Rating: 
Summary: Far from Eden, near Hell.
Review: Alternate History stories are one of Harry Harrison's favorite subjects. He had already written three trilogies: "The Hammer & the Cross", "Stars & Strips" and the present one "Eden" series. He situates them in very different eras and contexts: Middle Age, Civil War and a world where dinosaurs are the dominant specie.
Harrison is a great narrator, skilled, with a fertile imagination and proposes the reader astounding scenarios.
The present one, assumes the extinction of dinosaurs hasn't occurred, so they are the Kings of Creation. Human are very tiny marginal actors, overshadowed by omnipotent dinos. The only reason why they had survived is that they dwell in America far from the Ylane dominions in Eurasia, but this is going to end. The dinos crossed the ocean, forced by a major climatic change and clash with the mammals. One human cub is captured and raised by the Ylane but some years after is freed by a hunting party.
Kerrick has been "civilized" by the dinos and is able to unite different scattered human groups to face up the menace.
This book and the two that follows tell us the story.
Harrison develops an absolutely different civilization: no fire is known to them; technology is based on biology; the Ylane are not able to lie, due to their very special way to communicate among themselves. All this issues implies an enormous amount of imagination to make all details coherent and believable.
Harrison also creates different languages for each human group, with their own linguistic structures and provides the reader with an ad-hoc dictionary.
This book may be read as a stand alone story, but if you are hooked as I was, you'll jump to read the next installments!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.
Rating:
Summary: Far from Eden, near Hell.
Review: Alternate History stories are one of Harry Harrison's favorite subjects. He had already written three trilogies: "The Hammer & the Cross", "Stars & Strips" and the present one "Eden" series. He situates them in very different eras and contexts: Middle Age, Civil War and a world where dinosaurs are the dominant specie.
Harrison is a great narrator, skilled, with a fertile imagination and proposes the reader astounding scenarios.
The present one, assumes the extinction of dinosaurs hasn't occurred, so they are the Kings of Creation. Human are very tiny marginal actors, overshadowed by omnipotent dinos. The only reason why they had survived is that they dwell in America far from the Ylane dominions in Eurasia, but this is going to end. The dinos crossed the ocean, forced by a major climatic change and clash with the mammals. One human cub is captured and raised by the Ylane but some years after is freed by a hunting party.
Kerrick has been "civilized" by the dinos and is able to unite different scattered human groups to face up the menace.
This book and the two that follows tell us the story.
Harrison develops an absolutely different civilization: no fire is known to them; technology is based on biology; the Ylane are not able to lie, due to their very special way to communicate among themselves. All this issues implies an enormous amount of imagination to make all details coherent and believable.
Harrison also creates different languages for each human group, with their own linguistic structures and provides the reader with an ad-hoc dictionary.
This book may be read as a stand alone story, but if you are hooked as I was, you'll jump to read the next installments!
Rating:
Summary: An outstanding alternative future with intelligent dinosaurs
Review: An outstanding alternative future, where intelligent dinosaur and man collide.When I bought this novel, I could not put it down. I really mean it, I started to read it one Friday evening, kept going all day Saturday (even when I had stuff to do!) to finish it that night. I tried to put it down, but I couldn't. Toilet breaks and food aside, I spent all day with this book (is that too much detail? What the hey, I'll leave it in). This book must be the best written, researched, and thought about alternative futures ever written. What really impresses is the detail and the authenticity that Harrison brings to this alternative future. Things are so different that it really gets you thinking "what if...", and the story line is infectious, you just have to keep reading. The moment you put it down you start to wonder what's going to happen? It's almost painful to put down! Harrison is a master storyteller. The story involves humans at a stone age/bronze age level, confined to North America. Mammals are abundant, but so are dinosaurs, but of the big and dumb variety. The humans don't like the dinosaurs, they consider them filthy and taboo. Over in Africa and Europe, however, there are no humans, and the dinosaurs have developed intelligence and also a sophisticated culture, far more sophisticated than the human one across the Atlantic. Here is where it gets interesting. The Yilané (they're the dinos) culture that Harrison describes is totally different from any existing even now. Their speech is by means of sound, movement and colour of hands, arms, face and crest. Ability to speak their complex language is their main social determinant, only the best get to fully join society. Females are in charge, with the males confined to special compounds by birthing beaches, and they never join society. The males incubate the eggs, much as seahorses do, and rarely last past two or three seasons. Their technology is highly advanced, but is based on biology rather than physics, chemistry or engineering, as ours is. Everything is grown, from the cities (which span whole continents) to houses, to clothing. The Yilané have developed gene manipulating technology, and use it to grow things like giant Ichthyosaurs with large body cavities in their dorsal fins (kind of organic submarines!), and small frogs with hollow heads and large eyes that act as microscopes! An ice age is coming, and the Yilané, who are cold blooded, are being forced south into Africa, their cities dying from the cold. One of the city leaders decides to move her city west, across the hitherto uncrossable sea, to North America. She sends her lieutenant, Vainté, a fearsome and ambitious yilané, to scout it out, form a beach-head and to sow the city seed. There she finds Kerrick, a young boy, who