Customer Reviews

Paragaea: A Planetary Romance

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

 

 

This new novel is old again. That is, it is quite explicitly, indeed exuberantly, in the mold of planetary romances such as Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books, Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon serials, and Leigh Brackett's work. And, as the author reminds us, the television series Land of the Lost. Chris Roberson also includes buried references to many other SF books, and he grounds his story in at least vaguely (if not very) plausible speculative science. The end result is quite a lot of fun.

The main character is Akilina Chirikov, called Leena, a Soviet cosmonaut who is supposed to become the second woman in space, after Valentina Tereshkova. But her Vostok capsule encounters an anomaly, and she finds herself in another dimension, on a very Earth-like world -- but quite different.

She is quickly captured by intelligent jaguar men, and as quickly rescued by another jaguar man and a human. Fortunately for her, the jaguar man, Balam, and the human, Hieronymus Bonaventure, having little else to do, agree to help her in her quest to find a way back to Earth. She feels she must fulfill her duty to the Soviet people by reporting on this new land.

The rest of the story is a fairly typical quest, taking Leena and her companions around the whole continent of this world called Paragaea. The world is inhabited by many varieties of "metamen": jaguar hybrids like Balam, seal men, crocodile men, etc., as well as humans native to Paragaea and others who came through gates such as Leena. For instance, Hieronymus was a 19th Century British sailor. In rather Vancean fashion, the travellers encounter a wide variety of cultures. They are often forced to fight for their lives. They gather and lose additional comrades, including an immortal android of sorts, a seal man, and a human descended from a group which once ruled Paragaea.

Inevitably they are led to the mysterious city of Atla, perhaps the oldest city on Paragaea. There Leena hopes to find the secret to travel back to Earth, while Balam, it turns out, encounters his long lost daughter. And Hieronymus simply hopes to find a way to stay with Leena. And the reader learns intriguing secrets about the nature of this world.

As I said, this book is a lot of fun to read. It isn't a masterpiece: the prose is a bit uneven, the action is fun but not terribly original, the plot, as typical with quest books of this sort, is slightly rambling. But I enjoyed myself, and I enjoyed and cared for the characters. Roberson has produced some excellent short fiction in the past few years, and this book (his second novel) suggests he will be producing engaging longer works as well.

This was a great read. Chris Roberson packs more entertainment value into the first fifteen pages of this book than some authors get into one hundred.

I was a big fan of the "Adventure!" anthology assembled by Roberson, which pays tribute to the great pulp adventures of early serial sci-fi. When I picked this book up and saw that it was homage of sorts to Edgar Rice Burroughs and other authors of his era, I was hooked by the premise. Roberson does not disappoint.

The characters in this book are likable, though some might find them underdeveloped. Lina is a sympathetic protagonist; a Russian Cosmonaut who goes, at the blink of an eye, from being the second woman in space to being lost on another world. Hieronymous Bonaventure, formerly a daring seaman of the British Navy circa Napoleon, and lately a mercenary and adventurer of Paragaea, and his companion Balam, outcast prince of Paragaea's "Jaguar Men" quickly find and befriend the lost cosmonaut and join her on a worldwide trek to find a way back to earth.

Paragaea is a fantastic planet of lost races, sinister and strange creatures, and sweeping vistas that bears close ties to earth. People may be snatched up by wormholes and sent between the two, as happens with Lina and Hieronymous. Along their journey, our protagonists encounter flying pirates, sentient snake, jaguar, fish, and alligator peoples, and an ancient android programmed by a lost race to gather data, who just happens to posses a biting wit and superhuman strength.

The story reads far faster than one would expect from a four hundred page book. The action is well developed and exciting, and Roberson's pacing is excellent. A dedicated reader with a lazy Sunday might finish the book in a day. I certainly didn't want to put it down to attend to comparably mundane tasks like work, eating, and walking the dog.

If I had a complaint, it would be that Roberson's characters have a tendency to an inordinate amount of luck. Still, having them killed off to bad luck in the first paragraph wouldn't make much sense, I suppose. It just seems that even the greatest of obstacles is overcome with little real difficulty.

Still, this book was a great read, and now has me interested in the sources that Roberson credits with inspiring him, most notably the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

*as a side note to readers interested in Roberson and possibly Burroughs, some of their works can be had for free. Burroughs has a large selection at Project Guttenberg, and Roberson has made Hieronymous Bonaventure's first tale available for free download at paragaea.com.

