Book Review - "The Lords of Creation" by SM Stirling

"The Lords of Creation" is the third and latest book in an alternative universe Science Fiction series which has been retrospectively named after this third book.














The series to date consists of

I cannot think of another instance where a series has been retrospectively named for the final book published nearly twenty years after the first one, 

I suspect there may be arguments among readers about whether this is an appropriate name for the book and the series, but I cannot really explain where I think SM Stirling and his publishers are coming from without a pretty big spoiler giving away the final line of this book.

What S.M. Stirling has done with this series is imagine a universe in which there is life and civilisations on planets like Mars and Venus bearing a substantial resemblance classics of early 20th century science fiction such as "Barsoom" as depicted in the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs which began with " A Princess of Mars."

Where we look around this Universe and ask "where is everyone?" as we have yet to detect any convincing signs of other civilisations, in the world of "The Lords of Creation," as 20th century scientists began to study and explore the universe they found the most convincing evidence that a supercivilisation had been busy both in our own solar system and in others.

The first probes to Mars and Venus found that those worlds had been extensively terraformed many millions of years ago to make them habitable to terrestial life and used as some kind of vast nature reserves, with all kinds of creatures from Earth, from Dinosaurs to all kinds of hominids, including both Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis and Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

The first two books in the series tells stories of how with the development of space travel modern humans from earth began to interact with the Bronze one age human civilisation which has developed on Venus and the ancient and immensely advanced civilisation which has developed on Mars and become masters of biological engineering.

With this third book, Stirling returns to this universe, where three immense gates have suddenly appeared, one each on Earth, Mars, and Venus, ten thousand feet in diameter and leading somewhere else - somewhere else which appears to have exactly the same air composition, length of day, temperature and gravity that Earth had 200 million years years ago, about the same time Mars and Venus were terraformed and the first plants and animals from Earth planted on those planets.

The gate on Earth has appeared in the sea near The Bahamas, and this book tells the story of the first expedition sent through the gate.

I think any more about the plot would be a spoiler, but I'm going to say that this entire trilogy is highly entertaining, exciting, well-written and well thought through, and I recommend it.

"The Lords of Creation" is sufficiently self-contained that you do not have to have read the previous two books in the series to be able to follow what is going on and enjoy the book. However, I do think that I enjoyed it more because I had read those first two novels when they first came out, 

"  Mittth'raw'nuruodo" 


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