Chimaera by Ian Irvine

I quite enjoyed "Geomancer" However with each successive book in that series I became a little more disaffected. I kept hoping the author would straighten all of his flaws but instead they kept getting worse...

The over reliance on the 'Deus-Ex' mechanism - that is the intervention of the author to pull out some improbable outcome - kind of killed the plot for me.

And then there are the characters... From the first book to the last, the main characters did *not* evolve - no matter what they went through. Take 'Nish" for instance; a thick imbecile who remained a thick imbecile throughout... And I won't even bother describing the villains... Uniformly stupid. Every time you are told by the author that this or that character has changed - you can expect in the following pages to read that he/she's behaving exactly as he/she was behaving in the first book...

It's quite a pity since there were some interesting ideas in these books - but with all the arbitrary shit going on the author manages to spoil his entire cycle....

4/10





G.

After years of reading fantasy books I was so frustrated by the ending of this book that it's driven me to see if others felt the same way and here I am writing my first review. I felt the ending to be rushed and incomplete especially when we had so many pages describing the particulars of landscapes. Some bits seemed truncated like a parting of one of the main Aachim characters and one of the old humans. I *am* glad that some details are yet to be discovered (like who is the Numinator) but not happy having to read another series to discover the fate of one of the main characters. Anyway.....even with this I still give the book a reasonable rating due to the combination of variety of characters with different strengths, motivations and frailities, the dilemma about great power being good and bad, characters like Flydd working for the good of humanity with some dodgy attitudes and methods...of course the overall setting of multiple worlds and multiple races, who are wonderfully interlinked provides lots of rich possibilities. Final gripe...I think the meglomanic leaders (Vithis, etc) are bit 'overacted'. cheers all !

I admit, the ending to Chimaera did seem a little rushed. To end on such a cliffhanger, and having to wait for the next series to discover what happens in a let down.
After having said that, though, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed Chimaera. Actually, I was so enthralled by the series of books that I had begun to read all day, every day until I finished the book.
The book didn't seem to answer the questions that have been on my mind since the beginning of the series. The numinator, for example, is probably the secret I desire to know the most. Who could it be? Is it even a character we've met, so far?
Chimaera has pulled me in, and now I am impatiently awaiting the first book in The Song of the Tears trilogy.
Ian Irvine is a fantastic author, and I hope he has much success in the future. I also hope he writes many more books in the universe of the Three Worlds!