%A Brust, Steven %T Five Hundred Years After %I Tor %C New York %D April 1994 %G ISBN 0-312-81579-0 %P 444 pp. %O hardcover, U.S. $23.95 Steven Brust appears to have positioned himself quite deliberately in the great lineage of swordplay novels that begins with Alexandre Dumas and has descended to the modern day through the Baroness Orczy, Rafael Sabatini, and (with a twist) William Goldman. Brust borrows candidly from his romantic role models, but for several reasons his books have a unique and palatable flavor of their own: % He is a good stylist, as is evidenced by the fact that the words that come to mind to describe his work--"stately", "sardonic", "mannered", adventurous", "panoramic," and "humane"--are not often found together, especially in this connection. % The setting is interesting, from the awesome powers of the Imperial Orb to the strange, long lives of his protagonists. I'd characterize the setting as "always interesting enough"--different enough from our world to be stimulating, but similar enough that the behavior and attitudes of the characters has a distinctly contemporary flavor to it. % He has a great sense of humor and his characterization, although sometimes oblique, is eventually very effective. Brust takes longer to establish character than some authors. But he keeps plugging away at his faux verisimilitude, and over time I began to bond to his characters. He's particularly adept in the way he shows his characters repeating their pet foibles (the dialogues with Tazendra and Pel in this novel are some of the funniest stuff I've ever read in the fantasy genre). It reminds me of the comment that after a certain point in our lives we simply become more and more ourselves. Brust's characters have hundreds of years to become themselves, and they are indeed proportionately stubborn and idiosyncratic, just as we would be. (Some of us manage to get pretty darned stubborn in just a mere handful of decades...) I was skeptical about this book at first, and found the first several chapters slow going. But my patience was rewarded. There was a specific moment in reading this book--page 219--when Brust sold me and I became convinced that whatever he was trying to do, it would be good. The book transformed in my hands from a long, slowly ticking fuse to a long, satisfying detonation. And from that point on, the book just got better and better, until it reached its magnificent and horrible conclusion. FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER is must reading for Brust fans--it's a pivotal book in his metaseries. For those readers who are not familiar with Brust, it is a good introduction to his versatile and offbeat work. --Frederick Zimmerman ========== Previous IBIC Reviews, as well as links to many other Internet information resources related to books, are available via the Internet Book Information Center WWW serverspace (provided courtesy of SunSITE, a joint project of the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Sun Microsystems) The URL is http://sunsite.unc.edu/ibic/IBIC-homepage.html. Selected text resources are available by anonymous ftp to sunsite.unc.edu; directory is /pub/electronic-publications/ibic. The IBIC gopher server is temporarily unavailable. E-mail comments encouraged to ibic@sunsite.unc.edu.