Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear

Posted by: Redhead on: April 9, 2012

• In: Elizabeth Bear
• 19 Comments

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

Published in 2012

where I got it: Library

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Would you just look at that cover art? I would have a poster of that artwork on my bedroom wall in a heartbeat.

Strong female characters who kick ass without having to give up an ounce of their femininity? check. Creepy bad guy? check. A protagonist you actually want to root for? check. Worldbuilding that goes the extra mile? check. Mythologies that come alive on the page? double check.  Everyone is going apeshit over this book, and for good reasons.  If anything I mentioned earlier in this paragraph got your attention, Range of Ghosts is probably a book for you.

Our story starts on a battlefield within the Khaganate lands, where Prince Temur has been left for dead. Under The Eternal Sky, a tiny moon shines for every heir. Once, there were over a hundred. But the great Khagan died, and his heirs fight for his throne, shattering alliances and slaughtering brothers, sons, friends. As Temur looks to the Eternal sky, fewer and fewer moons remain. His brother’s moon has gone dim, but his uncle’s still shines bright.

After leaving the carnage of the battlefield, Temur heads for the safety of the mountains, and meets up with the refugee clans of his people. Many of the families lost all their young men in the battles, so a young man of marriageable age is far more valuable to them than a prince. Happy to live out his life as a simple man, Temur wisely keeps his mouth shut regarding his lineage, and is soon unofficially betrothed to Edene, the great granddaughter of a clan matriarch.  When Edene is stolen away by the ghosts of the battlefield slain, Temur vows to rescue her.

As the Khaganate falls under the weight of too many heirs, far to the West someone is breeding filth. Through the dark arts of a glass book, the Al-Sepehr has learned the magics of binding the dead to his will. The more deaths in the Khaganate lands, the larger of an army of dead he will have under his power. All that is left is to sew more and more discontent and anger among the few remaining heirs to the Khaganate.  Why fight a war of territory with your barbaric neighbors when you can make them kill themselves for you?

Meanwhile, in the high mountains of Tsarepheth,  once-Princess Samarkar has given up her royal position for wizardly magic. A small amount has manifested within her, but will it be enough?  With multiple wives and children, and a dowager empress, not even her family can escape the complications of succession.

it’s not difficult to guess that these three story lines will come together in fireworks. And they do.  The first in a series, Range of Ghosts is more about set up, world building, and characterization.  I adore deep characterization and world building, so I didn’t mind the slowly building plot or the lack of conclusion at the end.  For those of you who abhore cliffhangers, don’t worry, I’m pretty sure the next book is in the works.

And oh, the worldbuiling!  in Bear’s secondary world that reflects and yet doesn’t the geography and time frame of Genghis Khan’s rule over Central Asia, along with not-quite Persian and not-quite Chinese counterparts, she has created religions that bleed into physical manifestations, magical systems that require blunt sacrifice from its students, and cultural mythologies that shine unto themselves.  Temur and Samarkar cross paths and join up pretty early, and when they share the myths of their people, it’s pretty funny (and telling) that the villains of one person’s story is a real person who didn’t do anything wrong in the history of the other person’s culture.  And get this: depending on where you are on the map, the freakin’ sky changes.  The sun sets in a different place, the shape and quantity and paths of moons change. How cool is that?  I’ve never come across anything like that, and it really was quite brilliantly original.

Range of Ghosts is going to be on a lot of “best of the year” lists.  But not mine.

The designs of the cultures and the world building in Range of Ghosts was wonderful. I liked the characters, and loved the fantasy twist on an almost historical fantasy. But you see, it was the writing style of Range of Ghosts that did nothing for me. it was the sentences themselves, the words they were made of, the foundation of the thing itself that left me wanting.  Range of Ghosts simply did not sing to me.  It did not woo me, as it sat on the table across the room.  Too many descriptions and sentences struck me as unfinished and clunky, even awkward at times. I found myself stumbling and tripping over and through passages and paragraphs. It was a huge distraction of my enjoyment of the story.  I don’t know if this is a case where Bear wasn’t at the top of her game or if I was looking for poetry within the prose was that never designed to be there in the first place.

I desperately wanted to like this book. There are two scenes, involving Temur having visions of the goddess of Mother Night that were so stunning that I read them twice. With all the potential within those characters, all the world building, why couldn’t the rest of the book been that perfect, that polished, that alluring? I desperately wanted to like Range of Ghosts, and even with all its potential it just wasn’t going to happen for me.

Tags: adventure, fantasy, historical fantasy, magic, quest, secondary world, wizards