Speculative Fiction Junkie

Ken Scholes

Lamentation, the debut novel by accomplished short story author Ken Scholes, has been receiving a lot of buzz recently and is already being talked about as possibly the best debut of the young year. While I agree that it's a worthy effort, I'm not sure it's the debut of the year.

Mr. Scholes doesn't waste any time getting things going in Lamentation. The book begins with various characters witnessing the destruction of the center of the world, so to speak: the city of Windwir. Windwir is the seat of the powerful Androfrancine Order, which guards and selectively doles out the scraps of scientific knowledge that it has recovered from an age long since past. War breaks out almost immediately after the city's destruction and a large portion of the remainder of the book is devoted to introducing us to the main characters and their shifting alliances as everyone struggles to deal with the destruction of Windwir.

As anyone who is familiar with his short fiction knows, Mr. Scholes is a fantastic writer, and Lamentation is no exception in this regard. The book moves along at a very quick pace and the plotting is one of its main strengths. Its greatest strength, however, is the prose itself. Mr. Scholes has that rare gift of being able to craft prose that is simultaneously precise, engaging, poetic, but never unnecessarily lavish. The characters are well developed too even though they do suffer somewhat from the issue I discuss in the next paragraph.

I only had one complaint about Lamentation, but its effects permeated the entire reading experience for me. The one area in which Lamentation fell short was with respect to worldbuilding. The book starts in media res and then proceeds to its conclusion at breakneck speed. This is wonderful and makes for a fun read but it doesn't, in my opinion, give the reader a chance to become sufficiently emotionally invested in the places and people that populate the book. We are told what the Androfrancines did but we aren't told enough about them to really know them and to lament their loss. We are given enough details to move the plot along but not told too much else. I found this especially baffling in light of the fact that the book raises a number of issues that cry out for more in depth treatment, such as the cyclical nature of history, the role of science in society, whether machines can feel, etc. I found myself wondering why Mr. Scholes brought these things up only to seemingly rush past them.

In spite of this, Lamentation is a very enjoyable read. I am eagerly looking forward to the next book in the five book series, which will be called Canticle and which is scheduled for an October release. Ken Scholes is a writer to keep an eye on. His short fiction is among the best out there (this, for example, is a masterpiece) and with Lamentation, he has shown the potential to be a great novelist as well. In fact, I'm sufficiently impressed that I'm going to try to track down copies of everything Scholes has published thus far.

On a more serious note, Mr. Scholes recently lost his father and I want to extend my condolences to him and wish him the best during what is surely a difficult time.

Rating: 8/10

The True First

Lamentation was first published in the United States by Tor in February of 2009. I was looking into ordering a signed first edition but the one bookseller I contacted that had them wanted to charge an extortionate amount for shipping. Who knows, maybe Mr. Scholes will be the one who knocks down the invisible wall that prevents speculative fiction authors from touring the Southeastern United States and I'll be able to get him to sign the book in person.

[This review was not based on a review copy]