Ich kaufte dieses Taschenbuch von european-media-service.com in Deutschland. Es kam heute.

Das Lesen dieses Romans in der ursprüngliche deutsche Sprache ist für mich eine Herausforderung. Das Geheimnise auf der Welt der Haarteppichknüpfer, ist eine große Motivation, um mich zu lesen. Ich habe Seite 124 erreicht.

Letzte Woche, legte ich das Buch beiseite, The Quantum Thief, die mir durch ein internationales BookRing ist gekommen, zu lesen. Es gibt eine Menge von Lesern in der Schlange hinter mir, und sie würden alle schätzen mich mehr, wenn ich nicht zu verzögern. Danach hoffe ich, bis zum Ende.

Although the initial setting had some of the feel of the sort of low-tech traditional cultures that many fantasies are set it, and there is a wizard-like figure right on the cover, everything I've read so far is Soft/Social SF, rather than science fantasy. But I'll reserve my final opinion until I learn more about what is behind it all.

I am wondering if the word choice and prose has truly has a sort of near-poetic rhythm I sense sometimes. It could just be due to the fact that I am focusing so much attention on each sentence. But Eschbach's style definitely seems different from my couple of previous SF reads in German. wikipedia.de describes his characteristic style as a rich narrative power in spite of a brevity of text. Probably calling it "near-poetic" was my own poor attempt at describing the style I was noticing. This was especially pronounced in the first chapter, which was originally published as an award winning short story - and the impression stuck with me. Sigh, maybe after reading a hundred German SF books, I'll be able to "get it" as easily as I am used to. At this point, I am happy to follow the plot, and make the connections of one story episode to the next. I think this book was a good choice for my level of German language.

Hurray! After five weeks of reading it, I have finished my third German language sf book. The good news is that this means I have just about doubled my reading speed since my first one last year.

In the end, I decided this is not science fantasy at all, but best fits the space opera category. The god-like Kaiser is a classic galactic emperor, and this is mostly the story of his overthrow and the slow exposition of the consequence of his mighty obsession with his own mightyness.

Now then, I gave this novel a top rating. I felt it hit just the right balance of concept and plot and awe. There were a lot of characters and the perspective moved from one to the next in each of the stories that make up the book, but I felt each story dove into the complexity of each new character in a way that kept things fresh (with the exception of Lamita in the last story, who I just did not believe in). I especially liked the way each story just suggested one or two touches on the others, and sum didn't add up until you had quite a few under your belt. The book itself is a hair-carpet!

I am definitely planning to read the prequel Quest. Eschbach has won the Lasswitz Award for best German language science fiction novel no less than seven times, but ironically not for this one.