Customer Reviews

The Scourge of God: A Novel of the Change [With Earbuds] (Playaway Adult Fiction)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

S.M. Stirling hooked me with his first novel of the Change series "Dies the Fire". Stirling does an outstanding job of describing what might happen should all of our technology cease to function; no electricity, gasoline powered engines, and more importantly gun powder no longer functions. In the earlier novels he skates around the "why's" and goes right to the "How do we function now"? How do his characters survive; and what type of government will function in a world without technology? The answer is simple. Man returns to his tribal roots and a feudal system of governance fills the void.

While the first novels were about survival and war and the Earth's rise of the nerds (Witches with pretend Irish/Scot accents, people that believe they're elves from a Tolkien novel and recreationists are the new leaders), "The Scourge of God" is about Spiritual beliefs, prophets and messiah's. Stirling seems to be taking a page right from Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Now that man can again feed himself, he is searching for spirit and a reason for being. The world is beginning to change into a place of magic. Does the magic create the new beliefs and Gods, or does the belief itself create the magic? We don't know yet, but it will be interesting to find Stirlings views on this in his upcoming novels.

I found the "Scourge of God" to be a great read with plenty of action and hints at things to come. I anxiously await Stirlings next novel of the change.

From chapter nine:

"Long tables were set out buffet-style, with chefs in white hats waiting to carve the roasts and hams; whole yearling steers and pigs and lamb roasted over firepits behind them, the attendants slathering them with fiery sauce wielding their long-handled brushes like the forks of devils in the Christian hell."

The writing is flowery, with long, complex sentences hiding much ado about little, as our heroes, who call themselves such, make their way, mostly on horseback, across a vast continent once peopled by a homogeneous citizenry, but now inhabited by cannibals, remnants calling themselves the United States government, local dictators, religious fanatics, devils and gods.

That's enough of that. This series started, years ago in real time, as science fiction. It is now irretrievably fantasy. Or if it's not, the author has me completely fooled. The protagonists are on their way to Nantucket Island (remember that original series?) and, at the rate they are going based on the map in the front of the book, there are at least one or two more travelogs masquerading as novels to go before they get there. And then they have to find their way back.

Sterling's imagination is almost without living peer, I'll give him that, but things used to happen in his novels.

If you were to take out all of the songs, hymns, prayers, and poems that are quoted in the text, the book would slim down by a good 20%. Now, such things can give context and texture to a story, but enough already. A 7 or 8 verse song/poem (and there's more than one) is a sign that a heavier-handed editor is needed. Also, if you have been reading the entire series thus far, a good bit of the descriptions of bow making & so on have been covered at length in previous volumes.

The story seems unevenly paced; there will be a LONG description of, say, the craft of scouting (similar to a number of passages we've already read in previous books) and then a dramatic plot event will be all but skipped over. For example, a character is killed while in the care of one group of our story's protagonists. Yet, when the protagonists rejoin the family of the dead character (whose death causes a good bit of anguish on the part of a main character), presumably there is a dramatic interchange between these two - the sad telling of the news, the family's reaction, etc. But as far as the text is concerned, the two groups merely reassemble, serenely spend a little more time together, and then part ways again.

While Stirling has clearly thought out what a post-technological society might become, I have a quibble with a few of the conclusions he has reached - namely, that all morally good, intelligent people will come to the same conclusions. All the splinter groups - the people who take on the trappings of Ancient Greece, the Wiccans, etc - they fall deeply into these identities, even those who were adults at the time of the Change. I just don't see how this would be natural - for a modern, contemporary person to become, in 22 years, a peplos-wearing person who swears by Minerva and Jupiter, or a plaid-wearing person who thinks of the Lady and devoutly follows Wiccan practices. Maybe the attire makes sense, and I can see how the people born after the Change, or those who were kids, would buy completely into the splinter society's identity, but for those who were adults and became adults in our contemporary society? I don't see that kind of thing being so fluid. Also, I find it odd that people everywhere in this new, splintered remnant of our current world - where there is no real long distance communication, and no more common society (what with all the tribal identity stuff) use the same terms to refer to certain things - 'the Change', 'the Eaters'. Common sense says that there would be different terms for these. Even today, with mass worldwide communication, the events of Sept. 11 are referred to in a number of different ways - '9-11', 'the WTC bombing', 'September 11th', '911', etc. But in Changeverse, everybody everywhere uses the same terms.

The author does have a boundless imagination. This IS an interesting series, but I give Scourge of God 3 stars as it feels like a place holder to me. I don't mind the fantasy elements (the demonic possession, the hint of extraterrestrial interest in Earth as a cause of the Change, etc). I will almost certainly read the rest of the books, but am keenly hoping that this series isn't stretched out much more than it has been already.

I am a great fan of S M Stirling but he has fallen into the same trap as George R R Martin and Robert Jordan. The Nantucket series ran to three books and was not a page too long. This series is on its FIFTH book and the hero has reached Indiana on his cross country trek. In Martin's case it has become so ridiculous that I have stopped reading him. Stirling is still worth reading, barely, but needs a good editor to rein in some of his purple prose and get the series moving.

