Golden Anvil

Phera by Gary Springer

This is a book self published via Amazon written by a friend of Adviga. She was nice enough to give me one of the two copies she had, and I read it yesterday.

First of all, the book itself. It's a little hard to say exactly what the book is about. It has a strong component of telling about social changes in an alien society (although one that may as well be human). It is also talking about the spiritual journey of a small group of people. The book is really more about a journey than about any specific obstacle or goal.

The writing style takes the form of a someone remembering the events and history of the past. This is interspersed with with short sections of verse and direct accounts from participants in the scene. The writing is fairly terse, with most chapters being no longer than a couple pages. This writing style acctually works pretty effectively, and gives a different feel to the reading. I wouldn't want too much of this all the time, but for a single book it works very well.

Unfortunately, this writing style combined with the need to explain the background of the cultures and events that are going on during the main part of the book causes the first part of the book to be somewhat confusing. There are too many new things being introduced too quickly. The reader is given no time to get comfortable with the environment. This definitely smooths out in the second part where we start following specific people rather than entire cultures.

If I recall correctly, the book was mostly self-edited. Usually this would be a bad thing. However I only hit a single spelling mistake, and no real problems in presentation (things that are usually cleaned up in editing). I was very impressed by this.

I appreciated and enjoyed the world-building that went into the writing of this book. I'm always interested in world-building, and I liked seeing the thought that went into the cultures that made up the different societies in the setting. The sense of a plausible history was very strong, and there were interesting (and realistic) interactions in the background of the story.

I'm not really sure that presenting the storyteller and characters as an alien race was particularly effective. The people in the book really were presented as completely human. Describing them as alien at the start of the book just clouded the issue and caused me to go into the book with false expectations. I understand the need to create the cultures from scratch, but the sci-fi genre presents many alternatives to doing this without needing to fall back on aliens.

I also was disappointed that the events in the very introduction to the book were not returned to at the end. This introduction set up the framework of the telling of the story throughout the rest of the book, but the reason for that telling, and why specific things were stated never really seemed to be answered. I think the book could have done without the introduction, but since it was there, I wished the end of the story had brought me back around to those events, completing the circle.

All in all, this book was an enjoyable read. I could see reading it again. Keep writing Gary!

4 / 5