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Falcon Lord: Book One



Falcon Lord: Book  One, The Lost Isle of Perpetua seems in its early going a standard fantasy/adventure.

Like Carcium although a good deal better.

I was never able to get into Carcium. But Falcon Lord hooked me early. Here is its opening:

"Brighton listened. While feeling the sun warming his face, and taking in the salt air mixed with falcon's musky odors, he heard only the distant waves."

I like the two word minimalist first sentence. Subject verb. The subject is the name of the protagonist in this story, the son of a "Falcon Lord" and eventually, after he has undertaken a hazardous journey and been tested as such a protagonist must be, "Falcon Lord" himself.

The second sentence gives us data from three senses as Brighton experienced it at a certain moment: smell, touch, and hearing are all represented. And the data are familiar from our world, even the duskiness of falcon feathers seems right.

 As I say, in its early going this reads like a standard fantasy/adventure. Various sorts of animals can talk and the falcons, who don't talk, are uncommonly large and can be ridden like horses.

Yet there is something else here, a steampunk element. By "steampunk" I refer to the branch of sci-fi that looks both backwards and forwards -- backwards to the Victorian age, the age of steam and Babbage's computers -- and forward to a future of the sort the Victorians could have imagined.

Falcon Lord turns out to be steampunkish fantasy in two respects. We discover that riding a falcon, and doing a lot of the other things the creatures in this world do, requires a good deal of Victoriana.

Not long after the opening words quoted above, we watch as Brighton watches his father, who is adjusting their family falcon's "elaborate leather gear -- harness, bridle, saddle, stirrups. And the Teidalbaden, a steam-powered flight unit that contained an altitude and air pressure meter, a three-dimensional compass, and a long-distance, wireless telegraph device."

Second, the fantasy world of Perpetua begins to seem a bit less fantastical when we learn in time that these talking or oddly large creatures were the result of eugenics experiments gone wrong. The fantasy world folds into a steampunkish alternative time line.

There have been thus far two sequels.
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