Geomancer: Volume One The Well Of Echoes

Irvine Ian

ISBN 10: 0140292322 / ISBN 13: 9780140292329

Published by Penquin, Camberwell, 2002

About this Item

620 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout. Falsely Accused Of Sabotage By Her Rival, Irisis, Yiaan Flees For Her Life.

Seller Inventory # 215640

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Geomancer: Volume One The Well Of Echoes
• Publisher: Penquin, Camberwell
• Publication Date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0140292322
• ISBN 13: 9780140292329
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: Reprint.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: None Issued
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fantasy

About this title

Synopsis

Two hundred years after the Forbidding was broken, Santhenar is locked in war with the lyrinx - intelligent, winged predators who will do anything to gain their own world. Despite the development of battle clankers and mastery of the crystals that power them, humanity is losing.

Tiaan, a lonely crystal worker in a clanker manufactory, is experimenting with an entirely new kind of crystal when she begins to have extraordinary visions. The crystal has woken her latent talent for geomancy, the most powerful of all the Secret Arts - and the most perilous. Falsely accused of sabotage by her rival, Irisis, Tiaan flees for her life. Struggling to control her talent and hunted by the lyrinx, Tiaan follows her visions all the way to Tirthrax, greatest peak on all the Three Worlds, where a nightmare awaits her ...

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Review

Geomancer starts a new sequence of novels "The Well of Echoes", set some centuries after Ian Irvine's earlier fantasy sequence "The View from the Mirror". The world of Santhenar is under attack from the Void by the lyrinx, giant winged intelligent carnivores, and generations of war have turned human society into a totalitarian spy-state with the front line of the war held over all men and so-called "Breeding Factories" held as a threat over women. Tiaan is a brilliant young artisan in a munitions factory whom the authorities are deliberately pressuring into excelling herself; when she falls foul of her rival Iriis and the apprentice spy Nish, events are set in chain which jeopardise the humanity of two worlds.

Irvine's strength here is that he makes us care not only about the idealistic, wet, misguidedly ruthless Tiaan, but also about the occasionally vicious and manipulative Iriis and Nish, who are not merely villains, but products of their unpleasant world somewhat redeemed by their growing regard for each other. This is, attractively, grimmer and grittier than most fantasy novels with a real sense of industrial squalor and a society in paranoid melt-down--and with a neatly unpleasant set of twists at the end. --Roz Kaveney