Okay Dr Livingston. I get it. You can write. Now will you please hurry up and write some more, so I can read it?

What I liked especially about this story was how completely different in style and setting it is from the Shards of Heaven series. Yet the research and background has the same meticulous detail, and the setting is so richly real that I could feel the stones beneath my feet and capture the smells in the air. I haven't been to the southwest since I was a child, but this story distinctly took me back there, in another dimension, another slice of time, another reality. I remember at university, a professor once commented that America wasn't a melting pot, rather it was an acid bath. This world is a sterilization chamber, eliminating those aspects of language and culture that, for me bring color and life to the world. One culture: one country is a stark concept.

Worlds can change in a flash. It's a spin of the roulette wheel of fate that separates possible realities.

2016-read, a-favorite-author, alternate-history, dystopian-ish, fantasy, great-cover, made-me-think, met-or-know-the-author, read, short-story, tor ( )

Some fantasy stories have this flavour of mystic sad obscurity. It's like they are trying to persuade readers that that have a lot of meaning and morality. While reading I can even hear a kind sad voice telling the story.
"At the End of Babel" is just like that. Great morality of "language revenge." Small oppressed tribes.
But it doesn't work for me, especially in the short format. Because this idea is very old. Probably death penalty should have shocked me, but it hasn't. Culture/language clashes are the basics of war. Of course, there is a place for money and lust for power, but war for common people is mostly about "they are not like us." So, this theme is obvious. One should try very hard to not make it dull. The author chose a trope of the Gods wrath. But as there was no real explanation behind it, here we are again: deux ex machina.

The story isn't completely bad. It uses nice wordings, not hard to read. That's why, 2 stars: just ok.
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