Customer Reviews

City of a Thousand Suns

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The Fall of the Towers 3: City of a Thousand Suns - 4/5 - From the onset of this third book in this trilogy, its obvious that Delany is taking a different literary route than the previous two books. Book one was more artistic, bordering on avant garde in some areas. Book two was more adventurous, expanding the horizons of possibility for the trilogy. And finally, Book three is a mix of humor and philosophy. City of a Thousand Suns is much more fun the previous two books with a surprising cavalcade of half-forgotten characters crossing paths and Delany's imperial insight into the expanding world of old Earth. Combine this with a heavily philosophical last five or ten percent, the contrast is both impressive and captivating.

Having actually liked Book two, I was eager to start Book three and was met by the familiar scene of the alien entities in The City conversing about three humans on Earth impressed upon by the powerful tri-entity, what is needed from the said humans and how the Lord of the Flames may act to disrupt their plans. The Lord of the Flames takes a backseat in this novel, allowing the story to focus heavily upon character interaction (a real highlight) and the quest to gain access to the psychotic computer (the same computer which fabricated the war in Book two). With the city of Toron under fire from remote controlled armaments, a quest is began which will take the reader from the Devil's Pot, over the sea, into the newly established city of which the title takes its name from and into the realm of the computer. Pretty good stuff!

This final novel of Samuel R. Delany's trilogy about mankind facing a potential enemy from another galaxy is better than the previous two novels. Delany grew enormously as a writer over the course of this series, producing prose that is frequently poetic. The Lord of the Flames is a truly fascinating alien being. His book, however, becomes unfocused and loses dramatic tension as he becomes more interested in concluding his big statements on the nature of Man without attending adequately to the nuts and bolts of anchoring them in a compelling narrative with a satisfying climax.