Each story seems only loosely connected to the whole at first, but eventually we begin to pull the various threads together, not because they interconnect strongly but because they share a very strong context and what emerges is a staggeringly awful and very human explanation for the carpet weaving. Told as a series of short stories with no truly central characters, this is a puzzling book. Ostensibly these carpets are intended to decorate the palace of the emperor but the stunning scale of the enterprise is too grand and the book becomes an exploration of what purpose they really serve.EschbachEschbach weaves a tangled web, jumping back and forth over the millenia, deceiving the reader up to the very end. I preferred the French title of this book which translates to “billions of hair carpets” as it better evokes the central idea of the book – a feudal society spread across thousands of planets where a major enterprise is the annual production of literally billions of carpets spun from human hair harvested from the heads of the weavers’ wives and concubines. I’ve found several of his works in French and enjoyed them all, most particularly The Last Of His Kind and The Jesus Video.
However, in my limited experience, no tale has had the range in either time (across hundreds of thousands of years) or distance (across entire galaxies) that this novel spans.Eschbach is not well known to English-speaking readers but is beginning to be read following his discovery by no less than Orson Scott Card.
Donaldson, which I guess puts my taste somewhere on the border between space age saga and fantasy. Some favourites over the years have included Julian May, Iain M.
I’m not a huge authority on science fiction, confining my consumption to a narrow range of authors who catch my attention.
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