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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the best,
By Stephanie Drew (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Time's Dark Laughter (Mass Market Paperback)
This series, of which this is the second book, is one of the most memorable I've ever read (3 times now). The concept of going back in time to create the present is exceptionally well done - the David Gemmel Jon Shannow novels have a similar concept. The idea that our mythology is based on past cycles of earth time is also very well done. It's a pity this volume (Time's Dark Laughter) was left on a flight to Perth and that it is now out of print.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It is a shame this book is so hard to find.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Time's Dark Laughter (Mass Market Paperback)
This was one of the three best books I have ever read. The characters were engaging, and the plot was so thick that once I picked this book up, it was not possible to put it down. If you're looking for a book so good that you will stay up all night reading, this is it!
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ponderous and dated,
By "fingolwyn" (midlands, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Time's Dark Laughter (Mass Market Paperback)
Unlike the original of the series (World Enough, and Time), this book has no excuse for its flaws and that's a shame. WEaT was, for its time, something very different from the usual fantasy novels on the shelves. TDL unfortunately isn't so much a sequel to WEaT as a reinterpretation of the original and continuation of the original storyline to a drastically altered conclusion. And I don't mean this in a good way...The author takes the original setting and characters and begins to tie up loose ends, beginning with the "Joshua and the Queen" plotline. This (through Rose, another character from WEaT) initiates a second "rescue journey" by the remainders of WEaT, a new character (Aba) and one from WEaT that was only lightly utilized (D'Ursa Magnu). However, the characters are definitely five years older and much different than before, and the rescue journey plotline and concurrent expansion of the setting (further details on The City With No Name, the Queen, and the general West Coast area) only take about half the book. So far so good... But then the author utterly re-interprets everything about the novel(s), including characters, plotline, history and such, with the birth of The Child. It was almost as if he wrote the first half a year or so after WEaT, then wrote a dozen movie knock-offs for Spielberg and Lucas, then remembered he had a novel to finish and came back to it with an entirely different concept on what it was about. And the new concept just doesn't fly. It's ponderous reading, even moreso than any volume of the Thomas Covenant/Illearth War series, and drags out to its inevitable conclusion in spurts (many wasted words filled unnecessary paragraphs, whereas entire other sections which should have taken several chapters were completed in but a few pages). The storyline was very uneven, and after only a few chapters I didn't even care what was going to happen anymore...I just wanted the book to end. But as bad as that was, the author had one more rotten trick up his sleeve to firmly cement a Two Star rating here. At the end he totally re-interprets the setting from post-apocalypse USA in roughly 2300 CE to a pseudo-Hyborian age type setting where everything in the books has actually happened in the *past* relative to modern times, and explains it with a trite, contrived "Time is a rubber band and everything repeats itself again and again" bit of pop philosophy. Yes, this is as bad as the infamous "Luke, I'm your father" reinterpretation in Star Wars, and it's not even an original idea. Moorcock used a similar concept to MUCH greater effect in his Eternal Champion novels a decade or more prior to TDL. Then, in conclusion, the author drops a short "and here's how some of them lived happily ever after" epilogue into the mix to tie up loose ends, having left Beauty in the Mosian Firecaves and Aba in search of his sister and lover. I'm hoping that someday, someone will rewrite WEaT and TDL as a movie script, throw out everything about The Child, and make a good 150 minute action-adventure fantasy movie from the material. But somehow I doubt that will happen; I can't see it being done well-enough to get anything less than an R rating while remaining true to the vision of the original setting and plot, and it certainly would test the boundaries of cultural acceptability (it's an anthropomorphic world, with humans and vampires as well, so there are quite a few scenes of animal/human/vampire "interaction" that play with the bestiality taboo...just how are they going to explain the relationship between Josh the Human and Isis the Cat)?
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