The Elder Scrolls: The Infernal City Author: Greg Keyes | Language: English | ISBN:
0345508017 | Format: EPUB
The Elder Scrolls: The Infernal City Description
Review
""This action-based fantasy will find a following among YA and adult gamers."" ---Library Journal
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
About the Author
Born in Meridian, MS, in 1963, Greg Keyes spent his early years roaming the forests of his native state and the red rock cliffs of the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona. He earned his B.A. in anthropology from Mississippi State University and a master's degree from the University of Georgia, where he did course work for a Ph.D. He lives in Savannah, GA, where, in addition to full-time writing, he enjoys cooking, fencing, the company of his family and friends and lazy Savannah nights. Greg is the author of
The Waterborn,
The Blackgod, the Babylon 5 Psi Corps trilogy, the Age of Unreason tetrology (for which he won the prestigious "Le Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire" award), and three New York Times bestselling Star Wars novels in the New Jedi Order series.
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- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Del Rey; Original edition (November 24, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0345508017
- ISBN-13: 978-0345508010
- Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
The Infernal City is a new novel by an accomplished sci-fi/fantasy writer. It is based upon a world from a popular video game and is a well written novel.
This novel is very fantastical in its writing. It is a new and vibrant world and very unique. There are cat people, lizard people, human, orcs, and other forms of life. The most creative portions of the novel are the ? of the book spent in the floating city. This portion is written from the perspective of two protagonists who find a way to "fly" up to the city. This city is completely unlike anything I have read before. It exists in a rigid cast system and this cast system seems to be most highly based on culinary abilities. That's right, the cities structure is based on chefs. There are coups to take over other kitchens, chef assassinations, culinary explorations, ect. The lower casts exist to serve and process the food and the higher casts seem primarily to consume the food and the "souls" which are imparted into the food. This is shallow overview of the city so as to not give spoilers, but it is a completely new and very creative place.
On the downside, this book is very short, around 280 pages. For a novel that exists in a very complex world, this is on the light side. For example, Greg Keyes last series was four novels covered about 2000 pages to explore that world. This series will be 2 novels around 500-600 pages total. From this first book, I would say this world is much more complex than that in the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. I wish the author had taken more time to explore this new world and further develop the characters. Perhaps the assumption is that many of the readers will have played the video game and therefore have a broader baseline understanding than I had.
Greg Keyes, The Infernal City (Del Rey, 2009)
How on Earth did it not occur to me when I first read the description for this a couple of months ago that "the first of two exhilarating novels" meant this was the first in a series? I try to wait until most, if not all, of a series is out before reading it these days (George R. R. Martin has taught me well). Not that I would probably have listened to my own advice in this case had I read that correctly. Elder Scrolls novels? I'm going to hop on that train from day one. Which I did, actually; I almost never pre-order novels, but the second I had book money, I tossed an order in for this (about a month before its release). So, yeah, there's been "waiting" all around where this sucker is concerned. Including the month between my finishing the book and my typing this. (I lost the first draft of my review for this book in a power outage and have been truculent about recreating the review ever since.) None of this, of course, has anything whatsoever to do with The Infernal City. I'm not usually big on novels adapted from games, but the Elder Scrolls world is something well beyond most game worlds, and I figured if any game world was detailed enough to make its novels worth reading, Tamriel would be it. While Keyes doesn't often stray outside the conventions that annoy me about most game-world books, he's still a good enough writer to make this worth reading, and the second book (whenever it appears) worth waiting for.
The book centers mostly on Annaig and Mere-Glim, a human and Argonian, respectively, from the Black Marsh. (If you don't know what an Argonian is, I cannot encourage you enough to run out and get yourself a copy of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind or Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as fast as you can.
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