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The Lords of Creation #3
The Lords of Creation
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Lords of Creation, the eagerly anticipated finale in S.M. Stirling's acclaimed Lords of Creation series, promises to be a masterful conclusion to a saga that has captivated readers worldwide. Following the remarkable adventures in "The Sky People" and "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings," this third installment is set to weave the intricate tales of alternate Venus and Mars into a climactic narrative.In this series conclusion, the richly imagined worlds of a habitable Venus and Mars, each with their own unique civilizations and ecosystems, come alive again. Stirling, known for his meticulous world-building and deep character development, is set to intertwine the fates of characters from both planets, exploring the culmination of their struggles and triumphs.
As is common of all of this award winning author's works, readers can expect an extremely well narrated version of science fiction adventure, political intrigue, and speculative history, all while providing a satisfying resolution to the overarching narrative.
Lords of Creation promises to be the epic conclusion of the journey through Stirling's imaginative and richly detailed versions of Venus and Mars. It is a must-read for fans of the series and science fiction in general.
Lords of Creation, the eagerly anticipated finale in S.M. Stirling's acclaimed Lords of Creation series, promises to be a masterful conclusion to a saga that has captivated readers worldwide. Following the remarkable adventures in "The Sky People" and "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings," this third installment is set to weave the intricate tales of alternate Venus and Mars into a climactic narrative.In this series conclusion, the richly imagined worlds of a habitable Venus and Mars, each with their own unique civilizations and ecosystems, come alive again. Stirling, known for his meticulous world-building and deep character development, is set to intertwine the fates of characters from both planets, exploring the culmination of their struggles and triumphs.
As is common of all of this award winning author's works, readers can expect an extremely well narrated version of science fiction adventure, political intrigue, and speculative history, all while providing a satisfying resolution to the overarching narrative.
Lords of Creation promises to be the epic conclusion of the journey through Stirling's imaginative and richly detailed versions of Venus and Mars. It is a must-read for fans of the series and science fiction in general.
210 pages, Hardcover
Published August 19, 2025
46 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
S.M. Stirling
170 books1,648 followersStephen Michael Stirling is a French-born Canadian-American science fiction and fantasy author. Stirling is probably best known for his Draka series of alternate history novels and the more recent time travel/alternate history Nantucket series and Emberverse series.
MINI AUTO-BIOGRAPHY:
(personal website: source)
I’m a writer by trade, born in France but Canadian by origin and American by naturalization, living in New Mexico at present. My hobbies are mostly related to the craft. I love history, anthropology and archaeology, and am interested in the sciences. The martial arts are my main physical hobby.
MINI AUTO-BIOGRAPHY:
(personal website: source)
I’m a writer by trade, born in France but Canadian by origin and American by naturalization, living in New Mexico at present. My hobbies are mostly related to the craft. I love history, anthropology and archaeology, and am interested in the sciences. The martial arts are my main physical hobby.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
July 5, 2025
fails to live up to the promise of its predecessors
Not a bad novel per se, but hardly a compelling conclusion (?) to Stirling’s pulp alternate history series that began with In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. Though it quickly introduces a fun sci fi premise, the book later pivots to become a “what if 17th century France and the 19th century British Empire went to war against each other” tale. Fine enough for a military alternate history but completely lacking the pulp adventure tropes that made the previous 2 entries so much fun. Generously, 3 mammoths out of 5.
Not a bad novel per se, but hardly a compelling conclusion (?) to Stirling’s pulp alternate history series that began with In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. Though it quickly introduces a fun sci fi premise, the book later pivots to become a “what if 17th century France and the 19th century British Empire went to war against each other” tale. Fine enough for a military alternate history but completely lacking the pulp adventure tropes that made the previous 2 entries so much fun. Generously, 3 mammoths out of 5.
August 7, 2025
I enjoyed the first two books in the Lords of Creation series and even reread them fairly recently. As homages to golden-era sci-fi they stood up well while being liberally sprinkled with the Stirling Special Sauce of great characters, "what-if" world-building, and good plotting.
So I was excited when I saw a final book in the series had been released.
Unfortunately, it was seriously disappointing.
