The Lord of the Sands of Time Kindle Edition

I enjoyed this novel, the underlying premise involves time-travelling soldiers of the future attempting to thwart an alien invasion by going to earlier eras and readying the people to fight the aliens. Ogawa handles the premise deftly, weaving in AI and alternate realities ideas into a multiple-timestreams fabric without bogging down in the details. In fact, for a book so full of heady concepts, it's a surprisingly quick and straightforward read. Whereas most alternate realities novels tend towards epic length and breadth, Ogawa keeps a tight focus on characters and plotline, and doesn't lose track of things as he tells the back story in flashback while progressing the current timeline story. Despite the tight focus, and naturally being based in Japanese history, his canvas is indeed world- and epoch-wide. There's plenty of sci-fi action propelling the thought-provoking concepts, I think this one would satisfy most action fans, "hard" sci-fi fans and "deep" sci-fi fans. I'm kinda all three and I enjoyed it.

I picked up this book while traveling for work, and I was astounded at how good a story it was. I read the majority of it in one sitting. While it is truly a sci-fi story, it is rounded out very well with philosophy and a bit of romance. The writing itself is also quite excellent considering it is a translation. The writing style is very direct and yet elegant at the same time.
The main focus of the plot is on ancient Japan, however it isn't an overwhelming cultural tsunami. A great deal of the story also takes place in the future and focuses much more on humanity as a whole for its thought-provoking sub-story.
It would definitely be worth a read by anyone interested in the sci-fi genre.

I think that the Japanese have a penchant for open-ended stories and for scary villains that are either faceless or else inscrutable and abhorrent in their moralities. This book was no exception.

In <i>The Lord of the Sands of Time</i>, humanity in the future has been decimated by a faceless enemy alien menace. Whoever the adversary is, they have unleashed monstrous creations that are designed for one purpose: to kill humanity. Humanity has tried everything it can think of, from talking, to even surrendering, and the enemy will not respond.

Eventually, the earth is lost and humanity is driven to the stars where they previously had some exploration. At this point, mankind begins breakthroughs to defeat the enemy and begins to gain hope. But there is a catch. Both humanity and the aliens have utilized breakthroughs in time travel. Now humanity attempts to destroy the aliens in the past and the aliens send their weapons (called ET's, though a different abbreviation) to stop humanity from progressing enough to oppose them.

In the midst of this, breakthrough technologies allow the creation of very human-like Artificial Intelligences (AI's) called "Messengers". Their task, to develop a connection to humanity before being sent backwards in time on their mission.

We meet several of these messengers and their leader of sorts, another AI called "Cutty Sark", through the point of view of our main protagonist, Messenger "O" - short for "Orville". Orvill, like his brethren, must suffer much heartbreak, some of it seen and much unseen but alluded to, in their mission. It leaves a really sad taste when considered.Read more ›

Artificially intelligent semi-organic beings were created to battle aliens bent on annihilating humans. The story follows one of them as he learns who he is and what his purpose is. He falls in love even though he knows he's going to be sent away and will never return.

The story is much better than the cover blurb and the title led me to anticipate. Overall I enjoyed the story. Most of the time the author allowed the reader to discover the world, but occasionally had expository dialog where one character tells another something he should have known. The characters were appealing and the dialog was fun. There were a lot of battle scenes that were interesting to a point. Ancient Japanese weapons and tactics versus space aliens. Over all I saw it as a love story. The ending was quite satisfying.

Some of the story didn't make sense, particularly the timestream travel limitations didn't seem consistent, and the aliens' motivation for the total destruction of humanity. The author also really didn't seem to understand what anti-matter really is.

I read this story because our book group was interested in reading Japanese science fiction. I offered to read it first since I had some experience reading translated Japanese fiction (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the Word, and an anthology Speculative Japan ), I have children who are into manga and anime, and I spent two weeks in the country while attending the Worldcon. I would not have chosen to read this book based on the blurb. This story is consistent with the other translated japanese stories I've read. There is more interest and authenticity in what the characters think and feel than there is in the external world. From my limited experience: for a taste of Japanese SF try the anthology first.