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Grand Amazon
What do you live for if you’re dead?
For Schneider Wrack, a rebel made into a monster, it’s freedom, and the chance of understanding who he once was. For Mouana, an executed soldier made into a slave, it’s justice. A world-shaking revolt has given them charge of the titanic whaling ship that was their prison, and now it’s steaming towards the city that killed them.
Mouana wants more than revenge – she’s out to destroy the grim technology that enslaved her and thousands of her comrades. But it’s a lot harder to kill an idea than a person, and this idea has deep roots.
It’ll bring them into conflict with terrifying powers, test the limits of their failing bodies, and take them far from the worlds of their birth, to the measureless wilderness known only as Grand Amazon.
It’s a jungle out there.
"Gory, Gross, Glorious."
- Cassandra Khaw on The Sea Hates A Coward
For Schneider Wrack, a rebel made into a monster, it’s freedom, and the chance of understanding who he once was. For Mouana, an executed soldier made into a slave, it’s justice. A world-shaking revolt has given them charge of the titanic whaling ship that was their prison, and now it’s steaming towards the city that killed them.
Mouana wants more than revenge – she’s out to destroy the grim technology that enslaved her and thousands of her comrades. But it’s a lot harder to kill an idea than a person, and this idea has deep roots.
It’ll bring them into conflict with terrifying powers, test the limits of their failing bodies, and take them far from the worlds of their birth, to the measureless wilderness known only as Grand Amazon.
It’s a jungle out there.
"Gory, Gross, Glorious."
- Cassandra Khaw on The Sea Hates A Coward
203 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 19, 2016
49 people want to read
About the author
Nate Crowley
24 books119 followersNate Crowley is an author, interactive fiction consultant, video games journalist, and public speaker.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 3, 2016
Grand Amazon was a riot of sinuous prose, thick with coiled metaphor. I hadn't read Nate's first book "The Sea Hates a Coward" - so I came to this fresh as a rookie to the ghastly undead crew of the Tavuto. But these bizarre reanimated zombies are not soulless monsters; they have feelings, desire and dreams; and the book has a surprising beauty to its emotion - which belies the gory and sinister picture it paints. The book has a fast pace, action and surprising twists, as wells as a few slightly disorienting scene-shifting chapters where Nate pulls focus on a different character to that most recently seen. The depth of imagination on display here is outlandish and breathtaking. I can't wait for more.
July 4, 2023
Disappointing. Author gave away the heart of the story, the camaraderie between the zombies, in exchange for some cheap conflict and plot twists. Turned an interesting character unsympathetic. Gore with little impact other than the shock factor, which just further diluted the stakes for me. Two stars only for Wrack, whom I still love and who had such potential.
March 21, 2017
The second book of the Schneider Wrack Chronicles continues the story of the mysterious worlds of Nate's mind, the creatures that inhabit it, and its bizarre technology. I love these novels because you don't quite know what the deal is with these worlds. Are they planets? Giant cities? Dimensions? There are gates, but it's all very veiled. I like that. The characters are fascinating too. Our hero from The Sea Hates a Coward, Wrack, takes a back seat in this chapter, and lets his friend and fellow slave/zombie Mouana take charge. She's a great character and I hope she's featured in more stories. There's also a great villain in Dust. The ending came up so quickly in this one. That's my only complaint. I wanted more!
December 14, 2017
I read this story as "The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack."
September 26, 2016
The previous book (The Sea Hates a Coward) was good, but Grand Amazon is better. The first book felt very much like a light-hearted adventure romp with a dash of grim, meat-horror, but as fun as it was, it left me with a gnawing hunger for something *bigger* and richer.
In the second book Crowley takes the solid foundation of The Sea Hates a Coward and builds something truly wonderful. So much of the shrouded mystery and opaque veils that covered his world have, if not been lifted, then tantalisingly tugged aside just enough to make you gasp.
With descriptions of strange, mind-boggling tech that is evocative of Iain. M. Banks; carefully crafted, and heart-rendingly beautiful descriptions that remind me of Yoon Ha Lee; a dirty, visceral take on combat that throws me back to my late teens devouring Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts; and that's before we even get started on the characters!
Grand Amazon is easily one of the most delightful science-fiction books that I have read in recent years, and I would thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
In the second book Crowley takes the solid foundation of The Sea Hates a Coward and builds something truly wonderful. So much of the shrouded mystery and opaque veils that covered his world have, if not been lifted, then tantalisingly tugged aside just enough to make you gasp.
With descriptions of strange, mind-boggling tech that is evocative of Iain. M. Banks; carefully crafted, and heart-rendingly beautiful descriptions that remind me of Yoon Ha Lee; a dirty, visceral take on combat that throws me back to my late teens devouring Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts; and that's before we even get started on the characters!
Grand Amazon is easily one of the most delightful science-fiction books that I have read in recent years, and I would thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
May 7, 2017
Continues where The Sea Hates a Coward leaves off, on board a colossal military/whaling ship steaming back full of vengeance towards the city that enslaved its undead crew.
We find out how and why Mouana originally ended up on the ship, put there by a new villain, Dust, who has her own horrifying origin story.
We also find out more of how the dead are reanimated as slaves, and where Wrack and Mouana must lead their shambling rebellion to put an end to it once and for all: through the gate to Grand Amazon and up its monstrous (in every sense) river to the legendary High Sarawak.
More carnage, more grotesque creatures and morally-dubious decisions.
We find out how and why Mouana originally ended up on the ship, put there by a new villain, Dust, who has her own horrifying origin story.
We also find out more of how the dead are reanimated as slaves, and where Wrack and Mouana must lead their shambling rebellion to put an end to it once and for all: through the gate to Grand Amazon and up its monstrous (in every sense) river to the legendary High Sarawak.
More carnage, more grotesque creatures and morally-dubious decisions.
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June 2, 2017Amazon is very good at recommending me sequels to books I only looked at because the title amused me, or items I already own from elsewhere (obviously, these latter appear particularly within the Kindle app, rather than anywhere I can actually edit the recommendations to tell it so). Yet somehow, when the sequel to a book I did buy and read on Kindle comes out, it remains mysteriously silent, and I only find out when Netgalley offers me the omnibus edition of the two. Though within said omnibus, the division is tripartite: The Sea Hates a Coward is part one, of course, but the longer Grand Amazon is presented as two books. The first part, Fisheries and Justice, follows directly from the conclusion of Coward, with the mighty city-ship steaming vengefully back towards the city that zombified its insurgent crew, Wrack himself now the consciousness of the mighty vessel and dead soldier Mouana taking the vaguely humanoid lead role. It's less thoroughly grotesque than its predecessor, though still not really for the squeamish, what with the undead and their semi-tame cyborg sealife taking revenge upon the living who sent them out as fisher-slaves. And if the grossness has been slightly dialled down (I didn't spot the word 'flensing' once), not so the comedy, particularly in one brief scene which I'm certain is an homage to cult cephalopod subterfuge game Octodad.
After that, Grand Amazon proper, which exists in the lineage stretching from Humboldt via Conrad to Herzog and Apocalypse Now, where the vastness of the jungle dwarfs the human cruelty in the foreground, though both share a certain quality of uncaring brutality. And as those comparisons might suggest, here the laughs are fewer. The zombies' revolution, as revolutions so often will, has reached the point where they're machine-gunning refugees in the name of the greater good (not that it's only revolutionary states which can reach this point, of course, as witness modern Europe, a parallel I'm sure we're meant to draw in that especially harrowing scene). Just as the jungle consumes the living and their technology, so it speeds the decay of the undead, their rot feeding into the feculent bounty of the environment. And hard on their heels the whole time is Dust, the rogue mercenary commander who was probably my least favourite part of the whole series. The overseers in Coward were brutal, but it was a believably capitalist brutality, the standard indignity of labour. Dust, on the other hand, teeters over into pantomime villain stereotype, forever doing away with her own subordinates or massacring the irrelevant and innocent for shits and giggles. It's the sort of role the right actor can carry off on screen or stage, but it tends to feel like a bit of a placeholder on the page. And yes, she's given a background whose inventive awfulness goes some way to explaining it, but still. However, I can forgive it all for the suitably epic finale.
After that, Grand Amazon proper, which exists in the lineage stretching from Humboldt via Conrad to Herzog and Apocalypse Now, where the vastness of the jungle dwarfs the human cruelty in the foreground, though both share a certain quality of uncaring brutality. And as those comparisons might suggest, here the laughs are fewer. The zombies' revolution, as revolutions so often will, has reached the point where they're machine-gunning refugees in the name of the greater good (not that it's only revolutionary states which can reach this point, of course, as witness modern Europe, a parallel I'm sure we're meant to draw in that especially harrowing scene). Just as the jungle consumes the living and their technology, so it speeds the decay of the undead, their rot feeding into the feculent bounty of the environment. And hard on their heels the whole time is Dust, the rogue mercenary commander who was probably my least favourite part of the whole series. The overseers in Coward were brutal, but it was a believably capitalist brutality, the standard indignity of labour. Dust, on the other hand, teeters over into pantomime villain stereotype, forever doing away with her own subordinates or massacring the irrelevant and innocent for shits and giggles. It's the sort of role the right actor can carry off on screen or stage, but it tends to feel like a bit of a placeholder on the page. And yes, she's given a background whose inventive awfulness goes some way to explaining it, but still. However, I can forgive it all for the suitably epic finale.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews