Reviews

The Tragedy of King Leere: Goatherd of the La Sals by Steven L. Peck

rachelhelps's review against another edition

This book shares many qualities with books I love. It has weird characters, including a retired demon and a newly conscious battle droid. It is lovingly set in the La Sals region, in a possible future where it is ravaged by the effects of global climate change. And since it was written by an ecologist, with notes from a conservationist, you know the science is good. The SF fan in me would have liked for more speculative science exploration. The plot is based on Shakespeare's King Lear and I didn't care for it--all about people dying and hating each other and in-fighting because of stupid miscommunications, assumptions, or obvious character flaws.

I've been having a bit of an existential crisis over not liking this book and another that recently came out from BCC Press. Have I changed? Am I depressed? I'm not sure what it is, but maybe pregnancy has made me less fond of stories where people die a lot. Some (fictional) mother put a lot of work into making that (fictional) once-child! Or maybe I just hate everything now. *shrug

andrewhall's review against another edition

5.0

I really enjoyed this weird, speculative, environmental tragedy, set in the La Sal Mountains near Moab. As with Gilda Trillim, Peck uses a wide variety writing styles and points of view to tell a heartbreaking story. Science fiction tragedy, where human greed mixed with high technology brings devastation, is not a new idea. But Peck is an environmental scientist and an imaginative genius, and he takes the story in all kinds of unexpected directions, using unexpected literary forms and POVs. We get inside the minds of a variety of non-humans with radically different ways of understanding the world, including an omniscient daemon narrator who places the story in context of longer environmental history, and robots with increasingly high sentience. Despite the tragedy, there are some very funny moments, and it a short novel. This is one of two books set in the La Sals I am reading this week, the other is D. J. Butler's "The Jupiter Knife".

wmhenrymorris's review against another edition

Brilliant and very weird (but what else would you expect?)