Customer Reviews

Emerald Eyes

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Long a favorite of the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, Daniel Keys Moran is an author who, by all rights, should be more popular than he is. Here is a writer who has an world so thoroughly mapped out that he plans thirty-two books to tell its entire story. While his influences are centered directly in the science fiction field, his plotting and writing are strong, if not subtle. What makes Moran so different from bestselling authors like, say, Orson Scott Card or Lois McMaster Bujold, who have similar influences and styles? Maybe it is because he is not as prolific as these two, and can't satisfy the fan craving for one to two books a year?

Let me get it straight here, and say that Moran's writing is never going to win him any literary prizes. His goal is adventure on the grand scale, not style or depth of human understanding. Yes, he can touch on emotions, but it is the action--the events--that concern him. It is a proud science fiction tradition, of which Asimov was its chief adherent for so long. Moran's a modern author, though, and while he writes in a traditional manner, his subject matter and some of his language would have been quite shocking in 1950.

Emerald Eyes is the first volume in Moran's epic vision of a series entitled "The Tales of the Continuing Time," a series that he has been planning and designing since he was thirteen years old (he goes into this in a quite amusing afterword to this volume). I remember doing the same thing when I was a teenager; I had a couple of spiral ring notebooks that I wrote the adventures of a couple of friends and myself interacting with fantasy and movie characters. I had them all planned out in alphabetical order, with the first two volumes entitled Anything Can Happen and Does and Anything Goes (I know, I know, but I was young, and it is amazing the sheer intensity and ambition of youth). I wonder now where those two notebooks are, having lost my vision sometime in high school. Moran's vision never left him, and he continued to define, invent, and catalogue characters and events in the epic struggle of the "Time Wars."

The timing of Emerald Eyes is in 50 years, when the United Nations has assumed control over the earth, sometimes by force as in the case of Japan and the United States. The French, who backed the UN early, are the ethnicity that now is in the ascendancy. Trying to genetically engineer humans to be better soldiers for them (to help control what they view as endless resistance), they create a race of telepaths, the first of which is Carl Castanaveras. Most of the novel is about Carl's struggle to free the telepaths (numbering almost 350 after thirty years of gene splicing and cloning experiments) from being slaves in the service of the U.N.'s peacekeeping force.

There's a lot going on beyond that in this novel, because of the depth of Moran's world building. The story may follow one plot, but there's many more sub-plots going on that intermix with the major plot, and while some of them are resolved, many of them are left to be the subject of later volumes. In most cases, this would be extremely annoying, but Moran makes it work through a combination of first person and third person narration, and through the jutzpah of trying to envision a series involving time travel in such detail. After finishing Emerald Eyes, it is hard not to desire more, to find out exactly what was going on with Camber Tremodian and his prey, what the House of November was and what was its gift, what a Long Run entailed, and who was Lady Blue.

This is stuff that cults are built around, and Moran has his faithful. But, for some reason, none of the faithful seem to be publishers. There have only been three novels of the Continuing Time published (I think--I was trying to figure out if Moran's first novel, Armageddon Blues, was a Continuing Time novel or not), and recently Moran bought the rights to the books back. His most recent effort is a collaborative novel with his sister that I do not believe is in this series. I enjoyed Emerald Eyes, and I've been told that The Long Run is even better. If it is, I might have to join the faithful and queue up to wait for future volumes, even if Moran has to self-publish them.

One of the BEST sci-fi books of all time! I first read this book about 15 years ago when it first came out. It, along with The Long Run and The Last Dancer, is definitely one of the best books that I've ever read. These are really the first great cyberpunk books in my mind. Every time I go to the book store I check to see if there's a new book out by Moran. Far better than Gibson and right up there with Neal Stephenson. I wish that some publisher would pick up Daniel Keys Moran and give us more of this great universe.

Characters that you realy care about and a plot that forces you to stay up all night long to see what's going to happen next are the reason that my original copy was worn ragged as I forced all my friends to read this series. Ask anyone who's read his books and you'll have to gag them to get them to stop praising his books. I liked it so much that I bought two copies of the whole limited edition series including Armageddon Blues which is not part of the series but is great for it's ideas. The writing in Armageddon Blues is not quite as polished as Emerald Eyes and the others but it's still a great read.

This is one of those rare stories that takes place in the near enough future with characters that are real enough that you really care what happens to them, and you have a sense that this could be the future that we will all experience in our lifetime. It's full of things like a reverse microwave to instantly cool things down that you wish you had in your own kitchen.

If you can't afford to buy this book go ask your local library to buy it. Just make sure that you READ this book!

Emerald Eyes is the opening act of Moran's stories about Trent and the Castanaveras telepaths. It covers how the telepaths were created, how they were destroyed, and how Trent and Denice survived. The characters are perhaps less well-formed than one would like--it's really not a very long book, and Moran spends a chunk of his time on showing us glimpses of the larger universe, glimpses that are hard to understand until you read The Last Dancer. But, if you like stories with a lot of mythic impact, then you'll love this one.

