Disposable Lit Reviews

Ace, 1992
257 pp.
ISBN 0-441-22551-9

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Robert J. Sawyer is a good SF writer. A very good one. He habitually combines hard SF concepts (or at least semi-hard) with a rollicking good story. His novels are always inventive, and far from formulaic. But even he might have bitten off more than he can swallow whole in this intelligent dinosaur novel.

In a far-off world populated by the sentient raptors who call themselves Quintaglios, young Asfan is the latest apprentice to the royal astrologer in the Capital City. His post is wrapped up in the mythology of their society, which is the foundation both for the monarchical government and the social customs which form rites of passage: That their single continent is a large island which floats down the endless river (as witnessed by the constant west-to-east winds and water flow), and that far down the river ahead of them, the Face of God looms in the sky, protecting their watery path from obstacles. Every young Quintaglio is expected to take part in a ritual hunt, in remembrance of the wild beasts they once were, and to take a shipborne pilgrimage to gaze upon the Face of God.

Asfan is young, quickwitted, inquisiitive, and politically naive, and in the course of his pilgrimage he manages to single-handedly discover heliocentric astronomy, the laws of gravitation, and the atheism which necessarily springs up when any single pillar of religious faith is knocked down. (Wait — you mean atheism doesn’t necessarily spring from any challenge to one’s faith system? Oh. Better not tell Sawyer that; he’ll lump you in with the vindictive anti-intellectual religious establishment of the Quintaglios.)

It’s a little much to swallow that a single uncertain savant could discover the entirety of the modern mindset at once, but then, it seems to fit with many of the other elements we’re expected to swallow. The largest is that the characters are simply too human. Yes, I understand that compelling fiction requires protagonists with whom readers can identify, at least broadly. But too much about the Quintaglios seems contrived in order to them them a recognizably human psychology and society. They are, for instance, pack-hunters by nature, with communal child-rearing and no real concept of discrete parentage… except for the royal lineage, because otherwise it’s too hard to establish a monarchy as part of the society. They have fierce territorial instincts which express themselves in absolute standards of personal space… but they force themselves into cities which curtail that space, and undertake sea voyages despite all living on a single continent. Males and females of the species, being unencumbered by the sexual politics of a marriage-based society and bearing no divergent behavioral instincts, are unstated equals… yet the preponderance of characters are for some reason male. The Quintaglio physiognomy is distinctly saurian, including their predator-optimized teeth and jaws… yet their names are of the standard “Star Trek” set of phonemes, geared around the sounsd comfortable English speakers: “Asfan,” “Dybo,” “Tak-Saleed,” “Lub-Kaden,” “Gerth-Palsab”, and so forth. Any one of these unlikely factors would probably have gone unnoticed; when they begin to pile up, though, they’re hard to ignore.

It is still an intriguing tale well-told, and I’ll likely read the further novels which Sawyer has set in the same world. But there’s a lingering sense of too many shortcuts taken in place of rigorous extrapolation or invention for me to recommend it without reservation.