is taken hostage, and brought back to Africa (what a delicious irony, a white North American boy brought over to Africa as a slave to a terrible and alien culture!). There he learns the language, and becomes a kind of court favourite. Then he's brought back to America, where he sees humans again, but as horrible, filthy, dirty creatures, not like him, a clean, strong Yilané! I'm sure you can guess where it goes from there, rediscovery of roots, torn between two cultures, neither fully understanding both, nor fully accepted by either. Vainté is the arch villain, and I found myself always worrying about what she was going to do next! She dominates the book. Another very strong theme is that among the Yilané a new religion has begun, with vaguely Christian overtones, but quite different too. This new religion is undermining the existing culture in all sorts of strange ways, and is persecuted by the Yilané social structure. Other features are the different tribes of humans the Kerrick's people discover as the flee from the Yilané, early farmers across the Rockies, and Eskimos further North (these guys are really cool, totally oversexed!). All of these forces interact, humans, Yilané, new religion, new technology, new ideas moving from one race to another, and produce fascinating results. Harrison has done a fantastic job in creating an entirely new and quite attractive culture, with a very strong environmentalist tinge to it. I found myself wanting to be like them, and even speak like them! How sad is that? Still, that's a sign that this book profoundly impressed me, and not many do. What are you waiting for, buy this book! Added bonus, there are two sequels. At least you won't have to wait a year and a half for the second book like I did!
Rating:
Summary: An outstanding alternative future with intelligent dinosaurs
Review: An outstanding alternative future, where intelligent dinosaur and man collide. When I bought this novel, I could not put it down. I really mean it, I started to read it one Friday evening, kept going all day Saturday (even when I had stuff to do!) to finish it that night. I tried to put it down, but I couldn't. Toilet breaks and food aside, I spent all day with this book (is that too much detail? What the hey, I'll leave it in). This book must be the best written, researched, and thought about alternative futures ever written. What really impresses is the detail and the authenticity that Harrison brings to this alternative future. Things are so different that it really gets you thinking "what if...", and the story line is infectious, you just have to keep reading. The moment you put it down you start to wonder what's going to happen? It's almost painful to put down! Harrison is a master storyteller. The story involves humans at a stone age/bronze age level, confined to North America. Mammals are abundant, but so are dinosaurs, but of the big and dumb variety. The humans don't like the dinosaurs, they consider them filthy and taboo. Over in Africa and Europe, however, there are no humans, and the dinosaurs have developed intelligence and also a sophisticated culture, far more sophisticated than the human one across the Atlantic. Here is where it gets interesting. The Yilané (they're the dinos) culture that Harrison describes is totally different from any existing even now. Their speech is by means of sound, movement and colour of hands, arms, face and crest. Ability to speak their complex language is their main social determinant, only the best get to fully join society. Females are in charge, with the males confined to special compounds by birthing beaches, and they never join society. The males incubate the eggs, much as seahorses do, and rarely last past two or three seasons. Their technology is highly advanced, but is based on biology rather than physics, chemistry or engineering, as ours is. Everything is grown, from the cities (which span whole continents) to houses, to clothing. The Yilané have developed gene manipulating technology, and use it to grow things like giant Ichthyosaurs with large body cavities in their dorsal fins (kind of organic submarines!), and small frogs with hollow heads and large eyes that act as microscopes! An ice age is coming, and the Yilané, who are cold blooded, are being forced south into Africa, their cities dying from the cold. One of the city leaders decides to move her city west, across the hitherto uncrossable sea, to North America. She sends her lieutenant, Vainté, a fearsome and ambitious yilané, to scout it out, form a beach-head and to sow the city seed. There she finds Kerrick, a young boy, who is taken hostage, and brought back to Africa (what a delicious irony, a white North American boy brought over to Africa as a slave to a terrible and alien culture!). There he learns the language, and becomes a kind of court favourite. Then he's brought back to America, where he sees humans again, but as horrible, filthy, dirty creatures, not like him, a clean, strong Yilané! I'm sure you can guess where it goes from there, rediscovery of roots, torn between two cultures, neither fully understanding both, nor fully accepted by either. Vainté is the arch villain, and I found myself always worrying about what she was going to do next! She dominates the book. Another very strong theme is that among the Yilané a new religion has begun, with vaguely Christian overtones, but quite different too. This new religion is undermining the existing culture in all sorts of strange ways, and is persecuted by the Yilané social structure. Other features are the different tribes of humans the Kerrick's people discover as the flee from the Yilané, early farmers across the Rockies, and Eskimos further North (these guys are really cool, totally oversexed!). All of these forces interact, humans, Yilané, new religion, new technology, new ideas moving from one race to another, and produce fascinating results. Harrison has done a fantastic job in creating an entirely new and quite attractive culture, with a very strong environmentalist tinge to it. I found myself wanting to be like them, and even speak like them! How sad is that? Still, that's a sign that this book profoundly impressed me, and not many do. What are you waiting for, buy this book! Added bonus, there are two sequels. At least you won't have to wait a year and a half for the second book like I did!