The text of the limited edition is slightly different from the paperback edition that came out in 1989. It's the same editor (who's now Moran's wife), so you don't get much in the way of really glaring changes; most of the ones I spotted were improvements. (I haven't gone through and compared them side-by-side yet, but I've read the paperback 5-10 times, so any differences tended to catch my eye.) Some of the more artificial bits have been trimmed (e.g., the line where Trent says of Carl, "His grammar is poor, but he never says anything he doesn't mean."), and some of the phrasings have been improved. Nothing major, but enough that I'm not going to get rid of the paperback.

The novella tacked on to the end, The Star, is from Trent's time in the Fringe. It's a nice bit of backstory for The Long Run, but mostly it's just a minor adventure story. Worth reading, but I'm glad I didn't have to buy it separately.

Emerald Eyes has not sold particularly well. It is not likely to be made in to a movie any time soon. The avowed thirty-plus publishing ambitions have silently waned in to something closer to four or five. If the book survives, it will survive based upon an underground network that it is establishing. It has survived this long because of the great ambition the book has in exploring themes of time travel, genetic engineering, and political hegemony that are so interesting and so prevalent to many science fiction fans. Yet will it exert any influence? Are authors writing today in 2006 taking up themes that Moran wrote about back in 1987? Or in the nearer term, are cyberpunk writers hacking away on their countercultural Macintoshes dealing with complexities Moran has set up? We have to say, not yet. This book has probably sparked ideas but not shaped them.

Who should read this:

This book has a very specific focus. Fans of science fiction who are avidly interested in telepathy and the moment of human evolution to a post-human status will be very intrigued by this book. People who enjoy action-oriented, thrill-ride science fiction novels that still have some ambition and meat to them-Ender's Game being a good example of this type of pacing--will like this book as well. Emerald Eyes is quite a bit better than the great many mass-market paperback sci-fi novels you're going to find on the typical bookshelf in an airport. Movie fans of Blade Runner, The Matrix movies, Ghost in a Shell, and perhaps even Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, should check this book out... and that covers quite a lot of people! Not as challenging, perhaps, as the meatier stuff from Gene Wolfe and John Crowley but not every time and for every book do people want to feel like they're fighting the author every step of the way.

Who should pass:

Philosophers should not enter. There's just enough ambition here that people with some background and training will only find themselves teased. Quite obviously, if you tire of familiar themes of eugenics and political hegemony and instead crave books in weird, new settings engaging in events never seen before, then you're going to be rather bored here. Emerald Eyes is a novel where familiar things happen but done very, very well: not new things done well but familiar things done well. There's the very practical matter of finding the book at all. Because it's published in a small press and from some time ago, getting your hands on a copy will require some effort over the Internet.

Read the entire review at inchoatus.com

One of the greatest mistakes ever made by a publisher was stopping the production of this book. It is truly, in my opinion, one of the greatest books written. Once you start, it is almost impossible to put it down. It's a shame that this novel is now so hard to find. I hope and pray the author completes this 33 volume epic.

Every now and then, a book comes along that will simply blow you away. Even though I read this book several years back, it's on my list of books that I'll read again. Withstanding that though, it's a book that will stay with you forever. It will scar your mind with its visualizations and story-telling. Even after all this time, I remember a painting that Mr Moran described. A painting that allows you to look at the perceptions of the characters, and give you a deep horror born shudder. And I'm not going to describe the painting. For that, you'll have to read the book. And this book, along with the 2 sequels out so far, are on my list of Top 100 books of all time...in the top 10%. And considering all the books I've read, I think that high praise indeed

I agree with everyone else. Really great, believable, authentic. Many of his ideas are showing up in other books. I keep looking for more of him, but he seems to have fallen off the ends of the earth. Read these books if you like hardSF future histories.

Emerald Eyes begins the story of the Castanaveras telepaths, the greatest science fiction I've personally ever read. Though Emerald Eyes seems more of a prequel than the true first of the series, it is a powerful story in its own right, and all the better since it leads into the amazing books to follow. Those first starting the series may want to consider starting with The Long Run first as I did. I enjoyed learning the characters as they were entering their prime, and then returning to learn about their youth. Whichever order you read them, I'm sure you will become as big a fan of this outstanding series as I.

It's hard for me to believe that this novel was written more than 20 years ago. I picked it up in a bookstore based more on the cover than anything else. Since then I've read it almost a dozen times, and the paper version is yellowed with age and nearly falling apart. Amazingly, there's very little that feels dated. The story is set far enough in the future, and intelligently speculated, that it all still feels (almost) possible.

This is the first book in Trent the Uncatchable's story, and he's barely in it. But it sets up his world, and his motivations, his history, his true love. And his talent. And Carl's story is pretty damn compelling. You won't be sorry to spend a few bucks on this book...though you may find yourself compelled to buy the next three books, too!

This is, in many ways, a prequel to the main series that DKM wrote about the "Tales of the Continuing Time." Set about 100 years or so in the future, the author does an extraordinary job of crafting a world and characters that compare to the best that other sci fi authors have created - and I'm talking about Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Card. He is that good.

You can do yourself an enormous favor by getting this book, starting the series, and sticking with it. This was his first novel and has one or two rough edges, but some of the passages are sci fi platinum. Just fantastic writing and and amazing world.

Get it.