The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm: Two [Hardcover]

Sean Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2006

In a remote city on the edge of two worlds, where blood has power and water is more precious than freedom, three far-flung friends unite on a quest to save their families. Sal Hrvati's estranged father has brought more into the world than the woman he loved. Instead of saving her from the Void Beneath, he has summoned an unknown creature - a creature with a mission of its own and a past that stretches back to the beginning of the world. The quest to find both of them entangles Sal and his companions in a hunt for magical treasure on the floor of the Divide, a mighty crack in the earth inhabited by creatures that are not remotely human. Desert landscapes and dirigibles feature in a fast-paced fantasy that combines romance, adventure, and humour with an original take on magic. "The Books of the Cataclysm" take inspiration from many arcane and mythological sources. In positing that this world is just one of many 'realms', three of which are inhabited by humans during various stages of their lives, it begins in the present world but soon propels the reader to a landscape that is simultaneously familiar and fantastic.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A baffling situation gets more complicated in the second entry in Australian author Williams's Books of the Cataclysm series. A far-future Earth has been shattered into different, isolated zones where magic has replaced electricity and where humans uneasily share space with ghosts, golems and animated statues. Two young men, Sal and Skender, who were friends in the first book, The Crooked Letter (2006), undertake separate quests to rescue parents from the results of stirring up arcane turbulence, especially by creating a potentially dangerous homunculus that brings two souls back from the void. The motives of the people around Sal and Skender are unclear or questionable; their own long-term goals are uncertain; and the action breaks off before anything has been resolved except that they'll follow the homunculus's trail. The detail of Williams's imagined world and his characters' concern with the moral consequences of their actions compel interest, though readers will have to wait until the final installment to see whether all the pieces fall into a coherent, satisfying whole. (Oct.)
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Review

"...[It] is a thoroughly fun and adventurous read. I continue to enjoy not only Williams' imaginative world and creatures, but also how he treats his characters. They are very much alive, no one fully good or fully villainous...Highly recommended." --Examiner.com, July 28, 2009 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 476 pages
• Publisher: Pyr; First Edition edition (October 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591024935
• ISBN-13: 978-1591024934
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #872,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

South Australian author and occasional DJ Sean Williams started writing in 1990 and has since published over sixty short stories across the speculative fiction genre and been reprinted in numerous Year's Best anthologies.

His novels have been compared to Peter Carey, Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg, and the "Three Gregs" (Bear, Benford, and Egan). As well as fiction, he has written reviews, music (for which he won a Young Composer's Award in 1984), a stage play, and the odd haiku.

With Shane Dix he has co-authored the Evergence, Orphans and Geodesica series, and the New York Times-bestselling Star Wars: New Jedi Order: Force Heretic trilogy. Together, they have been described as the "Niven and Pournelle for the 21st Century".

A strong believer in giving back to the community, he has been a Chair of Australia's oldest Writers' Centre, a tutor for Clarion South, and is a judge for the Writers of the Future contest. He was recently awarded an MA in creative writing by his hometown university in Adelaide, South Australia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Killed a great idea., December 19, 2007

By 

twingle93 - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm: Two (Hardcover)

Williams really should have just made this a seperate series, if he wrote it at all. To put "books of the Cataclysm" on the cover almost seems like false advertising.

The first book would get five stars, this sequel has almost nothing in common. What started out as truly inspired, Lovecraftian, surreal "end of the world" story, with realities colliding, mirror twins, monsters in the dark, all cities merging, all of humanity being devoured, etc has now become one of "stone mages", "mani'kins" and "sky-lords" and more stereotypical themes that could be found in any generic fantasy novel. If I wanted to read about those things, I could taken my pick of any other fantasy series, but I don't and I was tricked into reading about them anyway because I liked the first book and I thought this series was going to completely different.

Now its thousands of years into the future, and all characters from the first one are dead, and the one surviving one changed beyond recognition. No, scratch that. The entire series is changed beyond recognition. Yod is only mentioned once, which is an insult considering how big a role he played in the first book.

The first book had mind-blowing imagery of our world turned upside down and had awesome potential. This second book should have focused more on that, but no, instead we have an overlong book with cliched situations, juvenile dialogue, new indistinguishable, unlikeable characters who bicker with one another and whose largest concerns are dealing with the local bureaucrats over a "blood tax" and getting attacked by golems. Bring back the eery, chilling composite city and the twins fleeing in a world gone mad, overshadowed by the Cthulhu-like Yod.

I want Kafkaesque and Lovecraftian, not a mediocre Final Fantasy world.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome, September 23, 2006

By 

N. Linke "nicoruby" (Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm: Two (Hardcover)

The Blood Debt is awesome! Williams' books just keep getting better. Although this could be read easily as a stand alone, do yourself a favour and go and read The Crooked Letter and then read this! Then just try and stop yourself reading the third book! Fantastic characterisation and pageturning prose set in a mystical and unpredictable world. Five stars!!!

5.0 out of 5 stars Australian SF Reader, July 31, 2007

By 

Blue Tyson "- Research Finished" (Legion clubhouse) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm: Two (Hardcover)

Having read The Crooked Letter a while ago, somewhat of a surprise to find this jumping into a story with older verions of the characters from The Books of the Change. A pleasant surprise nonetheless. As the characters have aged this series is again more adult in tone and content, not deliberately designed to be young reader friendly like The
Stone Mage and the Sea, et. al.

It is still very good, and revolves around Skender's lost mother, and Sal's father, creating a homunculus, that it turns out, unsurprisingly, is carrying the minds of both Seth and Hadrian from the first book.

The setting is a desert city called Laure, where people used
charmed hang-gliders to retrieve articles from the divide for sale, and there are Change practitioners who use blood as a source. No need to blood bank ads, here!