but oddly unclear to this reader's inner eye, to the plot itself (and I'm not really an "I-need-a-plot sort of guy"), there just wasn't a whole hell of a lot to hang onto beside the ambitious scope. The writing, while not once embarrassing -- my biggest worry picking up an sff book; my biggest worry when I go back to read my own work -- didn't really thrill me, either. There were a few supercool turns of phrase, but overall I didn't feel Toner reaching for anything.
... Again, other than scope. Toner is working the long game of the imagination, clearly, and for once I admire it. Why? Because it's not built on the soap-opera-ish drama of most epic sff works; instead, it's a real vision of a frustratingly rich (read: tantalizing, but not painted with any specificity) future. For that leap of imagination alone, it deserves four stars. If you're a reader like me, you'll be thrilled not so much by this single work, but the potential it reveals.
Immortality is drowning in waking dreams that are remembered yesterdays.
The phantasms of memory come and go like dense fogs overlaying the present, and when it doesn't matter whether it is really now or remembered, the balmy Utopias beckon.
Light, pure and blinding, enters a prism and bursts into multiplicity. From a technological singularity, man has colonized the stars and become the Prism, each cultivar of homo sapiens distinctly alien. And the long lives, the Amaranthine, pass the slow, slow, slow, then timeless years in rule.
Fourteen thousand years have passed when we, dear readers, are dropped into this universe.
