ISBN: 0-451-45669-6 Order from: Amazon.com Barnes & Noble.com
Interesting, well-executed first novel, combining mystery, politics, and an exotic location; slightly flawed by over-ambition.
Reviewed by David on April 26, 1998
Genre: Science Fiction (Mystery, Australian Aborigine)
Synopsis: A traveler arrives on an colony where his sister died in a fall. Almost by accident, he gets involved in increasingly complex and violent plots, all against a backdrop of a colony which survives in a hostile world by dint of sophisticated, expensive and fragile technology.
Full Review: Anvil is an interesting first novel, about a mystery surrounding the death of a young woman, Elspeth, in a colony city of Kyara. The city is located on a world called Anvil, for the punishing hammer of its surface gravity, nearly 40 times Earth's. Complex anti-gravity generators are the only things that prevent the beautiful domed city from being flattened. Being in the center of a trading hub, and tight privacy laws make it a haven for large, powerful and ambitious corporations.
When the victim's brother, a native Australian called Gabriel arrives in the colony, it doesn't take long for him to smell the stink of lies in official investigation reports which followed Elspeth's fatal fall. However, Gabriel gets no time for a leisurely investigation, as multiple parties, including two separate police forces, drag him into their plots. Various factions assume either that he knows more than he tells, or try to stop him from finding out anything ever again.
The novel is well executed, the author is familiar with the tools and conventions of modern science fiction, and he uses them with skill. The tension is maintained throughout the book, with multiple mysteries and plot-lines being generated and converged. In the background, Anvil, like the gun over the mantlepiece, broods ominously. The stakes become higher and higher, as some of the secrets are resolved. The plot is unexpectedly circular, with seemingly unconnected elements returning and taking additional significance. The plot convergence is a little too pat, but even that is addressed by the nature of the book, which leaves the true causes nicely ambiguous. The surprise resolutions continue even to the last few pages, presenting more circles closing.
The one flaw of this novel is perhaps too much ambition. Sometimes having too many elements, too many plots, detract from the author's very real skill in telling the story. Occasionally, an author can succeed spectacularly, as Hodgell did in God Stalk. In some cases, the story may collapse under the welter of invention, as in Zindell's Neverness. This novel is on the borderline: it hangs together, but it would have benefited from simplification of some plot-lines, and elimination of others: the main story would have stood out more clearly.
Overall: 6; Plot: 7; Characters: 5; Style: 5; World-building: 7; Originality: 6;
ROC, February 1998, Mass-market, 476 pages
ISBN: 0-451-45669-6 Order from: Amazon.com Barnes & Noble.com