Like Gene Wolfe's seminal tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun, CS Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy takes part in a future where science has become magic. But unlike Wolfe's world, in which science has transformed into magic due to a vast gulf of years, CS Friedman's Erna is a planet, colonized by Earth, in which a fictional scientific force called the fae gives rise to magical phenomenon. The fae is a presumably natural force on Erna that responds to all levels of thought--from the conscious to the unconscious to the subconscious--and then manifests those thoughts materially, giving rise to creatures much like Forbidden Planet's "monsters of the id." Naturally the first colonists were decimated by the creations of their own imaginations, and now, 1200 years later, mankind survives in a pseudo-medieval society where the fae is controlled by powerful sorcerors and shunned by ordinary people.

As a premise, the concept of the fae is fantastic--and Friedman does an excellent job in the first few chapters (especially during the harrowing prologue) giving all the necessary exposition for her complicated setting. But unfortunately the original premise is the best part of Black Sun Rising, which suffers from a writing style that can most politely be described as obvious. (Take, for example, an early passage in which one of the characters falls madly in love with another, for little reason.) For such a large book, the plot is also surprisingly slow and straightforward. And while the original premise is wonderful, Friedman doesn't do enough with it--indeed, at times the novel was indistinguishable from a garden-variety hack-and-slash dungeons-and-dragons adventure.

One area in which the novel excels, however, is in its villain-hero, Gerrold Tarrant. Tarrant, as we discover in the prologue, was once a great man who sacrificed his own humanity in exchange for the chance to wreak havoc on his oppressors. In this book he joins on the main quest, providing moral anguish (most of it fairly simply described) to a priest who can't decide whether the utilitarian benefits of Tarrant's power are worth the cost of associating with such evil. At any rate, having a protagonist who is both likeable and loathsome makes the book much more interesting than it should be.

Black Sun Rising is not an auspicious beginning to the Coldfire Trilogy--and if the rest of this series is the same, then it won't really be worth getting into.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu