ad

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Time Streams by J. Robert King

A third book telling the story of our White Planeswalker Urza te Artificer. Urza gathered intelligent and young mages and artificers and together they created New Tolaria Academy at the very same place the old Tolarian Academy stood. This time this should be the place where the ultimate weapon to defeat Phyrexians would be build.

After the old Tolaria was destroyed by Urza himself time streams cover most of the island. Some of them are slow and some of them are fast. Urza comes back with the students and together they study the streams and start building the New Tolaria.

Unfortunately in one of the fast streams a Phyrexian survivors build a fortress and labs. The book mainly focuses on the battles between the Dominarians and Phyrexians.

The book shows Urza gaining more and more sanity and with time he really starts to do good. He creates alliances among the goblin tribes, Viashino and forestfolk. Even Serra's Realm inhabitants join the coalition and they together create the Legacy weapon.
----------------------
The book is fast paced with a lot of stuff going on and highly emotive. Especially the difference between Karn and Urza is striking (a machine being more human than any other human and Urza being well...um...something else completely). It shows many values and shows that Heaven does not always need to be a "heaven". This book also describes all the spells and cards precisely. This description is even more subtle than in other books so it does not disturb you at all (it's well incorporated).

Personal Rating: 3.75/5
I don't give it more for several reasons. It is a third book to a series of books (and to understand it you need to read the first two. One being really good and the second one...??? I guess I will rerate that one).
The battles are sometimes never-ending and that's not something I like in any kind of books. Sometimes the skips in years are to big for me. Just one sentence telling you that 6 years has passed? It takes time to adjust to that. Some things are forced even though that's not the authors fault but more of a fault of the game designers.

No comments:

Post a Comment