A couple of years ago S. M. Stirling wrote a trilogy about the island of Nantucket being somehow transported back in time to the Bronze Age. I eagerly read Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity as soon as I could get my hands on them. It was a fascinating series that I recommended to several people.
Recently I saw that Stirling had come out with a new book called Dies the Fire which takes place at the same time as Island in the Sea of Time, and mentions its disappearance – it’s the parallel to the story I had read in the earlier trilogy, except it’s about the people who stayed behind instead of the people of Nantucket who went back to the bronze age. I haven’t finished the book yet, but already I have a few problems with it.
In Dies the Fire when Nantucket disappears, the rest of the world undergoes a change to the laws of physics: electrical devices including IC engines, batteries, radios, etc. stop working, gunpowder burns slowly so guns won’t fire, and so on. The world plunges into chaos. I have a few problems with this event, like how can animals live since our nervous systems are electrical in nature? However, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for the story.
My main problem so far is that most of the main characters are Wiccan, and I can’t relate to any of them. While I can predict some potential conflicts coming up in the story like fundamentalist Christians attacking them because they believe that Wiccans worship the devil (the don’t), I get really tired of being reminded every page that they’re on, that they belong to a misunderstood non-mainstream religion.
Years ago I dated someone whose mother always used the phrase “if God wills it” whenever anyone spoke of a planned future event – “I’ll be back in an hour.” “If God wills it.” It was like a conditioned response and it was enough to make you scream. This book has a character that’s just as bad as that girl’s mother, only the character invokes “the goddess” in almost every paragraph. Sometimes I think that if Stirling removed all of the references to “the goddess” he would shave 20 percent off of the book. It’s really, really annoying.
I’ll continue reading the book because the story is somewhat interesting but so far having my nose rubbed in the character’s religion all the time is kind of irritating.
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