Glorious and disturbing--squeamish steer clear!
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"The Memory Cathedral" joins the small but distinguished company of "Lord of the Flies" and Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love" as one of those books I could neither put down nor bear to read any further. I must concur with the previous reviewer, this is a truly brilliant novel, but the squeamish and sensitive would be best advised to steer clear. If you are more inured to sex, violence and general darkness than we more delicate souls, give this book a try. It is a glorious and disturbing masterpiece, all the more powerful for the author's obviously painstaking research into the people and environment of Leonardo's Italy and the Middle East, not to mention the life and works of the protagonist himself.
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I prefer something less dark, like dante's inferno.
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I bought this cause a book review segment in Asimov's made it sound good. To be honest it is brilliant, but not to my taste. The graphic violence, explicit sex, & general darkness of the story turned me off. It is well written & well researched, but my tolerance for darkness, death, & depravity is low.
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Well-researched historical fantasy, including military SF.
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Jack Dann's latest book blends historic figures with well-researched fiction to detail the loves, inventions, coups and many `flights' of Leonardo da Vinci in Renaissance Italy and beyond. Set during a "lost" period of the historical da Vinci diaries, "The Memory Cathedral" is a daring `what if...'.
Drawing on the possibility of actually building many of the devices of warfare found in Leonardo's sketches, Dann comes up with a plausible person to implement them, and reasonable political expediency for doing so.
Dann admits a few historical `nudges' in his afterword, but these don't detract from the novel, and indeed make it more entertaining. Developing interesting interactions between famous characters who never met in actuality is always fun. Enjoy spotting the famous names, and applaud how Dann handles them.
Although the work drags in places, particularly in the first half, there's enough action by the end of it to keep readers of military SF happy, and enough background details to satisfy epic fantasy fans. Like his protagonist da Vinci, Dann seems to have demonstrated mastery of many areas of the SF/fantasy spectrum in this single work.
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