P.S. I now see from his website that there will be SEVEN books in the series (and possibly two more after that). I have now given up on him.

I haven't read the original series but picked this up with Dies The Fire and on through Meeting at Corvallis and the last book, The Sunrise Lands. I'm mainly a science fiction reader but also like a good fantasy novel. This series, started out as post apocalyptic (science fiction's little brother) but has been devolving into fantasy. The Scourge of God is apparently the Prophet, a religious madman working out of Wyoming and the upper midwest. Ok, I can deal with that. But why do his minions, the Seekers, talk in bold type and are almost impossible to kill? Why is Rudi getting visions? For that matter, this whole quest they are on to the East coast is taking on more and more the trappings of The Lord of the Rings. And as another reviewer noted, it's probably going to take them at least two more books to get to Nantucket. And then 4 more to get back? We could have another Time of Wheels (I mean Wheels of Time) on our hands, a story which the author doesn't know how to end. Like I said, I don't know how much more of this I can take.

I've got to be the dissenter apparently on this one as all other reviews are 4s and 5s. But I have read all the books in this series and most have accomplished quite a bit, but this one did nothing to help advance the story. Really, the overall plot between the beginning of this book and the end of this book hasn't advanced the story. It's moved geographically but not plot wise. Still no answers to what is going on and we'll probably never find out the cause of the change at this point.

If you have never read any of the other books in this series you'll be highly confused here, and if you have read them and were hoping to get somewhere with this story in this book, sorry.

Don't bother buying this book - it's not worth the money. Get it from the public library instead.

I've read all the books in this series because I like apocalyptic genre and enjoyed the storyline at first. But Stirling has jumped the shark with this volume. The 450 pages of this book do nothing at all to advance the plot and Stirling's visceral need to describe how his characters and battle scenes smell-- the metallic smell of blood, the acrid smell of perspiration mingled with the stench of fear -- is redundant and tiresome. I mean, really, how many times does he have to tell the reader that the padding under armor smells like stale socks? (apparently 2-3 times in every volume)

I had to force myself to finish Scourge of God and was frustrated in the end that story hadn't advanced, the characters hadn't grown, the McKenzie party was no closer to Nantucket at the end than they were on page 1, and it was just a setup for the next volume.

If you plan on enduring to the end with the novel of the Change series, you're a far more loyal fan than I.

I am a big fan of this series and eagerly awaited the arrival of the latest edition in hardcover.

I dove into the book immediately, but kept thinking "OK, when is the action going to start". I also found myself doing what I almost never do which is skipping large blocks of complex prose to get to something interesting. The last time I can remember doing that was in some of Jordan's later additions to the Wheel of Time series.

If I wanted to read a case study about Wiccan religion, I'd look in the library.

Because of the lack of development of existing characters, the blandness of the new characters introduced and the minuscule advancement of the overall story, I think there's really just one good word to describe how Scourge of God fits into this series...

...filler.

Y'know, I loved the first 3 books in this series. "Dies the Fire" remains one of my favorite novels. Technology ends -- no electricity, no gunpoweder, no gasoline or diesel engines. How will humanity survive? No magic, just guts and smarts. And, sometimes, ruthlessness. Great stuff.

But this book completes the dissolution begun with "The Sunrise Lands." With this novel, S.M. Stirling leaves science fiction behind and enters pure fantasy. I expect dragons and unicorns to make an appearance in his next novel. Any *hint* of reality has been left FAR behind. I've grown used to the semi-mystical-wiccan-and-Tolkien-nonsense from some of his characters, but we really go off the rails in this one. We have villians catching swords between the palms of their hands, and continuing to fight beyond death, imbued with vitality by some malignant force. Please. If Mr. Stirling wanted to write this Dungeons & Dragons crap he shoulda started a different series; NOT tried to morph an existing sci-fi story into a fantasy.

Spare yourself. Read the first 3. Then stop. It's all downhill after that.

The concept of the Change series is interesting, and it is easy enough to suspend disbelief that in less than a generation after such a cataclysm, the survivors could be building huge castles and nineteenth-century industrial complexes. The social changes are certainly interesting (the Wiccans) and sometimes credible (the Indians). The series has definitely descended from soft Sci fi to pure fantasy (demonic possession has come to the fore) and religious diversions (Odin and the Virgin Mary both make appearances, and a good chunk of the book takes place in a Buddhist monastery). All this absurdity is related with absolute sincerity, and therefore has a certain charm. My big complaints about Stirling, however, are that he does not bother to check his facts at all (I forget if it was this book or a prior one that referred a few times to St. Paul's Cathedral in Rome), and he wastes pages and pages with gushy descriptions of nature and sometimes whole chapters with interminable conversations between and among the characters that tell us nothing we have not heard in the previous books, and do absolutely nothing to advance the story. So wrap it up in the next book, Stirling, and get an editor for the next series.