A review by trike
Falling Sky by Rajan Khanna
2.0
This book starts off so well and then just fades like a slowly-leaking helium balloon.
The ideas are ones we've all seen before, but Khanna gives them a twist. Instead of zombies, we have people who have become animalistic due to a brain-eating virus, and they're called Ferals. That's cool. Instead of old-timey steampunk airships, we get modern, sleek dirigibles and blimps. So far, so good. Instead of Mad Max's bad guy The Humongus we get the sky pirates called the Vikings... uh-oh.
Then the story moves along by the numbers and becomes kind of rote. Plots are no big deal, really, because even the simplest plot can be gussied up with cool action scenes, witty dialogue and razor-sharp prose. We almost get that. The first few pages are really terrific. Now that I've finished the book, it feels to me like Khanna rewrote and polished those opening two chapters over and over and spent less and less time doing so in the rest of the book.
It makes a good first impression, then becomes less interesting. Characters are constantly expelling their breath because they've forgotten to breathe. Bad guys get taken out with a couple blows to the head but our hero gets shot and beat up and stabbed and beat up some more and can still kick ass, even though he complains he's not really capable of doing much. Ferals get blown away when they are literally on top of main characters, but somehow none of their contaminated blood gets on the heroes. The protagonist is in love with one woman but sleeps with another, despite the whole "avoid exchanging fluids" thing. He's shallow but knows he's shallow, the rogue with a heart of gold. Coincidentally, his name is Ben Gold.
He's also Jewish, which comes up about halfway through the story but then it's abandoned for some reason. It's almost as if Khanna started doing an "Obi-wan Kenobi mentors Han Solo" story but then lost the thread of that. Which is too bad, because some more of that sort of thing would have helped cement Gold's development as he becomes less shallow.
Similarly, there's a scene when Gold is on the run from the Vikings and Ferals and happens to run into a guy with what might very well be the last horse. There is plenty of room for character development here as Gold encounters someone who behaves decently and differently from most people he knows, but the guy mysteriously disappears and Gold never thinks about him again. Might as well just skip over that chapter because it's just pointless if the main character doesn't learn something from it.
I also had a few technical issues with the technology, as well. The zeppelins seem to be incredibly fast, when in reality they are pretty slow. Everything that happens must take place in a relatively small area around the ruins of San Diego because it seems to only take a couple hours to get anywhere. Even if these are the fastest blimps ever made and can hit 100 mph, that's not a huge distance to travel. Los Angeles is 125 miles away, for instance. I dunno, it just kept bugging me every time Gold mentioned how fast his ship was. Also, you need a LOT of helium (or hydrogen) to lift a gondola with multiple rooms, engines, furniture, food, water, weapons all the stuff you need in your RV of the sky. So these things would be, at minimum, the size of Goodyear's latest dirigibles, and given the description of what some of these Vikings are carrying, waaaay bigger than the largest Zeppelins we've ever constructed. Plus, there sure seem to be a lot of them.
I could go on, but suffice to say these three stars are more for ideas rather than execution. It certainly doesn't meet the high praise on the cover blurb from Tad Williams of "Hemingway meets the Walking Dead." It's a decent beach read.
Khanna at least has the good sense to end the story at the emotional high point.
The ideas are ones we've all seen before, but Khanna gives them a twist. Instead of zombies, we have people who have become animalistic due to a brain-eating virus, and they're called Ferals. That's cool. Instead of old-timey steampunk airships, we get modern, sleek dirigibles and blimps. So far, so good. Instead of Mad Max's bad guy The Humongus we get the sky pirates called the Vikings... uh-oh.
Then the story moves along by the numbers and becomes kind of rote. Plots are no big deal, really, because even the simplest plot can be gussied up with cool action scenes, witty dialogue and razor-sharp prose. We almost get that. The first few pages are really terrific. Now that I've finished the book, it feels to me like Khanna rewrote and polished those opening two chapters over and over and spent less and less time doing so in the rest of the book.
It makes a good first impression, then becomes less interesting. Characters are constantly expelling their breath because they've forgotten to breathe. Bad guys get taken out with a couple blows to the head but our hero gets shot and beat up and stabbed and beat up some more and can still kick ass, even though he complains he's not really capable of doing much. Ferals get blown away when they are literally on top of main characters, but somehow none of their contaminated blood gets on the heroes. The protagonist is in love with one woman but sleeps with another, despite the whole "avoid exchanging fluids" thing. He's shallow but knows he's shallow, the rogue with a heart of gold. Coincidentally, his name is Ben Gold.
He's also Jewish, which comes up about halfway through the story but then it's abandoned for some reason. It's almost as if Khanna started doing an "Obi-wan Kenobi mentors Han Solo" story but then lost the thread of that. Which is too bad, because some more of that sort of thing would have helped cement Gold's development as he becomes less shallow.
Similarly, there's a scene when Gold is on the run from the Vikings and Ferals and happens to run into a guy with what might very well be the last horse. There is plenty of room for character development here as Gold encounters someone who behaves decently and differently from most people he knows, but the guy mysteriously disappears and Gold never thinks about him again. Might as well just skip over that chapter because it's just pointless if the main character doesn't learn something from it.
I also had a few technical issues with the technology, as well. The zeppelins seem to be incredibly fast, when in reality they are pretty slow. Everything that happens must take place in a relatively small area around the ruins of San Diego because it seems to only take a couple hours to get anywhere. Even if these are the fastest blimps ever made and can hit 100 mph, that's not a huge distance to travel. Los Angeles is 125 miles away, for instance. I dunno, it just kept bugging me every time Gold mentioned how fast his ship was. Also, you need a LOT of helium (or hydrogen) to lift a gondola with multiple rooms, engines, furniture, food, water, weapons all the stuff you need in your RV of the sky. So these things would be, at minimum, the size of Goodyear's latest dirigibles, and given the description of what some of these Vikings are carrying, waaaay bigger than the largest Zeppelins we've ever constructed. Plus, there sure seem to be a lot of them.
I could go on, but suffice to say these three stars are more for ideas rather than execution. It certainly doesn't meet the high praise on the cover blurb from Tad Williams of "Hemingway meets the Walking Dead." It's a decent beach read.
Khanna at least has the good sense to end the story at the emotional high point.