* The setting was too big. (Yes, I know that was part of the point. It was still too big.)
* The primary characters were all "check-markers" - female, bi-, Mary-Sues
* The obligatory native lover subplots were predictable, repetitive, and boring, with both lovers woefully undeveloped
* The "can we trust each-other long enough to work together and save our skins but still maintain appropriate distrust and suspicion because we know we're all spies for our respective cold-warring governments" sub-plot between the two female leads was never well developed
* The plot floundered early on when the primaries got stranded with a not-super-interesting group of natives and embroiled in a who-cares power struggle while waiting for rescue. It then hopped around wildly with so little time spent developing any of it that I couldn't even begin to get involved
* The end, when it came, was sudden and unsatisfactory, with a near-insulting level of "pretty little bow"-tying.
Stirling is, at his best, an amazing writing with a surprisingly complex grasp of human nature, history, technology and religion. The first three "Emberverse" books and the parallel "Island in the Sea of Time" books are, while not perfect, classics of their genre, full of imagination, well drawn characters, and fascinating plots. As mentioned, the first two Lords of Creation books where pretty good too.
But this is not Stirling at his best. This felt like a phoned-in, contractually obligated series entry with no heart.
So I was excited when I saw a final book in the series had been released.
Unfortunately, it was seriously disappointing.
* The setting was too big. (Yes, I know that was part of the point. It was still too big.)
* The primary characters were all "check-markers" - female, bi-, Mary-Sues
* The obligatory native lover subplots were predictable, repetitive, and boring, with both lovers woefully undeveloped
* The "can we trust each-other long enough to work together and save our skins but still maintain appropriate distrust and suspicion because we know we're all spies for our respective cold-warring governments" sub-plot between the two female leads was never well developed
* The plot floundered early on when the primaries got stranded with a not-super-interesting group of natives and embroiled in a who-cares power struggle while waiting for rescue. It then hopped around wildly with so little time spent developing any of it that I couldn't even begin to get involved
* The end, when it came, was sudden and unsatisfactory, with a near-insulting level of "pretty little bow"-tying.
Stirling is, at his best, an amazing writing with a surprisingly complex grasp of human nature, history, technology and religion. The first three "Emberverse" books and the parallel "Island in the Sea of Time" books are, while not perfect, classics of their genre, full of imagination, well drawn characters, and fascinating plots. As mentioned, the first two Lords of Creation books where pretty good too.
But this is not Stirling at his best. This felt like a phoned-in, contractually obligated series entry with no heart.
Want to read
July 13, 2025Mixed early reviews. I liked the first two a lot. So, wait & see. Offbrand publisher.
July 16, 2025
It feels rather slight, too short, and padded. It's not exactly bad, but it sure isn't good, either.
Stirling returns here to his Edgar Rice Burroughs homage universe, only the parallels are a lot thinner. Instead of Mars or Venus, it's set in a "hollow sphere" world. Except that instead of a hollow Earth, it's the interior of a Dyson Sphere. This vague parallel to Pellucidar, which Stirling explicitly calls out, is where the Burroughs analogy stops.
It's not really necessary to have read "The Sky People" or "In the Court of the Crimson Kings," since other than sharing the same background, this is an unrelated story.
There's not a lot of that story to this short (210 pages in hardcover) novel. The two protagonists journey into the Sphere, get stranded, and end up embroiled in a local war until they get rescued, the end. There's no real character development, and even Stirling's usual lesbian romance feels phoned-in and tacked on.
It doesn't help that there's a lot of expository padding. It's pretty common for a character to say something, the listener to think about related subjects for 2 pages, and then the conversation belatedly continues.
It feels a bit like Stirling took what would have been 2-3 chapters in a novel from earlier in his career, and added filler until it could just barely qualify as a stand-alone novel. Which is jarring since Stirling used to write the proverbial doorstopper novels in the 600+ page range.
The result is still readable despite that, which is why I think it's 2.5 stars, 3 stars if you're charitable. There are a few battles, and a few innovations introduced by modern characters in a war fought with 18th-century weapons, but it's ultimately rather forgettable.
