Principles of Angels is the debut novel of Jaine Fenn, published in 2008. It is soft science-fiction: which is to say there are psychic powers, and the antagonists are called the Sidhe, and there is no particular explanation of how anything works, merely that it does.
It is billed as a "vivid, relentless all-action thriller." This is accurate, I suppose: there is action, there are thrills; there is little breathing room between one thrill and the next, and the descriptions are indeed vivid — one might even say lurid.
The setting, unfortunately, isn't terribly believable — not the part where it's a gigantic dystopian city of technology no one understands hovering within the toxic atmosphere of an uninhabitable planet*, but the human-scale details of the society that inhabits it. Short version: it's a quasidemocracy where disfavored politicians get sacked by means of public assassination. The assassins in question, the titular Angels, are universally feared and respected, even in the worst parts of town ... but they're not generally superhuman; one wonders why no Angel has ever been torn to shreds for an only borderline-popular assassination, or for that matter whether or not any gang has ever tried to pile up on one and shiv her for her purse-equivalent.
So yeah, they don't hold up to analysis very well.
The class-divided City itself is reminiscent of such quasi-arcologies as Midgar or Mega-City One: anvilicious and unlikely. The technology that keeps it up and running, as has been mentioned, might as well be made of fairy dust.
There's no point in focusing on the characters instead; the only character in the entire book who even comes close to being three-dimensional is Elarn Reen, the second of the two viewpoint characters. Everyone else (including Taro, the other viewpoint character) is either wooden and distant, a one-note villain, or both.
So yeah. There is action; there are thrills. If that's all you're looking for, Principles of Angels is for you. I don't think I'll be picking up Ms. Fenn's next book, however, without a coherent recommendation by someone else. 1 out of 1.
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2 comments:
I take it you did a lot of reading over the holiday :)
So, how's it going?
Not nearly as much as I'd wanted to do: the only books of these that I read last year were Soulless and Algorithm. I'm now frantically trying to keep up, and only have one day's worth of buffer.
We seem to have the same New Year's resolution (or at least very similar ones). ^_^;
Other than that... comme ci, comme ça. Et vous?
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