Dies the Fire (Emberverse, #1) by S.M. Stirling

Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


My eyes rolled so much they hurt. I just couldn't take the "Sweet Goddess, Oh Goddess, Lady-Mother-Of-All" Pentagram tracing crap any longer. It is written in the dialog to the point where it is constantly in your face. It was absolutely nauseating. The author uses every possible opportunity to work into the text that he has knowledge of The SCA, The Wiccans, The Shamans, The Society of Jesus, The Aryian Brotherhood, and whatever other society may or may not exist out there. I have nothing against Wiccans, unless they are like the fanatic characters portrayed in this book. If so they can enjoy their apocalypse without me.

I am involved in the SCA. Reading this book is like camping at an SCA event in the middle of a cow pasture in the pouring rain, too hungover to drink more mead. Someone has just walked up to you eager to have finally found a sympathetic ear. They proceed to drone on and on while you nod politely wishing you had a medieval form of an i pod...

To be fair I only made it to page 115. It seemed the stories main focus was on the Wiccan group and I had to put the book down (not that the other groups were any better). I won't even get started about 'the history professor' The only good thing I can say about this book is that when something bad happened to a character I was okay with it because I didn't care a bit about any of them (except maybe the orange cat who didn't talk). I am not an uncaring person. I cried when Bambi's mother died. I like to think of myself as a tolerant person who enjoys an eclectic group of characters and beliefs. This book did not bring out those qualities in me.

I was also concerned that I would never find out the reason for 'The Change'. After some poking around I read that more detail is supposed to be given in book 2, The Protector's War. There is also a separate series of books, Island in the Sea of Time, that allegedly give some deeper background info on it . I realized I would rather eat 8 month old cottage cheese than read more books by this author, which confirmed that it was definitely time to end the self punishment and put the book down. This is the first book of a series of 7 (so far). That is a big time commitment of reading. Better to quit while I was ahead.

I usually don't get so passionate about hating a book. I just really wanted to like this book. I was so excited that I found an entire apocalyptic series. If there was an edited version of this book where all the irritating parts were stripped out... I might have been able to finish the entire book. The book would also have been much shorter. Didn't this author have friends, family, an editor ? Why didn't someone point out prior to publishing that he was laying it all on way too thick ?



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