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Die Kuppel (2009)

by Peadar Ó Guilín(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

3764530111 (ISBN13: 9783764530112)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

München Penhaligon

series

The Bone World Trilogy

review 1: O Guilin convincingly gets you into the mind of a stone age tribe person, with anxieties and attitudes totally different from your own. I like the perspective it gives on the nature of carnivorousness and peoples' attitudes to what they eat in general. The "human" tribes consider it perfectly natural to kill and eat people from other tribal species, who they universally call "beasts". Even though they have to contend with the others' rival hunting strategies and skills, and hear them talk in unintelligible (to the humans) languages, they never acknowledge their essential kinship. The idea of "cannibalism" as a viscerally repugnant or even just immoral thing doesn't enter their minds. It's simlar to the mental self-evasion real world humans usually do when they eat the... moreir fellow animals, although the two situations are completely different because O Guilin's people seem to lack any other available food source other than each other's flesh.It may have been myopic though on O Guilin's part that he himself picked the "humans" out of all the possible subjugated hunter species to use for all his protagonists, and for the species of the high tech civilized sky people. It makes it seem like the author himself is succumbing to the speciesism of his creations in the midst of his critique against it (if any such critique was intended, that is). But maybe historical reasons for the subjugators being humans will be revealed in the sequel, since this book was just part one of an (at least?) two part story (and I wish it said so on the cover or something, although now that I notice it the title on this web page says "The Bone World Trilogy #1"). It seems possibly implied that the humans are the humans from Earth and they engineered the other species somehow themselves.It seems like O Guilin could have excised some of the action sequences in favor of some more environmental/cultural detailing (although I liked the stylish paucity of exposition). Like I think the diggers were creepy enough when they were just glimpsed on the periphery -- no need to do the whole actually getting captured and buried and munched on and then escaping action sequence. I wasn't sure how to imagine the cities. I ended up thinking of the world as a Culture-style orbital but enclosed (with a ceiling above Stopmouth's level and possibly other layers above that) instead of open to external sunlight, and possibly rotating for gravity and/or encased inside some kind of interstellar colony ship, with Stopmouth's lower surface basically completely covered with a modern-day-tech, suburbanish cityscape (suburbanish because most of the buildings seemed to be 1-4 stories, and most didn't seem to have the high tech stuff from the globes, because Stopmouth saw all that for the first time when he went in the globe) after maybe 500 years of no maintenance.I think this is written and marketed as young adult fiction, which explains why the violence isn't more explicit and why the language isn't richer. Given the themes it could have used more explicit and wrenching violence, but the spare vocabulary works well for the stone age people and for Stopmouth's interactions with Indrani, since the mental and cultural concepts that the tribes share with the reader and that Stopmouth shares with Indrani are relatively basic and limited.
review 2: This was probably one of the strangest books I've read, yet one of the most interesting and fascinating stories out there! The world of this book was so unique and I really don't think there's any other book out there quite like this. A bit slow but picks up as you read on. The writing style and wording kind of threw me off a bit too, but it really helped with telling the story and i seriously enjoyed it. Really glad I picked up the second book in B&N! I seriously recommend this to anyone who wants a new, far out read from the average genres out there. less

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