{"id":1268,"date":"1998-04-07T15:29:27","date_gmt":"1998-04-07T15:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1268"},"modified":"2012-04-25T15:30:10","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T15:30:10","slug":"city-on-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1268","title":{"rendered":"City on Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>City on Fire<\/em> by Walter Jon             Williams<\/h3>\n<p>Ten people attended the discussion of Walter Jon             Williams&#8217;s &#8220;hard fantasy&#8221; novel <em>City on Fire<\/em>,             the sequel to <em>Metropolitan<\/em>. <em>City on Fire<\/em> tells the story of establishing a new government in a             city-state after a political overthrow. We see these             events through the eyes of Aiah, a young woman who             becomes a vital part of this new government. The             fantasy component of the book is setting these events             in a world where a magical substance called &#8220;plasm&#8221; is             treated much like any other natural resource             (electricity, gas, water, etc.)<\/p>\n<p>We found the book to be a compelling &#8220;page turner&#8221;,             despite the prose being written in &#8220;present tense&#8221;             (which led to a discussion of grammatical terms like             &#8220;future perfect&#8221; and &#8220;past pluperfect&#8221;). The             characterization of several characters was well done,             and we particularly enjoyed the growth of Aiah from a<!--more--> political novice to a wielder of significant power. The             world of this book is interesting and full of rich             details including mythologies, cosmologies, and unusual             ethnic groups.<\/p>\n<p>We detected only minor problems. Since <em>City on             Fire<\/em> is clearly the continuation of the story begun             in <em>Metropolitan<\/em>, one must have read the earlier             book to fully understand the current book. Also, since             this is a fantasy novel dealing with wars and political             situations, some of us felt there should be a map.             (Note: There was no consensus on the map situation. In             fact, one of a group, who will be chairing the World             Fantasy Convention in 2000, said &#8220;If there was a map in             this book, it would be regular wuss fantasy&#8221;.)<\/p>\n<p><em>City on Fire<\/em> was an enjoyable reading             experience, and we were pleased to learn that it was             nominated for the Hugo Award. We&#8217;re all looking forward             eagerly to the next installment in this series.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8211;A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>City on Fire by Walter Jon Williams Ten people attended the discussion of Walter Jon Williams&#8217;s &#8220;hard fantasy&#8221; novel City on Fire, the sequel to Metropolitan. City on Fire tells the story of establishing a new government in a city-state after a political overthrow. We see these events through the eyes of Aiah, a young [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1268"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1270,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268\/revisions\/1270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}