This is brilliant science fiction writing... or fantasy, or science-fantasy. In any case, this left me wondering why the hell I have never read anything by Mary Gentle; she's brilliant, and apparently a fascinating and untraditional person. To sum up in the most superficial way, this book is about a female mercenary captain in Europe, 1476, but it quickly becomes clear that this is not our Europe, a conclusion supported by the secondary narrative in the form of emails between three modern-day scientists (or two scientists and a publisher) who are studying historical documents that relate to this mercenary captain, Ash. I picked this up thanks to the glories of amazon.com and their magnificent interface which allowed me to jump from "The Deed of Paksenarrion" by Elizabeth Moon (completely wonderful fantasy trilogy) to related titles.
Ash portrays the life of a medieval mercenary in such vivid and gritty detail that "Paksenarrion" fades in comparison. All senses are filled with the experience; the smells, the tastes, the absolutely perplexing "fog of war" on the battlefield; the suffering of a siege in winter, of captivity, the fear of maiming, the terrible fear of watching people you love hacked to pieces on the battlefield... I am in awe; and beyond the intensity and the poetic narrative there is the modern-day plot line and the increasingly mysterious happenings as details from that distant past seem to exist or not exist, to be real or fictional. She manages to weave quantum physics in, by the end, and an alternate history that has to be negated in order for ours to be real.
Amazing stuff.
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