I had a lot of trouble getting into this book. It takes forever for anything to happen for long stretches of the book. We just jump from character to character get little snippets of their life with no real development of those characters. I'm into Part 5 of the book and have put it down. I'll return to finish it, but right now it just annoys me.

I loved this book, I burned right through it in less than a week. I got it with the companion CD that Kevin did under the moniker Roswell Six, great music and a great book.

It's nice that the reviewer here points out that, yet again, Kevin J. Anderson doesn't have the talent to SHOW readers anything -- he can only TELL, TELL, TELL. The ultimate sign of a talent-free hack, albeit one who seems to appear weekly at SciFi Wire.

And where is the character development? Oh, wait: never mind. Why would expect KJA to be concerned about character development when he's ignored it in his other 100 books?

This is an epic, all right. Epic FAIL.

I liked this book a great deal.
I thought the voyage of the Luminara was very exciting. I was very much intrigued throughout the book.
Looking forward to book 2.

I LOVED KJA's The Edge of the World. I was a little skeptical; when Amazon.com suggested the book to me (because I'm a big fan of KJA and the Dune books and Saga of the Seven Suns). I haven't read a "planet bound" fantasy in years. But since KJA wrote it.. I HAD to try it.
I really enjoyed it. Could not put the book down after I started reading it. Loved the adventures, the explorations, the search for new lands, how "little mistakes" turned to big problems. I also can't wait for the next book to come out.

Great review, I'll have to add this to my towering reading list, I wonder if the worlds speculative fiction authors could maybe have a hiatus for the next six months to let poor people like me catch up on there reading.

It would also be nice if scifi wire gave these book reviews, often the best reading on the site, the same front page billing as every little insipid rumour about the Twilight movies, at the very least have the jpeg for the article the same size so i don't keep scrolling past them. Equal treatment for the written word!

Well, as one of the members of the KJA Special Forces (kjasf.com) wrote in a review over on Amazon, this is "a book where the story drives the prose instead of the other way around. The story is the most important thing here...not the telling of it." That sounds like a poor aping echo of KJA's own pronouncements that he is a "storyteller" in the old oral tradition. More gibberish, in other words.

Yawn. I thought it might be interesting to dissect this thing while waiting for this year's McDune offering, The Winds of Jessica of Dune, to break onto the market, but honestly, I just couldn't get into it. Mammoths and Mohammedans and seaworms ... er, I mean sea serpents and Papists without the Pape. Yawn.

Everyone goes on about this wonderful fantasy world Anderson has supposedly created, but I didn't see it. All I saw is a mishmash of real world elements in thin KJA drag and a few things he tried to disguise more thoroughly. (Why is there so much Latin in the thing and no corresponding Arabic? Tierra [snicker] isn't Europe after all, right?)

How about instead of fluffing his latest literary dump, some of you people seriously look into the website I mentioned above? A secretive site where members have to virtually swear that they are KJA fans when they register and are offered prizes and benefits for posting reviews on Amazon and other book sites and for actively discussing KJA books on forums, etc.

I would like to echo everything Unreadable Dreck said above, as he or she said just what I wanted to say about Mr. Anderson's previous work, only a lot better than I ever could have. His Star Wars and Dune novels are, well, unreadable dreck; at least I knew enough after wasting good money on the Star Wars novels to buy the Dune ones at a used bookstore for cheap, on the off chance that they might be better (they weren't).

silversInsightful review. The last two paragraphs are key, I think.

If your "good guys" do the same reprehensible things as your "bad guys", then you have to show why they're good guys. Just *saying* they're good doesn't cut it. There should be moral questions raised, and some exploration into characters' values and motivations.

KJA doesn't have the writing chops or inclination to write that kind of novel. It's easier to justify characters' actions as being "in the name of God" than to actually address questions about what makes a hero heroic, or the good guys good.

A simplistic, by-the-numbers action novel with little or no depth of character or setting - let alone time for reflection - is par for the course for Anderson. Don't expect anything worthy of note here.

HBJ

The book's length is intimidating but it's a fast read. I enjoyed the invigorating pace and the interesting characters. I also appreciated the moral ambiguity. Nobody's all good or all bad. Characters do things for their own reasons that, subjectively, are 'good'. As always, the world and the people he depicts are colorful and multi-dimensional. Can't wait for the 2nd one! When it comes out I'm dropping whatever I'm reading and diving right in.