In the 1960s Soviet cosmonaut Akilena "Leena" Chirikova orbits the Earth in her Vostok 7 rocket ship when a hole suddenly opens up in her path. Her ship goes through the portal and when she exits on the other side she crashes on an orb she later learns is called Paragaea. Leena leaves the vessel, but rather quickly jaguar men attack and capture her. Before she can figure out how to escape, another jaguar man Balam and his human companion Heironymous "Hero" Bonaventure rescue her.

Hero explains to Leena that he was a British naval lieutenant during the Napoleonic Wars before falling through an opening and ending up on Paragaea. He further explains that the planet includes several sentient species including humans and "metamankind" such as the jaguar-men called Sinaa. Balam is a royal who hopes to reclaim the Sinaa throne from his traitorous cousins Finally Hero explains no one knows how to return to earth because almost everyone believes earth is a myth. Still Leena wants to go home so Hero and Balam escort her on a quest to find the portal back to earth.

Combining an old fashion series of cliffhangers within modern astrophysical theories, Chris Roberson fashions a terrific science fiction thriller that hooks readers from the moment Leena realizes this isn't earth anymore. The action-packed story line never slows down as the displaced heroine gets in and out of one predicament after another with the help of her two comrades and several additional members of a variety of sentient species that join her quest. With humor and a strong cast that make Paragaea and its residences seem real, thriller fans who appreciate the offbeat will want to join Leena's trek to find a way back home.

Harriet Klausner

I enjoyed Paragaea & hope that Hieronymos,Leela, Balam & Benu are reunited. Unlike Burroughs, the story is well written, scientifically plausible & characters are developed. It lacks the compulsive page-turning end- of-chapter cliff-hangers that I remember from Burroughs at his best, but it is an enjoyable rewarding adventure. Unfortunately, reading ERB as an adult can be disappointing, but one does not need to feel guilty for enjoying Roberson's writing.
This is a worthy companion to Michael Moorcock's "Warrior of Mars" trilogy which also attempts to recapture the sense of adventure & existential freedom in ERB's John Carter books.
I also hope there is a followup to Adventure 1 which he produced.

Chris Roberson pays homage to the planetary romance subgenre of SF and does a fine job. His female protagonist, Russian cosmonaut Leena Chirikova, is an intelligent, capable, and believable character. As she is swept through a gateway to the weird and perilous world of Paragaea and joins with companions Hieronymus "Hero" Bonaventure and Balam, prince of the jaguar men, we are treated to a thrilling quest that leads us across the new world. Ultimately, I found the world of Paragaea itself to be the most interesting character, with its traditional blend of unusual races and its exotic, fantastical cultures and places, like the Roaming Empire, a nomadic city.

Why 4 stars and not more? Paragaea is solid and well-done, a lot of fun. Admittedly, it did little to extend the subgenre beyond its usual conventions, but it is well-paced and delightfully entertaining, and I found the character interaction here to be more entertaining than other books of its type. It's been too long since I've read science fiction that was so well-spiced with adventure, romance, and mystery, and all touched with a sense of tragic humanity. Ultimately, though, the most memorable aspect of this story was that it reawakened in me a sense of wonder and childlike joy that I hadn't felt in far too long, not since I first read the adventures of John Carter, Flash Gordon, and Conan (planetary romance being a precursor to the perhaps better-known sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy). For this reawakening, Roberson deserves my sincere gratitude.

I greatly enjoyed Chris Roberson's X-men novel, The Return. I've had this one on my shelf for a while, and I'm not sure why... it's really a sweet perfect SciFi adventure. Very good all around, and hard to put down. Nice balance of action, world building, characters and plot.

During a mission into space, Cosmonaut Leena Chirikov stumbles upon a gateway to another world. As soon as Leena lands on Paragaea, she meets companions Hieronymus Bonaventure (from Set the Seas on Fire), and Balam, exiled prince of the jaguar men. Hieronymus (Hero) only seeks adventure and excitement, and Balam accompanies him until he can regain his throne. So when Leena insists that she find a way home to Earth, Hero and Balam agree to assist her.

Hero, himself, is from Earth of the Napoleonic era. Whereas, Leena came from Russia, in the 1960's. But the natives of Paragaea believe that Earth is just a myth. The gateways between worlds seem random and difficult to find. Pagaraea is a world reminiscent of a fantasy story, with strange Metamen, which have bodies resembling humans but the faces of animals. But this is actually a science fiction adventure, complete with advanced technology and genetics. As the trio's adventure progresses, they come across other unique and interesting characters, each with their own story.

Paragaea is a wonderful story with the feel of a fantasy, but the heart of a science fiction novel. Though it isn't necessary to read Set the Seas on Fire, I found it helpful to already have a background on the character of Hero. I found myself loving Paragaea , the story and world, even more. With more swash-buckling action and stronger characters, Roberson is a truly gifted storyteller.

Fifty years ago, writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alex Reynolds used to churn these sorts of novels out all the time. They were stories of high-jinks and adventure in far-away lands that never took themselves seriously. Nowadays, it's something of an outdated genre (so outdated, in fact, that the author felt compelled to tell us what it was in the title of the book), but Chris Roberson is an all new face to SF and his attempt to reinvent the genre for the new millennium is, on paper, inspired.

He sticks close to formula too. Akilina "Leena" Chirikov is a Russian cosmonaut from the late 1960's. After embarking on her first solo flight into space, she encounters a wormhole that sucks her, Farscape style, into the parallel world of Paragaea. After crash-landing, it isn't long before some companions join her: Hieronymus "Hero" Bonaventure, another time-lost person from Britain during the Napoleonic war and Balam, a deposed prince of the Jaguar people, who longs to recover his throne. Both agree to help Leena find her way back home, agreeing that her best hope lies in making the long trip across continent to the city of Lisbia.

Defenders of this book will argue that it is a lot of fun but, while this is true, I found it very difficult to buy into the world of Paragaea or its people. Character arcs are minimal and the story often dissolves into an endless succession of engage and retreat `adventures'. No matter how vile the enemies become, or how high the stakes, we never fear for the heroes' safety. Every time they get into a difficult situation, they are rescued through a series of convenient plot points. They're about to be killed by some giant ants... nope, they get saved at the last moment by some alligator people. They're about to be driven out of a town by an angry mob... nope, a boat in harbour just happens to allow them safe passage across the river for no apparent reason. There's a lack of narrative tension without which the entire story dissolves into little more than filler book-ended by brief moments of actual plot.

In fairness, the plot does pick up considerably towards the end - the last 100 pages go as far as being genuinely tense as Leena's struggle to get home culminates in her discovery of Paragaea's origins. It's just a shame that the entire novel leading up to this point is a meandering mess of contrived events held together by a cast of cliché-riddled archetypes and a thin veneer of pseudo-science. That this was all done in the name of staying true to the genre is the most damning thing of all. Storytelling has moved on a lot over the last 50 years and simply saying that 'this is how books used to be written' isn't a reason to write an identikit copy, ignoring all the issues that today's plot-savvy reader might have with it in the modern publishing environment.

Fans of Planetary Romance might find a lot here to get excited about - I don't know, I'm not one of them - but it's precisely Roberson's habit of continually alluding to those old pulp adventure stories and keeping so rigidly to the formula of old that ultimately prevents Paragaea from standing on its own as a work of genuine merit.

Worthy of Edgar Rice Burroughs? I would say this book supersedes ERB! I am a great fan of ERB and other authors of his era and style. I've also read some books which are of the ERB style but much modernized, like the early James Rollins books. But this book, this is written in the exact style of the ERB era.

What is great about it is that it's like the author took an ERB book and expanded on it: the Paragaea world is bigger, there are more creature types, there are more events, there is more action, the characters are more interesting. Towards the end of the book I was hoping that there would be more and the book would continue with a sequel.

To summarize, if you've ever loved the ERB books, you'll love this one, and more! If you haven't read any ERB books and like this one, you should go back and read ERB. However, one thing this book won't bring back are the memories - I still remember the first Pellucidar book I got, it was an old copy given to me by a young guy who had finished it, just fantastic! I hope that this book will give the same good memories to a young reader in the future as well.

Cosmonaut woman seeks original Earth, prefers shooting to swordplay, Soviet duty via singulairty over sailor.


A female cosmonaut ends up on another world after a flight, and ends up adventuring along with Hieronymus Bonaventure, a 19th century naval officer, and a jaguar man deposed ruler. Lots of drinking, travelling and eating leads them to an artificial man and an advanced civilisation responsible for creation of the titular joint. An army of religious fanatics lead by jaguar man relatives and another artificial are the major problem.