Rating:
Summary: Unique idea + great storyline = awesome book.
Review: From a master of imaginative storytelling comes an epic tale of the world as it might have been, a world where the age of dinosaurs never ended, and their descendants clashed with the humans. The story is set in the Americas, where a clan of native humans survives by hunting and fishing. Suddenly they clash with a new race that comes from across the ocean - the lizards who are a much more advanced civilisation, progressing not through technology, but through animal-breeding. They breed new kinds of animals, each one serving as a machine desined for a specific purpose. A human teenager is caught by the lizards and survives in their city, first as an animal, then as a prizoner, then as a member of society. Still, his human instincts takes over and he betrays his masters, escapes and leads the humans to destroying the lizard city and driving them back across the sea. The book is very hard to put down, it's a very exciting read. recommended to everyone! (5 points)
Rating:
Summary: Every hack writer has his masterpiece; this is Harrison's.
Review: From page one, West of Eden is a book too engrossing to put down. The story of Kerrick, at least initially, resembles a more extreme version of James Clavell's "Shogun" - more extreme because Kerrick is a total alien in a society more alien to us than Clavell's Japanese: the Yilanè, with advanced biotech and a language far different from anything ever to form on Earth. The plot gets ever more addictive, until, regardless of anything more crucial, you'll have to stop what you're doing to finish it off; at the end, West of Eden will leave you having taken a side, and will keep you thinking and talking about what might have happened, what is to be, and the significance this holds to the world (and the prospects of bioengineering)... the mark of a piece of literature. This is probably Harry Harrison's pièce de resistance - unless I find a copy of Make Room! Make Room! and conclude it's beyond even West of Eden, it's probably the best thing he's written to date.
Rating: 
Summary: great idea, unconvincing outcome.
Review: Great idea and convincingly developed dinasour society with man at the fringes as a late arrival. The series of scirmishes between the two groups and the manner in which they are finally resolved - man wins - was unconvincing.
Rating:
Summary: A Unique Concept
Review: I have longed considered Harry Harrision one of the masters of the science fiction genre. In West of Eden, Harry Harrison takes his considerable literary talents a step further. This novel is based in a what-if world where the mass extinction of the dinosuars never occured, thus allowing a species of intelligent dinosuars to evolve. Harry Harrison, imbues this intelligent race of dinosuars with its own unique culture, language and characteristics. He not only creates a story, but a whole vivid world filled with a strange assortment of animals and compelling characters. In creating this whole new world he invokes the scholary aspect of Tolkein's writing such as creating a large appendix that contains the history of the world and a section on the finer points and pronunciation of the languagues he creates. Combining this scholarship with an easy to read story produces a book of excellent breadth and scope. Reminds me a lot of "Battlefield Earth."
Rating:
Summary: One of the Greats
Review: I picked this book up on a trip about 6 years ago. It nearly ruined the trip. I couldn't put it down. This is the first in a great trilogy. I am shocked that the second and third book are out of print! I only wish more people knew of this series and gave it a try. The only reason I give it 4 stars instead of 5 is because it has been so long since I read it. Pick this one up if you're thinking about it!
Rating:
Summary: One of the Greats
Review: I picked this book up on a trip about 6 years ago. It nearly ruined the trip. I couldn't put it down. This is the first in a great trilogy. I am shocked that the second and third book are out of print! I only wish more people knew of this series and gave it a try. The only reason I give it 4 stars instead of 5 is because it has been so long since I read it. Pick this one up if you're thinking about it!
|
