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Winterlong #3
Icarus Descending
The energumens, creatures who are the result of centuries of genetic engineering, threaten to come to Earth to lead the other bioengineered slave races in a war against humanity
334 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published July 1, 1993
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255 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Hand
186 books1,314 followersA New York Times notable and multiple award– winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written seven novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 19, 2011
tonight the geneslaves revolt! well, to be precise, it is the extra-sexy branch of geneslaves that do the actual revolting: the exceedingly tall, romantically-inclined, daddy-fixated energumens. they are sick and tired of serving the Ascendants on the HORUS space station; time for a regime-change, suckers!
the third and final novel of elizabeth hand's baroque, often horrific science fantasy suffers a bit from the law of diminishing returns. there's a bit of weepiness present that comes as a surprise from such a usually heartless author. still, it is exciting stuff. after all, it not only contains the end of the world, but fascinating characters with names like Wendy Wanders, Metatron, Agent Shi Pei, and of course the clones of the redoubtable scientist Luther Burdock. oh yeah, and Aviator Margolis Tast'annin returns from the dead again, and is doomed per usual. poor Aviator, what a life!
the third and final novel of elizabeth hand's baroque, often horrific science fantasy suffers a bit from the law of diminishing returns. there's a bit of weepiness present that comes as a surprise from such a usually heartless author. still, it is exciting stuff. after all, it not only contains the end of the world, but fascinating characters with names like Wendy Wanders, Metatron, Agent Shi Pei, and of course the clones of the redoubtable scientist Luther Burdock. oh yeah, and Aviator Margolis Tast'annin returns from the dead again, and is doomed per usual. poor Aviator, what a life!
January 26, 2010
The final installment in the trilogy that started with Winterlong, Icarus Descending left a bit to be desired. The writing was great, the ideas were wild and the imagery was disturbing, but it all fell apart at the ending. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the ending was so jarringly abrupt that there was no time in which for anything to fall apart or get resolved. As the page numbers climbed, I started wondering how she was going to wrap-up everything only to find out that she apparently decided not to; it really reads like Hand simply ran out of steam and chose to just slam the door on the story and be done with it. Other than the incredibly unsatisfying ending, however, the book was enjoyable, written with style and creativity, so I'll give it a moderate rating.
February 4, 2018
would like to think no book by Elizabeth Hand could ever cause me to hover mentally at "one or two stars for this?" but this book did... i decided her writing, while still Hand-sian and therefore rather stupendous, hardly polishes a hot, steamy turd of whothefuckcares or whatthefuckhappened or didicarusburntherestofthemanuscript? yeah, i figured a book with such great descriptions deserved a few made up words... shitandshine! gak! let's rewind to 1990, maybe a few years prior, say 1987... Elizabeth Hand writes 'Winterlong' as a standalone book and even though she thinks "i could make this into a crazytownsprawl of a trilogy, i'm not going to spoil an amazing and twisted and dreamy book by tacking on two overwrought dimestore science fiction sequels to it"... Æstival Tide gets written next, but in a stroke of authorial genius (or at least 'authorial assistant professorship') Hand decides to take her tangential and derivative drafts for a sequel, let's call it Icarus Descending, maybe (not 'Icarus Descending, maybe' which based on the real time actual plot trajectory of the actual Icarus Descending - the book i am reviewing - would have worked because the actual Icarus Descending had a sort of contingent/notquitesureifanythinghappened feel), and this pause causes her to hold publishing Æstival Tide to make it a longer tale incorporating said drafts from ID (yep, abbreviated now)... not sure what this hypothetical book would be titled, maybe Dreams of a Festival of Metal and Flesh... anyway... if you got this far, you're crazy... i hated this book... HATED.THIS.BOOK. there is better ____________ (fill in the genre, or plot, or monsters, or world building) and i am going to find one of them...
April 16, 2021
Of the three books in the series, this might have been the slowest moving. But we also learned a ton more how the world got the way it did, and where all the geneslaves came from. And of course, why they would want to revolt. We're also back with Wendy Wanders, Miss Scarlet, and of course, Margalis Tast'annin.
The pacing was weird here, and I felt like I learned more than I wanted about some things, and less than I wanted about others. Hand's writing is undeniably compelling, but I'm not sure who I would recommend this series to. It's a sci-fi/horror, but also leans towards weird fiction. This is very early work of Hand's and, in my opinion, she hasn't hit her stride yet.
And I'm pretty sure this was not meant to be the end of the series, and so the ending is ambiguous in a way that's potentially pretty unsatisfying. (It's a fine end of a book, but not necessarily where I would want to see a series end.)
The pacing was weird here, and I felt like I learned more than I wanted about some things, and less than I wanted about others. Hand's writing is undeniably compelling, but I'm not sure who I would recommend this series to. It's a sci-fi/horror, but also leans towards weird fiction. This is very early work of Hand's and, in my opinion, she hasn't hit her stride yet.
And I'm pretty sure this was not meant to be the end of the series, and so the ending is ambiguous in a way that's potentially pretty unsatisfying. (It's a fine end of a book, but not necessarily where I would want to see a series end.)
January 25, 2020
Very interesting characters. The ending made me anticipate another book in the series.
May 24, 2020
Damn Elizabeth Hand and her poignant but infuriatingly unsatisfying endings!! As a stand-alone novel this would have been a solid 4 stars, but as the final book in a series it leaves a lot to be desired. It’s definitely more of a direct sequel to Winterlong than Aestival Tide was, but it doesn’t really resolve anything and it felt a bit rushed. Wendy, Jane, and Miss Scarlett are main characters, but Rafael just disappeared? And making Margalis Tast’annin a sympathetic figure was super problematic. Idk....It seems like she’s focusing more on Detective/Mystery novels now, but I really hope she comes back to this world at some point because this was a let down. I’m still a huge fan, but damn....
December 30, 2019
Very strong 4 stars. An interesting and different series. I think she's an excellent writer.
September 4, 2022
When I first started this series my main concentration was on the bizarre concepts and customs in this novel and trying to follow the complex storyline. But when I started this book I noticed some things that may have been more subtle early on but now are becoming more explicit. Aside from the feminism and the bending of the ideas of gender, I hadn’t realized how political this book is. In the final show down the ascending autocracy is being overthrown, their Horus colonies one by one taken over by rebels and on earth the geneslaves are rebelling in city after city. With humans working on genetic experiments and creating these monstrous geneslaves a direct comparison is made to the enslavement of blacks. It is the human tyrants that must be overthrown and destroyed. This is a call to arms that unites the geneslaves to fight back and overthrow their overlords and win the freedom they never had. Humans destroyed the world with their nuclear and chemical warfare turning it into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In the aftermath they then enslave the most vulnerable populations. Throughout this series climate change has also played substantial role with talk of eroding coastlines, of drought, of rising sea levels, etc. From these developments it is evident that Elizabeth Hand is making out the entire human race to be the bad guys, the evil tyrants who are destroying the world. For most of this series I’ve been searching for the underlying message, the meaning of the story. It seems I have lost it. It took so long because the message was lying beneath highly technical nomenclature and a world whose cultures have lost all moral virtue. The themes are definitely nihilistic in nature with regard to the fears expressed of the damage that humans will cause to their environment and the world because of their hubris.
Unfortunate to say the ending was disappointing. This turned out to be one of the worst, groveling excuses for the ending of a trilogy I have ever seen. It is as if Elizabeth Hand literally threw up her hands – no pun intended – and gave up on the whole endeavor. Early in the novel there was some exciting plot twists but that’s about the best that can be said about this book. The ending was rushed way too quick with an anti-climactic ending that didn’t resolve anything. Then Miss Scarlet just disappears from the story after running away and she doesn’t return. Other plot threads in the story were either resolved way too quickly or not resolved at all. For me I had a serious issue with the structure of the novel. We are give multiple perspectives but in the case of most of these characters the perspectives are not palatable. The author tries to humanize and make the aviator a sympathetic character. Seriously the due is the reanimated dead and a heartless killer. Yet I’m supposed to join sides with this guy in his efforts to suppress the rebellion. We are also given the perspective of some weird, bioengineered alien-human hyrbids. Considering that the author didn’t write from alien perspectives in either of the two previous books this seems incongruous. C.J. Cherryh is an author whose excellent at writing from alien perspectives. Her aliens seem truly alien. But Elizabeth Hand doesn’t specialize in that type of thing. It just felt flat, a failed attempt at writing from non-human perspectives. The characters still think like humans, not like the alien, android things they are purported to be. Then to make it worse Elizabeth Hand uses multiple first person narrators. I think she did this in earlier books but for some reason it didn’t bother me as much then. This is a horrible decision that adds nothing of artistic merit to the book (and I don’t care what the author says regarding that decision). It just makes it unnecessarily confusing because as a reader I have to try and figure whose head I’m in (its not hard but its a slight annoyance).
In conclusion this is one of the worst science fiction novels I have read and literally the worst, and I mean BY FAR the worst ending to a trilogy I’ve encountered, or series for that matter. Having said all this I still think the first two books in the series are great reads. Just don’t go into this book with high expectations.
Unfortunate to say the ending was disappointing. This turned out to be one of the worst, groveling excuses for the ending of a trilogy I have ever seen. It is as if Elizabeth Hand literally threw up her hands – no pun intended – and gave up on the whole endeavor. Early in the novel there was some exciting plot twists but that’s about the best that can be said about this book. The ending was rushed way too quick with an anti-climactic ending that didn’t resolve anything. Then Miss Scarlet just disappears from the story after running away and she doesn’t return. Other plot threads in the story were either resolved way too quickly or not resolved at all. For me I had a serious issue with the structure of the novel. We are give multiple perspectives but in the case of most of these characters the perspectives are not palatable. The author tries to humanize and make the aviator a sympathetic character. Seriously the due is the reanimated dead and a heartless killer. Yet I’m supposed to join sides with this guy in his efforts to suppress the rebellion. We are also given the perspective of some weird, bioengineered alien-human hyrbids. Considering that the author didn’t write from alien perspectives in either of the two previous books this seems incongruous. C.J. Cherryh is an author whose excellent at writing from alien perspectives. Her aliens seem truly alien. But Elizabeth Hand doesn’t specialize in that type of thing. It just felt flat, a failed attempt at writing from non-human perspectives. The characters still think like humans, not like the alien, android things they are purported to be. Then to make it worse Elizabeth Hand uses multiple first person narrators. I think she did this in earlier books but for some reason it didn’t bother me as much then. This is a horrible decision that adds nothing of artistic merit to the book (and I don’t care what the author says regarding that decision). It just makes it unnecessarily confusing because as a reader I have to try and figure whose head I’m in (its not hard but its a slight annoyance).
In conclusion this is one of the worst science fiction novels I have read and literally the worst, and I mean BY FAR the worst ending to a trilogy I’ve encountered, or series for that matter. Having said all this I still think the first two books in the series are great reads. Just don’t go into this book with high expectations.
September 16, 2023
I really like Hand's writing, but this early trilogy just doesn't work for me.
This finally brings together the various story lines of the previous two books. Wendy remains an engaging character, but the bioengineered characters mostly are not. Although the fanatical rebels manage to make even the rasa Tast'annin a somewhat sympathetic figure. The ending is very unsatisfying; maybe Hand originally intended to continue it. Major characters just get abandoned (Reive was abandoned at the end of Aestival Tide) and evil has an inconclusive triumph. The message seems to be that the world is a chaotic mess headed for annihilation. May reflect reality, but not what I am looking for in fiction.
This finally brings together the various story lines of the previous two books. Wendy remains an engaging character, but the bioengineered characters mostly are not. Although the fanatical rebels manage to make even the rasa Tast'annin a somewhat sympathetic figure. The ending is very unsatisfying; maybe Hand originally intended to continue it. Major characters just get abandoned (Reive was abandoned at the end of Aestival Tide) and evil has an inconclusive triumph. The message seems to be that the world is a chaotic mess headed for annihilation. May reflect reality, but not what I am looking for in fiction.
August 16, 2013
This is a book that most likely ended up in my collection after a raid on a used book store or a library book sale; I was always hunting for sci-fi/fantasy books when I was younger (who am I kidding... I'm still always hunting for those). Finally, on a 4 hour plane ride, I read it. It is apparently the last of a trilogy of books set in a post-apocalyptic world all but destroyed after centuries of Ascensions by various factions. It is also a world filled with geneslaves, replicants, clones, rasas (re-animated dead), and other products of genetic manipulation. The current ruling faction lives primarily on the HORUS spaces stations, and is tended to by the impossible-to-pronounce energumens, geneslaves based on the DNA of the daughter of Dr. Burdock, he whose research basically led to this dystopian future.
The book is problematic and, sadly, not that good.It did do a pretty excellent job of building atmosphere, making the reader feel the despair of life (or un-life, or re-life) on such a desiccated planet. But there were way too many story lines to follow. It took all of my willpower to get through the first third of the book, to a place where I actually had enough of an understanding of the 3 or so main threads I was following. And while they all converged (a little too neatly) by the end, several of them seemed to have no bearing on the actual story. Scratch that - none of them did, because there was no main story. The book was really just a collection of stories that were shoved together at the end. There were several sub-plots that were pushed on the reader heavily and then never completed. The fourth - and ostensibly pretty major - plot line wasn't really introduced until the last 50 pages of the entire book, by which point it felt like a complete afterthought. And then the book ended, with only one character's fate certain (2, if you're generous); everyone else was just never heard from again.
To sum it up, it comes as no surprise to me that I had to search by ISBN to find any mention of this book within Goodreads.
The book is problematic and, sadly, not that good.It did do a pretty excellent job of building atmosphere, making the reader feel the despair of life (or un-life, or re-life) on such a desiccated planet. But there were way too many story lines to follow. It took all of my willpower to get through the first third of the book, to a place where I actually had enough of an understanding of the 3 or so main threads I was following. And while they all converged (a little too neatly) by the end, several of them seemed to have no bearing on the actual story. Scratch that - none of them did, because there was no main story. The book was really just a collection of stories that were shoved together at the end. There were several sub-plots that were pushed on the reader heavily and then never completed. The fourth - and ostensibly pretty major - plot line wasn't really introduced until the last 50 pages of the entire book, by which point it felt like a complete afterthought. And then the book ended, with only one character's fate certain (2, if you're generous); everyone else was just never heard from again.
To sum it up, it comes as no surprise to me that I had to search by ISBN to find any mention of this book within Goodreads.
October 8, 2015
3 and a half stars. she writes terrific beginnings, but she's no good at endings. does she run out of time, or lose interest, i wonder? she is well worth reading, for her interesting characters and her great world-building, i recommend her highly really. and the Winterlong series as a whole is excellent. but every story she writes has a tendency to run down before it ends. it's a bit of a problem.
August 31, 2008
My only problems with this book were the absence of several characters from previous novels - why Hand brought back certain people, but not others, was unclear; and the cliffhanger ending. It wasn't quite as richly developed as the previous two books, but seeing as it was split between the narratives of three characters, that's to be expected. Still leaves you wanting more from the series.
April 17, 2009
Touched on many brilliant ideas but then didn't flesh a lot of it out. A bit more political than the rest of the books in the series (to my distaste). Sadly, only one of the really awesome characters from the second book are in this one.
July 11, 2011
A fitting conclusion to a singular trilogy.
January 3, 2013
2.5 stars, the ending is quite a cop-out.
March 4, 2018
Not my favorite book of the trilogy. I was fine throughout the first half of the novel - I liked being re-introduced to some of my favorite characters from book one - but halfway through, things fell apart. It was difficult to keep all of the different viewpoints separate. Also I couldn't make heads or tails out of the ending. To me, it was a very ambiguous ending that made an anti-climatic ending of the series. The author, I believe, was trying to say something, but what that was, I have no idea.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews