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Radix #4
The Last Legends of Earth
Set in the artificial planetary system of Chalco-Doror, which is no more and no less than a vast cosmic machine, The Last Legends of Earth is a love story, a gripping saga of struggle against alien control, and an examination of the machinery of creation and destruction. Above all, it is world-building of the highest and grandest order, on a scale rarely seen in science fiction since the great works of Olaf Stapledon.
450 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
115 people are currently reading
621 people want to read
About the author
A.A. Attanasio
47 books360 followersI’m a novelist and student of the imagination living in Honolulu. Fantasies, visions, hallucinations or whatever we call those irrational powers that illuminate our inner life fascinate me. I’m particularly intrigued by the creative intelligence that scripts our dreams. And I love carrying this soulful energy outside my mind, into the one form that most precisely defines who we are: story.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
July 17, 2025
(ETA: Don’t fret about the “Radix #4” assignation if you’re interested in this one, as the books are each entirely standalone.)
I very nearly gave this a full 5 stars, and may in fact still do so if the urge becomes too much to bear. The amount of mind-blowing/bending concepts jammed into its 450 pages is overwhelming, rivaled only by Neal Stephenson’s Anathem as far as my personal reading experiences go.
The story spans thousands of years, which is mere weeks to Gai, a highly advanced, almost godlike being from the rim of a black hole who, with the help of AI machines, resurrects the long-extinct human race and keeps watch over their new planetary system throughout their ensuing, endless war against an invading horde of nightmarish, parasitic alien spiders known as the zōtl. She’s using the humans as bait, you see, as she has a bone to pick with the zōtl.
Gai is our main through-line in the story, connecting all the various human-related plots throughout the centuries. But so much is thrown at the reader that it’s nearly impossible to keep track and remain invested in everything happening on the various planets and planes of reality, especially once wonky time shenanigans are introduced.
And that’s the main reason I can’t quite give it the 5 stars it possibly deserves. It becomes extremely convoluted as new characters and plot lines are constantly introduced. If only my brain worked better … it don’t think so good sometimes. A glossary and/or some sort of general timeline would have been handy as well, but alas.
I might have more to add once the dust settles and I can wrap my head around everything, but for now I’ll just say that overall this was a tripped-out, awe-inspiring (and at times even horrifying) epic, punctuated with moments of total incomprehensibility.
4.5 Stars.
I very nearly gave this a full 5 stars, and may in fact still do so if the urge becomes too much to bear. The amount of mind-blowing/bending concepts jammed into its 450 pages is overwhelming, rivaled only by Neal Stephenson’s Anathem as far as my personal reading experiences go.
The story spans thousands of years, which is mere weeks to Gai, a highly advanced, almost godlike being from the rim of a black hole who, with the help of AI machines, resurrects the long-extinct human race and keeps watch over their new planetary system throughout their ensuing, endless war against an invading horde of nightmarish, parasitic alien spiders known as the zōtl. She’s using the humans as bait, you see, as she has a bone to pick with the zōtl.
Gai is our main through-line in the story, connecting all the various human-related plots throughout the centuries. But so much is thrown at the reader that it’s nearly impossible to keep track and remain invested in everything happening on the various planets and planes of reality, especially once wonky time shenanigans are introduced.
And that’s the main reason I can’t quite give it the 5 stars it possibly deserves. It becomes extremely convoluted as new characters and plot lines are constantly introduced. If only my brain worked better … it don’t think so good sometimes. A glossary and/or some sort of general timeline would have been handy as well, but alas.
I might have more to add once the dust settles and I can wrap my head around everything, but for now I’ll just say that overall this was a tripped-out, awe-inspiring (and at times even horrifying) epic, punctuated with moments of total incomprehensibility.
4.5 Stars.
March 9, 2021
"Lord of the rings, crossed with the Silmarillion... with lasers."
"Narnia, but the baddies are brain-sucking aliens."
"The entire Star Wars sequence, but spread out over thousands of years, just about everyone dies and all the planets are going to explode."
This is how I imagine A.A Attanasio pitched The Last Legends of Earth to his publisher, liberally sprinkling the word ‘Epic’ into every second sentence.
Be warned, curious reader, this is about as epic as epically epic epics come, with a tone that feels much more like a grand fable than your usual work of SF. There are sections that feel like the ‘begats’ bit of the old testament and sections that really do feel Silmarillion-ish in their weird names and hard-to-follow historical outlines.
All this epicness encompasses a Big story. In the far future, humanity (and our solar system) have been dead for billions of years. However, our race, and most of the plants and creatures of Earth are revived by an alien entity, and rebirthed on a series of worlds names Chalco-Doror that the alien has built as part of a gigantic machine designed to lure a deadly adversary. In this machine, we humans are the bait, attracting an horrific species - the zotl - who feed upon the enzymes our brains secrete when we are in severe pain.
And so begins a story that spans thousands of years, tens of characters to lose track of, a grand love story and some pretty confusing jumps between all of them.
This is a weird book. I dug it, but reading it was at times a bit draining.
Genre-wise it feels closer to the space fantasy style of Star Wars, than anything anchored in hard science or reality. The fable, the mythos, and the quest that the novel centres on are the focus, and all the SF stuff is pretty thin in its description. It's really just fodder for moving the plot along. The ideas that do so are pretty cool – different dimensions with different energy levels, entire star systems set up as traps for marauding aliens, the re-creation of entire biomes from scraps of DNA and many more – but they aren’t really founded upon anything other than ‘advanced alien technology, so hard SF readers should look elsewhere.
The novel is listed as being part of a four part sequence, but it completely stand alone, thank the gods. While I was able to hack my way through one jungle of time jumps, weird names and plants that let you seen through time and space, three more books would have led me to lie down on the forest floor and give myself over to the anacondas. That’s not to say I hated this book – I actually rather enjoyed it – but that by the end of the story I was comprehensively fatigued by it. Even an hour after reading it I struggled to mentally order the events in the story into a coherent narrative or timeline.
The Last Legends of Earth is genuinely grand, genuinely epic, and at times hugely imaginative. Just make sure you’re in the mood for an epic saga before you pick it up, and that you’re mentally equipped for a slogging expedition through its overgrown narrative.
Three trusty jungle machetes out of five.
"Narnia, but the baddies are brain-sucking aliens."
"The entire Star Wars sequence, but spread out over thousands of years, just about everyone dies and all the planets are going to explode."
This is how I imagine A.A Attanasio pitched The Last Legends of Earth to his publisher, liberally sprinkling the word ‘Epic’ into every second sentence.
Be warned, curious reader, this is about as epic as epically epic epics come, with a tone that feels much more like a grand fable than your usual work of SF. There are sections that feel like the ‘begats’ bit of the old testament and sections that really do feel Silmarillion-ish in their weird names and hard-to-follow historical outlines.
All this epicness encompasses a Big story. In the far future, humanity (and our solar system) have been dead for billions of years. However, our race, and most of the plants and creatures of Earth are revived by an alien entity, and rebirthed on a series of worlds names Chalco-Doror that the alien has built as part of a gigantic machine designed to lure a deadly adversary. In this machine, we humans are the bait, attracting an horrific species - the zotl - who feed upon the enzymes our brains secrete when we are in severe pain.
And so begins a story that spans thousands of years, tens of characters to lose track of, a grand love story and some pretty confusing jumps between all of them.
This is a weird book. I dug it, but reading it was at times a bit draining.
Genre-wise it feels closer to the space fantasy style of Star Wars, than anything anchored in hard science or reality. The fable, the mythos, and the quest that the novel centres on are the focus, and all the SF stuff is pretty thin in its description. It's really just fodder for moving the plot along. The ideas that do so are pretty cool – different dimensions with different energy levels, entire star systems set up as traps for marauding aliens, the re-creation of entire biomes from scraps of DNA and many more – but they aren’t really founded upon anything other than ‘advanced alien technology, so hard SF readers should look elsewhere.
The novel is listed as being part of a four part sequence, but it completely stand alone, thank the gods. While I was able to hack my way through one jungle of time jumps, weird names and plants that let you seen through time and space, three more books would have led me to lie down on the forest floor and give myself over to the anacondas. That’s not to say I hated this book – I actually rather enjoyed it – but that by the end of the story I was comprehensively fatigued by it. Even an hour after reading it I struggled to mentally order the events in the story into a coherent narrative or timeline.
The Last Legends of Earth is genuinely grand, genuinely epic, and at times hugely imaginative. Just make sure you’re in the mood for an epic saga before you pick it up, and that you’re mentally equipped for a slogging expedition through its overgrown narrative.
Three trusty jungle machetes out of five.
December 14, 2021
The Most Wildly-Imaginative, Complicated, Weird, and Epic SF Novel I've Read in a Long Time
It's a bit sad that this book hasn't gotten more attention in the SF community. I think that's partly due to the mistaken attempt by the publisher or author or readers to classify it as Radix #4. These books are all stand-along novels tied *very* loosely by the concepts of height, length, depth, and time. That framework is so open-ended as to be virtually meaningless. But I'm pretty sure there were a lot more readers of Radix, as it got a lot of critics excited and Bantam Spectra gave it quite a push, and the middle novels are far slighter in both length and heft, so perhaps not too many readers ever got round to this.
For that matter, I bought the paperback back in 1989 and have only now listened to the audiobook in 2021, 32 years later (!), so it certainly didn't do Mr. Attanasio any favors in terms of building popularity or momentum. Having checked what he's written since, it looks like he's written a series of historical fantasy novels instead, a totally different direction, which makes me think he was disappointing in the lack of recognition for his SF and moved onto new pastures.
In any case, this book's storyline and structure truly defy description. The amount of characters, both humans and AIs, evil brain-sucking winged spiders, ghosts, zombies, Vikings, and alien super-beings capable of creating whole star systems and move between times and dimensions, is literally mind-blowing and overwhelming. At some point Attanasio's relentless creativity just pummels the reader into an accepting stupor - it's hard to picture any readers really following the story and making sense of it the way the author (I assume) intended. It gets full marks for imagination, but think the scale and complexity and number of ideas just overwhelmed the narrative. Happens when you span 7,000 years, multiple planets, various dimensions, and of course throw in a bunch of time travel through alternative realities (time-lines) as well.
Nobody can accuse the author of being unimaginative, but I think he really just tried to cram too much into one book. If only he could have spread this over 4 books and given more space to the various ideas and storylines, this could have been a mind-blowing epic SF series. As it stands, it seems to be a sadly neglected work of staggering creativity, though far from perfect.
It's a bit sad that this book hasn't gotten more attention in the SF community. I think that's partly due to the mistaken attempt by the publisher or author or readers to classify it as Radix #4. These books are all stand-along novels tied *very* loosely by the concepts of height, length, depth, and time. That framework is so open-ended as to be virtually meaningless. But I'm pretty sure there were a lot more readers of Radix, as it got a lot of critics excited and Bantam Spectra gave it quite a push, and the middle novels are far slighter in both length and heft, so perhaps not too many readers ever got round to this.
For that matter, I bought the paperback back in 1989 and have only now listened to the audiobook in 2021, 32 years later (!), so it certainly didn't do Mr. Attanasio any favors in terms of building popularity or momentum. Having checked what he's written since, it looks like he's written a series of historical fantasy novels instead, a totally different direction, which makes me think he was disappointing in the lack of recognition for his SF and moved onto new pastures.
In any case, this book's storyline and structure truly defy description. The amount of characters, both humans and AIs, evil brain-sucking winged spiders, ghosts, zombies, Vikings, and alien super-beings capable of creating whole star systems and move between times and dimensions, is literally mind-blowing and overwhelming. At some point Attanasio's relentless creativity just pummels the reader into an accepting stupor - it's hard to picture any readers really following the story and making sense of it the way the author (I assume) intended. It gets full marks for imagination, but think the scale and complexity and number of ideas just overwhelmed the narrative. Happens when you span 7,000 years, multiple planets, various dimensions, and of course throw in a bunch of time travel through alternative realities (time-lines) as well.
Nobody can accuse the author of being unimaginative, but I think he really just tried to cram too much into one book. If only he could have spread this over 4 books and given more space to the various ideas and storylines, this could have been a mind-blowing epic SF series. As it stands, it seems to be a sadly neglected work of staggering creativity, though far from perfect.
February 13, 2016
Spoiler free summary: An alien archaeologist digs through dead Earth's past to use humans as bait for the purpose of intergalactic pest control. Humans don't like being bait for alien spiders who drink their neurological pain endorphins, so they resist, ally, or betray one another to the exterminator. Centipedes, spiders, humans, gnomes, robots, ghosts, and zombies clash in a space war fought across 15 planets and two sentient "suns" that are actually machines designed to maintain the insect trap.
Who is AA Attanasio? Oh, just a writer using every inch of his brain to pummel readers with the most original, outrageous story set to paper. He's a master mood manipulator, turning on a dime from cerebral (ow, my brain), to terrifying (dont read if you have arachnophobia), to grotesque (oh the distorts you'll know!), to badass (Vikings fighting robot zombies? fuck yeah!), to charmingly goofy (evil priests live in a fortress of insect parts on the north pole!), to poignant (humanity's glorious flaws radiate on every page).
Though the writing is overwrought at times, it's actually a very taut novel without a page of wasted space to advance the plot. Oh, and "the plot?" It only spans some seven thousand years. Seven billion years if you count the death of Earth. And the timeline is hardly linear--add in the paradoxes of time travel and parallel universes and it's perhaps the most ambitious story ever told. Somehow this complexity doesn't overwhelm, it only astounds. Even characters who appear in the flash of a year are given a memorable background and purpose. On the whole Attanasio transcribes a beautiful nightmare "rising from the tar pit of dreams." By the end I didn't want to wake up.
Who is AA Attanasio? Oh, just a writer using every inch of his brain to pummel readers with the most original, outrageous story set to paper. He's a master mood manipulator, turning on a dime from cerebral (ow, my brain), to terrifying (dont read if you have arachnophobia), to grotesque (oh the distorts you'll know!), to badass (Vikings fighting robot zombies? fuck yeah!), to charmingly goofy (evil priests live in a fortress of insect parts on the north pole!), to poignant (humanity's glorious flaws radiate on every page).
Though the writing is overwrought at times, it's actually a very taut novel without a page of wasted space to advance the plot. Oh, and "the plot?" It only spans some seven thousand years. Seven billion years if you count the death of Earth. And the timeline is hardly linear--add in the paradoxes of time travel and parallel universes and it's perhaps the most ambitious story ever told. Somehow this complexity doesn't overwhelm, it only astounds. Even characters who appear in the flash of a year are given a memorable background and purpose. On the whole Attanasio transcribes a beautiful nightmare "rising from the tar pit of dreams." By the end I didn't want to wake up.
August 3, 2012
WARNING to my friends: do NOT read reviews or summaries of this book on Goodreads, as every one I've seen has casually given away a big portion of the book, explaining what's going on in a way that the book intentionally takes a long time to reveal. A second NOTE: this book stands alone, so do not be fooled by the "Radix #4" label, as if it is fourth in a larger cycle.
That said, this is an A.A. Attanasio book. Among other things, this means that it is a big story that has been intentionally and lovingly crafted to resemble another author's style exactly. This book is Attanasio's Jack Vance science fiction book. Jack Vance writes stories that feature complicated space opera/science fantasy plots with a vast array of improbably hyperbolic settings, dispassionate and sarcastic characters, and an indulgently elaborate vocabulary. Attanasio emulates all this and the distinctive style of Vance's prose flawlessly. It's a great story, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of science fantasy, space opera, and/or Jack Vance.
That said, this is an A.A. Attanasio book. Among other things, this means that it is a big story that has been intentionally and lovingly crafted to resemble another author's style exactly. This book is Attanasio's Jack Vance science fiction book. Jack Vance writes stories that feature complicated space opera/science fantasy plots with a vast array of improbably hyperbolic settings, dispassionate and sarcastic characters, and an indulgently elaborate vocabulary. Attanasio emulates all this and the distinctive style of Vance's prose flawlessly. It's a great story, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of science fantasy, space opera, and/or Jack Vance.
April 21, 2022
So here's the long and short of this book: I couldn't get into it.
I hate that I couldn't get into it, too, because the damn thing was rife with great ideas, with a sprawling galactic battle for the soul of the human race, including enormous stakes, new-agey, straight starship/alien technology/truly WEIRD technology, capped with original concepts and events.
It even has cameos from the other Radix books.
So what's my problem?
I just couldn't get into any single character except obliquely, through the worldbuilding, and it just wasn't enough to hold onto.
Attanasio is good on the originality front. Indeed, he's overflowing and I LOVE that. This book just isn't good enough to hold me on anything else, and even though I was pretty solid on books one and three in Radix, this one feels like it should have had some really gritty threads of characters to do it justice instead of the massive jumps we did get.
This isn't a Stephen Baxter Xeelee take, no matter how it slightly resembles it from my description.
It may be a case of "it's me, not you", too.
I hate that I couldn't get into it, too, because the damn thing was rife with great ideas, with a sprawling galactic battle for the soul of the human race, including enormous stakes, new-agey, straight starship/alien technology/truly WEIRD technology, capped with original concepts and events.
It even has cameos from the other Radix books.
So what's my problem?
I just couldn't get into any single character except obliquely, through the worldbuilding, and it just wasn't enough to hold onto.
Attanasio is good on the originality front. Indeed, he's overflowing and I LOVE that. This book just isn't good enough to hold me on anything else, and even though I was pretty solid on books one and three in Radix, this one feels like it should have had some really gritty threads of characters to do it justice instead of the massive jumps we did get.
This isn't a Stephen Baxter Xeelee take, no matter how it slightly resembles it from my description.
It may be a case of "it's me, not you", too.
February 5, 2017
Describing this book is almost an impossibility. It is a love story spanning cosmos and millennia through pure chaos.
TLLoE brings to mind the following adjectives: Wondrous, herculean, mesmerizing, psychedelic, chaotic, challenging and extremely provocative.
Conceptually is excitingly challenging: Attanassio presents philosophical concepts from a pure scientific point of view, only to tease and trap the reader to extrapolate these concepts ad infinitum if, of course, the reader dares.
I need to digest this beast for a little while before continuing with the Radix series.
TLLoE brings to mind the following adjectives: Wondrous, herculean, mesmerizing, psychedelic, chaotic, challenging and extremely provocative.
Conceptually is excitingly challenging: Attanassio presents philosophical concepts from a pure scientific point of view, only to tease and trap the reader to extrapolate these concepts ad infinitum if, of course, the reader dares.
I need to digest this beast for a little while before continuing with the Radix series.
January 17, 2022
Reading this was an infuriating experience. The beauty of Attanasio's ideas, words, and even certain moments of his characters' relationships gets mauled by some of the most meaningless antagonists in all of speculative fiction and the brainless use of violence as a cure-all.
I'm not sure I'll ever try anything else by him.
Still, here's the beauty:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
I'm not sure I'll ever try anything else by him.
Still, here's the beauty:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
August 11, 2007
Quite possibly the best science fiction book I have ever read. And that's saying a lot. Epic on a scale rarely attempted in a series, let alone a single novel.
August 4, 2012
Complex. Disjointed, in a way. I didn't realize it when I began, but this is the fourth book by Attanasio in a tetrad devoted to the four cardinal dimensions that rule our lives - height, depth, width, time. In retrospect, it makes sense for the one about time to be disjointed. That's not a bad thing, of course.
Distant. As with any book that covers a span of seven thousand years, there are plenty of characters that are introduced, make their effects felt, and disappear - a handful of characters remain constant and well-known to the reader.
Epic gods - reminded me of nothing so much as of the Valar vs. Melkor in Tolkien's The Silmarillion. The continuing struggle of the great machine intelligences against torture and conversion by the zōtl... the two forms of fire, one bright as the sun and one unrelenting darkness. Genetrix, omnipresent and life-giving - and Gai, the creator.
It was meant to be read straight through, forging ahead like tank bruting through jungle. I don't know how many times this happened: a detail is mentioned offhandedly about a topic that had been described before as if the detail is obvious and you should know it - making you think, "Oh, I missed something. I'll go back and check." But when you go back to the original description, that detail is nowhere to be found. You didn't miss anything; that new detail is just being given to you by the author in a different order than usual. Eventually you get used to it and you stop looking back whenever you find details. A second read would probably give you a much clearer idea of what's going on.
It was hard to get into, certainly. Storywise, I was lost for a good first quarter of the book. Writing was enjoyable enough that I kept going for the sake of the descriptions, so I eventually caught onto the story. Then I couldn't put it down.
So many twists. There were a lot of ways I could have seen it ending.
Distant. As with any book that covers a span of seven thousand years, there are plenty of characters that are introduced, make their effects felt, and disappear - a handful of characters remain constant and well-known to the reader.
Epic gods - reminded me of nothing so much as of the Valar vs. Melkor in Tolkien's The Silmarillion. The continuing struggle of the great machine intelligences against torture and conversion by the zōtl... the two forms of fire, one bright as the sun and one unrelenting darkness. Genetrix, omnipresent and life-giving - and Gai, the creator.
It was meant to be read straight through, forging ahead like tank bruting through jungle. I don't know how many times this happened: a detail is mentioned offhandedly about a topic that had been described before as if the detail is obvious and you should know it - making you think, "Oh, I missed something. I'll go back and check." But when you go back to the original description, that detail is nowhere to be found. You didn't miss anything; that new detail is just being given to you by the author in a different order than usual. Eventually you get used to it and you stop looking back whenever you find details. A second read would probably give you a much clearer idea of what's going on.
It was hard to get into, certainly. Storywise, I was lost for a good first quarter of the book. Writing was enjoyable enough that I kept going for the sake of the descriptions, so I eventually caught onto the story. Then I couldn't put it down.
So many twists. There were a lot of ways I could have seen it ending.
May 24, 2025
attanasio operates from that spot at which sf resembles the highest of fantasies, in that tethers to the ground are broken and we are working only on elemental levels, with massive abstraction, archetype, and generality, all to the background score of a handpan and siku. the parts of this book that do that are okay to v. good. and much of the rest operates from the most banal corners of cheesy 80s genre blockbusteriana.
August 24, 2012
It's big (huge, collossal, overwhelmingly large) in time, societies and surroundings. It's complicated, with characters coming and going and coming and going, sometimes in both directions. And it's interesting, in a "how the heck is this all going to hang together?" kind of way. But,as much as the authour tries desparately to hold the whole thing together, in my case he failed to hold onto my interest. The best characters and civilizations come and go, and the boring, underdeveloped, predictable ones keep hanging on page after page. It seems to be trying to be space opera and sermon at the same time, and not pulling either off completely.
It's worth reading, but don't expect too too much.
It's worth reading, but don't expect too too much.
January 14, 2015
A.A. Attanasio takes sci-fi worldbuilding quite literally.
The Last Legends of Earth is a fantasy/sci-fi epic that details the formation of an artificial planetary system in the far future. After being populated by Earth humans from the distant past, the saga tells how various cultures rise and fall within the system over a course of thousands of years.
The story has a lengthy time-scale, and is structured by telling us the story of several protagonists who traverse both time and space within this star system. In some ways it's similar to Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker and Last and First Men, although the writing style is far more pulpy and less focused than Stapledon's epic. The majority of the story is captivating, though there are periods throughout the middle that did tend to bore, such as endless war-related chapters. (First half - great; middle - poor; final act - great).
What really makes this story stand out though is the treatment of several fantastical and spiritual qualities (such as existence of an afterlife) as exact sci-fi sciences; whilst then subverting and minimalising explanations for more common sci-fi standards (such as explanations of time-travel, and instantaneous wormhole travel), reducing such explanations to that of lore-driven fantasy.
The Last Legends of Earth is a fantasy/sci-fi epic that details the formation of an artificial planetary system in the far future. After being populated by Earth humans from the distant past, the saga tells how various cultures rise and fall within the system over a course of thousands of years.
The story has a lengthy time-scale, and is structured by telling us the story of several protagonists who traverse both time and space within this star system. In some ways it's similar to Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker and Last and First Men, although the writing style is far more pulpy and less focused than Stapledon's epic. The majority of the story is captivating, though there are periods throughout the middle that did tend to bore, such as endless war-related chapters. (First half - great; middle - poor; final act - great).
What really makes this story stand out though is the treatment of several fantastical and spiritual qualities (such as existence of an afterlife) as exact sci-fi sciences; whilst then subverting and minimalising explanations for more common sci-fi standards (such as explanations of time-travel, and instantaneous wormhole travel), reducing such explanations to that of lore-driven fantasy.
May 6, 2017
In my lexicon, two stars is a "meh" book, probably something else to read out there.
(I could have swore I did this review already, but doesn't seem to be here. I read this a few weeks ago)
Attanasios' Last Legends of Earth is innovative and clearly shows that Attanasio is a force to be reckoned with in terms of sci-fi and imagination. But for me, it was slow, hard to get in to and by the time I began to actually relate to the characters it was all over. The enemies, the Zotl, were particularly one-dimensional, creatures created to bring out maximum horror with for a really contrived reason.
I haven't read any of the rest of Attanasio's Radix books and right now I don't think I'm going to. He's clearly talented in word-building, but the story and characters left a *lot* to be desired.
(I could have swore I did this review already, but doesn't seem to be here. I read this a few weeks ago)
Attanasios' Last Legends of Earth is innovative and clearly shows that Attanasio is a force to be reckoned with in terms of sci-fi and imagination. But for me, it was slow, hard to get in to and by the time I began to actually relate to the characters it was all over. The enemies, the Zotl, were particularly one-dimensional, creatures created to bring out maximum horror with for a really contrived reason.
I haven't read any of the rest of Attanasio's Radix books and right now I don't think I'm going to. He's clearly talented in word-building, but the story and characters left a *lot* to be desired.
September 8, 2012
LLOE, as Attanasio's fans refer to it, is a science-fiction epic and should be a classic. The scope and dazzling brilliance of the book defy easy description. It tells the story of characters living in a universe created by a god-like alien for the sole purpose of attracting and destroying another alien race of predators. The humans who inhabit its worlds are bait for the predators. Earth, their original home, has long since been destroyed. They have been recreated from waveforms in the void of space. As stated, none of this begins to do justice to this book. I consider it one of a handful of the very best SF I've read. Check it out!
April 9, 2017
There were parts of this I loved. It was an original idea with complex characters who had competing but logical interests. It was fascinating to see the different civilizations pop into and out of existence. Yet I thought the book started dragging in the last quarter or so. I felt like the author was throwing in unnecessary complications to keep the book going. I also felt like the ghosts, and people being reborn as needed, just a little to convoluted to really make the story as effective as possible.
August 11, 2012
Hands down one of the best SF books ever written and one of my favorite books of all time. The plot is, essentially, a love story across time, space, death, and reality. The story sprawls across six thousand years and involves a number of characters, but always seems to drive forward with purpose. The settings and storylines are imaginative and grandiose. The core themes of the book are epic and unforgettable.
November 17, 2014
Mind blowing. The entire history of a binary solar system and its civilizations, with really alien gods, sinister alien demons and lots of time travel, in only 500 pages.
March 12, 2011
A fantastic read. Attanasio really should return to science fiction as it is what he does best. This dense, imaginitive story is a must read for anyone who enjoyed Radix. This is another book I re-read every few years and it always leaves me saying "wow....".
From Last Legends of Earth: "We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside ourselves diminishes us - because comfort and power, unless they are won from the void inside us, are illusions that make us forget the emptiness that carries us. When we forget that, we believe we deserve comfort and power and so we are capable of any evil. We deserve nothing but what we can make of ourselves. We deserve nothing else. And when we understand that, then nothing is enough."
From Last Legends of Earth: "We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside ourselves diminishes us - because comfort and power, unless they are won from the void inside us, are illusions that make us forget the emptiness that carries us. When we forget that, we believe we deserve comfort and power and so we are capable of any evil. We deserve nothing but what we can make of ourselves. We deserve nothing else. And when we understand that, then nothing is enough."
January 2, 2021
A complex SF world with a sweeping scale that touches on the nature of time, space, religion, history, empire, evil, and eschatology. It is more impressionistic than thorough, touching on many things but not quite sinking its teeth into them before moving on. Other reviewers have commented that the Zotl in particular are one-dimensional -- a pity, since they are arguably the main character of the novel. While many describe this as a love store across time, I actually felt that the love story was one of the least compelling aspects of the novel, acting more as the metaphorical strohlkraft to move the characters and plot forward and expouse us to the much larger story and bigger ideas. Ultimately, though, this creative rollercoaster of a tale moves so fast through thousands of years that you don't have time to question it before you are distracted by another marvel, conundrum, or terror.
June 7, 2018
Wow! This is so huge it is difficult to review. Apparently the fourth in a series. The premise is the re-animation of humans from their stellar molecules to serve as bait for a spider race that feeds on pain. Filled with quantum physics, a love story through 1,000 years, a sort of tessering, and am epic war over 7,000 years! Plus the creation of an amazing system of planets. What is the responsibility of the creator to his creation? Dose a noble goal justify any means? How much free will do we have? All this and more.
August 9, 2011
I read this book in High School, when it first came out. I have also committed to reading it again as an adult.
I was drawn into it instantly. I loved its exploration of what love, life, and death are all about, while inside a vastly weird and wonderful plot involving mankind as bait -- bait who earns the compassion of its fisherman.
I was drawn into it instantly. I loved its exploration of what love, life, and death are all about, while inside a vastly weird and wonderful plot involving mankind as bait -- bait who earns the compassion of its fisherman.
December 19, 2009
One of the craziest plots ever. Attanasio uses language beautifully.
April 15, 2014
This book has the most outrageous plot I've ever encountered, but the author never loses control and the book provides a fantastic read.
July 12, 2023
I started with this not realizing that it was the fourth and final installment of the so-called Radix series; but it stands alone just fine. In fact, if you are not familiar with Attanasio, I’d suggest you begin your journey with this one.
The four books of this series are very loosely organized on the topic of four dimensions – height, depth, width, and time – with one book exploring each subject. There is just one minor carryover of the world-building between them, the telepathic Voors, otherwise they stand alone just fine.
Of the four this is the one I remember most vividly. I read it in 2019 and yet, here in 2023, I can still picture many of the scenes in this book. With the others, just vague impressions.
I count this among my Top Ten favorites, and I can see why Robert Silverberg was impressed with it. It’s a complex tapestry of characters and timelines spanning billions of years. Attanasio is a real virtuoso of the English language, not only using verbs as nouns and vice versa, but in usage of words that I’ve never before seen, though one can usually determine meaning by looking at the Latin or Greek root, such as ‘rubinessence’ which means a reddish or rosey-colored glow (whereas rubenesque with an “e” would refer to the painter’s preference for voluptuous or corpulent body form).
I’m somewhat puzzled by the Attanasio fans who rate all of his books with glowing five star reviews. I find the themes and characters and tone of the writing so very different, hence the disparity in my ratings. The book that has the most in common with this one is In Other Worlds, which I also recommend. To be honest, if I had started with Radix, the first book of the series, I would have gone no further with Attanasio. Start here, or with the shorter In Other Worlds , to get an idea of Attanasio at his best.
The four books of this series are very loosely organized on the topic of four dimensions – height, depth, width, and time – with one book exploring each subject. There is just one minor carryover of the world-building between them, the telepathic Voors, otherwise they stand alone just fine.
Of the four this is the one I remember most vividly. I read it in 2019 and yet, here in 2023, I can still picture many of the scenes in this book. With the others, just vague impressions.
I count this among my Top Ten favorites, and I can see why Robert Silverberg was impressed with it. It’s a complex tapestry of characters and timelines spanning billions of years. Attanasio is a real virtuoso of the English language, not only using verbs as nouns and vice versa, but in usage of words that I’ve never before seen, though one can usually determine meaning by looking at the Latin or Greek root, such as ‘rubinessence’ which means a reddish or rosey-colored glow (whereas rubenesque with an “e” would refer to the painter’s preference for voluptuous or corpulent body form).
I’m somewhat puzzled by the Attanasio fans who rate all of his books with glowing five star reviews. I find the themes and characters and tone of the writing so very different, hence the disparity in my ratings. The book that has the most in common with this one is In Other Worlds, which I also recommend. To be honest, if I had started with Radix, the first book of the series, I would have gone no further with Attanasio. Start here, or with the shorter In Other Worlds , to get an idea of Attanasio at his best.
May 14, 2023
Blew my tiny mind with its high concept and epic span when I first read it back in, as they say, the day, blew it again this time because of the sheer storytelling skill - this is like Iain Banks crossed with Guy Gavriel Kay, to give a woefully inadequate sense of what it does. Massively mind-boggling science fiction melded with a deep love of storytelling, which enables the author to skilfully draw the reader across a tangled plot spread over thousands of years and multiple settings, all contained within a planetray system that is both a disassembled starship and a trap for a particularly nasty and malevoelent enemy that preys on the long-extinct but newly-ressurected race of humans who are bait in the trap. The complexity of the worldbuilding and the story is actually kind of stunning. Self-contained, by the way, I haven't read any of the other Radix books - which is weird considering the way this exploded in my head - with no trouble. I think one supporting character comes from the previous books. A love story at its heart, too, which is nice.
October 8, 2023
I remember picking this book up as a young teen in the nineties at a garage sale. I had no idea that it was going to lodge itself deep into my brain meat and completely change the chemistry therein forever and ever amen. There are very very few books that I've read to to tatters, but I still have all the pieces of that original copy, though they don't hold together any more: the pages all soft-edged, the covers missing, the spine shattered and replaced by layers of duct tape where it's been put back together over and over again so many times it will no longer stick, everything peeled off and no longer able to fit together. The profound sense of weirdness and wonder in this book has gotten me through so much in my life. The entire Tetrad has gotten me through a lot, but this is the one I keep circling back home to.
Somehow, the book being in pieces that I can't always keep in the right order has never hurt it. Maybe in just this one case no longer being able to read it through in the same order twice is just right.
Somehow, the book being in pieces that I can't always keep in the right order has never hurt it. Maybe in just this one case no longer being able to read it through in the same order twice is just right.
October 22, 2022
A book with a lot of potential but which lost its "oomf" as it went on. The Last Legends is strongest when it follows its aliens; the zōtl, the trill, and the O'ode were absolutely fascinating when first introduced, and the moments we learned more about them are the most memorable parts of the book. The Rimstalkers had a bit less of this magic, and I think it's because they're portrayed as being very human, which are incidentally Attanasio's least interesting characters. After the first third of the novel, we just stopped learning new things about the world and started focusing on our pre-existing character arcs, which were straightforward and lusterless.
Also this is more of a personal thing, but Attanasio permanently lost my interest when "friendly ghosts" became a legitimate, recurring plot point.
Also this is more of a personal thing, but Attanasio permanently lost my interest when "friendly ghosts" became a legitimate, recurring plot point.
August 29, 2022
This is a story that spans thousands of years and has pretty much everything you can imagine, space and time and creepy aliens, oh my! It is quite unique and imaginative. It's doing a lot, much of it fascinating, but it isn't easy to tell a very weird story on at this scale while maintaining tension and character investment. I actually think it is very impressive. I had fun with some of it and thought some of it dragged too much, but I admire all of it.
Also please note that it is entirely standalone and I haven't read anything else listed to be in this series.
Also please note that it is entirely standalone and I haven't read anything else listed to be in this series.
October 18, 2023
My gosh, this book is dense and unlike anything I think I have read before. True science fiction with an original story that I cannot liken to anything else I have seen. Sometimes overly wordy and almost intentionally obtuse, but I could not stop reading nonetheless. A new solar system is created out of the parts of an alien's spaceship with the intent to trap and kill the alien's enemies, while using human souls from Earth, placed into new bodies, as bait. And yes, it is just as crazy as it sounds, with an entire new vocabulary to learn.
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