Stirling returns here to his Edgar Rice Burroughs homage universe, only the parallels are a lot thinner. Instead of Mars or Venus, it's set in a "hollow sphere" world. Except that instead of a hollow Earth, it's the interior of a Dyson Sphere. This vague parallel to Pellucidar, which Stirling explicitly calls out, is where the Burroughs analogy stops.
It's not really necessary to have read "The Sky People" or "In the Court of the Crimson Kings," since other than sharing the same background, this is an unrelated story.
There's not a lot of that story to this short (210 pages in hardcover) novel. The two protagonists journey into the Sphere, get stranded, and end up embroiled in a local war until they get rescued, the end. There's no real character development, and even Stirling's usual lesbian romance feels phoned-in and tacked on.
It doesn't help that there's a lot of expository padding. It's pretty common for a character to say something, the listener to think about related subjects for 2 pages, and then the conversation belatedly continues.
It feels a bit like Stirling took what would have been 2-3 chapters in a novel from earlier in his career, and added filler until it could just barely qualify as a stand-alone novel. Which is jarring since Stirling used to write the proverbial doorstopper novels in the 600+ page range.
The result is still readable despite that, which is why I think it's 2.5 stars, 3 stars if you're charitable. There are a few battles, and a few innovations introduced by modern characters in a war fought with 18th-century weapons, but it's ultimately rather forgettable.
June 26, 2025
S. M. Stirling is known in particular for his ability to create fascinating scenarios, and here he gives us a Dyson sphere of mind-boggling size, created by the mysterious unseen Lords of Creation and connected to planet Earth in such a way that people can easily cross from one to the other.
However, in fictional world-building, size is not really important: what matters is what you do with what you’ve got. And the story in this novel is one that could have played out equally well on a normal Earthlike planet.
On first reading, it’s quite a diverting story, and I found nothing to dislike about it. However, the plot, the characters, and even the details of the scenario are less interesting than those of the previous two novels in this series.
As the book is called the The Lords of Creation, which is also the name of the series, I was expecting a dramatic end-of-trilogy novel in which the Lords of Creation would finally be revealed; or, at least, we’d get some significant new information about them. But this is not a dramatic end-of-trilogy novel (further books in the series are clearly possible), and we get no new information at all about the Lords of Creation.
I now have fourteen novels by S. M. Stirling, and it occurs to me that ten of them feature major characters who are lesbian (or bisexual); while, as far as I remember, all the male characters without exception are heterosexual. This is not a complaint; I just mention it as a minor curiosity.
However, in fictional world-building, size is not really important: what matters is what you do with what you’ve got. And the story in this novel is one that could have played out equally well on a normal Earthlike planet.
On first reading, it’s quite a diverting story, and I found nothing to dislike about it. However, the plot, the characters, and even the details of the scenario are less interesting than those of the previous two novels in this series.
As the book is called the The Lords of Creation, which is also the name of the series, I was expecting a dramatic end-of-trilogy novel in which the Lords of Creation would finally be revealed; or, at least, we’d get some significant new information about them. But this is not a dramatic end-of-trilogy novel (further books in the series are clearly possible), and we get no new information at all about the Lords of Creation.
I now have fourteen novels by S. M. Stirling, and it occurs to me that ten of them feature major characters who are lesbian (or bisexual); while, as far as I remember, all the male characters without exception are heterosexual. This is not a complaint; I just mention it as a minor curiosity.
July 31, 2025
I ran into the same problem with this book as I did when I first hit the Pellucidar books. Not bad, but nothing to really make them stand out from other books of the time.
For this book in particular I couldn't tell the two point of view characters apart. Their inner voice was so similar that I would often have to flip back to the start of the section to figure out which one it was supposed to be.
I liked the world and the setup. But the story itself didn't do it for me.
My suggestion. Read the first two books in the series. And don't worry about missing this one.
For this book in particular I couldn't tell the two point of view characters apart. Their inner voice was so similar that I would often have to flip back to the start of the section to figure out which one it was supposed to be.
I liked the world and the setup. But the story itself didn't do it for me.
My suggestion. Read the first two books in the series. And don't worry about missing this one.
September 17, 2025
steve Sterling Strikes Silver and some gold
I liked it,but I was a Burrough’s fan and”got” a lot of reference points. S.M. Gets better with time, though it is hard to beat the Emberverse series, which I have now read completely eight times.
This tale of parrellel worlds kicks back to his prior works about a secret passageway to older California in Conquestadore, but a much broader expanse. Characters are ok… they’ll get better as he concentrates on the new world building… which is what he excels at.
I liked it,but I was a Burrough’s fan and”got” a lot of reference points. S.M. Gets better with time, though it is hard to beat the Emberverse series, which I have now read completely eight times.
This tale of parrellel worlds kicks back to his prior works about a secret passageway to older California in Conquestadore, but a much broader expanse. Characters are ok… they’ll get better as he concentrates on the new world building… which is what he excels at.
December 13, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley for making an eARC of this book available for my review.
If you read the first two books in this series (an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs books), you'll want to read this one as well. While it doesn't give us a resolution as to the origin of the civilization that spread humans to other planets, it does make for a nice extension to the series and also plays as an homage to Larry Niven's Ringworld books.
If you read the first two books in this series (an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs books), you'll want to read this one as well. While it doesn't give us a resolution as to the origin of the civilization that spread humans to other planets, it does make for a nice extension to the series and also plays as an homage to Larry Niven's Ringworld books.
June 26, 2025
Great ending to an excellent trilogy
Great ending to an excellent trilogy. Stirling's series is a great and fun read.
Do you think he'll allow this one to grow into another 6 or 9 volumes? I hope so
Great ending to an excellent trilogy. Stirling's series is a great and fun read.
Do you think he'll allow this one to grow into another 6 or 9 volumes? I hope so
July 2, 2025
Adventure without character
Fun read, but never really connected with the characters. Needs more development of both the 2 main characters and how they worked with the French technically and politically. Fun, but no 1632!
Fun read, but never really connected with the characters. Needs more development of both the 2 main characters and how they worked with the French technically and politically. Fun, but no 1632!
July 4, 2025
The ending came too soon
Like any good story, this was over too fast. Another good yarn that has me wondering how Steve tells so much story with so few words. Something to aspire to, like most of his work. But mostly just a story to be enjoyed.
Like any good story, this was over too fast. Another good yarn that has me wondering how Steve tells so much story with so few words. Something to aspire to, like most of his work. But mostly just a story to be enjoyed.
July 5, 2025
The Lord of Creation
Another great universe in an alternate time line. S.M.Sterling has created a background with unlimited possibilities, unknown aliens, and cultures that are fascinating. Easy to read. Recommended.
Another great universe in an alternate time line. S.M.Sterling has created a background with unlimited possibilities, unknown aliens, and cultures that are fascinating. Easy to read. Recommended.
October 12, 2025
S M Sterling's tales always entertain and this was no exception. I don't think Burroughs could have done better. One small omission marred the take though. The paragraph(s) that explained how Dacshaw got from the airship to the ground were omitted
June 2, 2025
An absolute masterpiece of world building and high adventure. I loved every page of this book. It lives up to the quality of the first two books in the series. I highly recommend this book.
July 1, 2025
What a rousing good story.
A very nice continuation to this series and a nice wrap up that still leaves this universe wide open to a near infinity of other stories.
A very nice continuation to this series and a nice wrap up that still leaves this universe wide open to a near infinity of other stories.
July 16, 2025
I didn’t realize it until they actually said it but….
Of Book 1 was Carson of Venus Book 2 was John Carter, OF COURSE a Dyson Sphere would be Pellucidat!!
Of Book 1 was Carson of Venus Book 2 was John Carter, OF COURSE a Dyson Sphere would be Pellucidat!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 25, 2025
Given the title, I looked forward to meeting the eponymous characters, but no such luck. And given the epic canvas of the setting, _this_ was the best story we could make of it? Disappointing.
September 16, 2025
Another thrilling wonder story set in the LOC universe, this one features an American and Chinese operative stranded amidst the backwards cultures inhabiting a mysterious Dyson Sphere.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews