The cover shows a bright young dinosaur holding a telescope. For once, the cover is an excellent advertisement of what you'll get inside the novel. Sawyer took the calculated risk of making all his characters nonhuman. Somewhere in another solar system, there is a world with one large landmass, creatively called Land by the inhabitants, and a great deal of ocean (called the River. They believe Land is eternally floating down the endless River). The inhabitants are obviously saurians, calling themselves the Quintaglio. Sawyer does a good job of trying to create a plausible civilization in which the members are all descended from predatory lizards and it still shows, despite their having developed hands on their forelimbs.
The hero of this first volume is Afsan, an apprentice astrologer. Sawyer's plot includes some rather obvious parallels to the experiences of Galileo (although not a carbon copy, I admit) as Afsan gradually constructs some new theories about the meaning of the motions of various astronomical bodies in the sky. Unfortunately, the one and only Official Religion has some very different doctrines on the subject, and Afsan ends up being called a heretic. The title, "Far-Seer," is the Quintaglio term for what we would call the newly invented "telescope" which Afsan uses throughout the story to study the weird objects in the sky more closely.
I've read some of Sawyer's other books (including two sequels to this one) and I'll offer some general observations. He does a first-rate job of coming up with odd scientific situations which puzzle his protagonists, but which are eventually untangled by the use of the scientific method, creating and examining one hypothesis after another until they come up with something that appears to be consistent with all available data, even if it blows some of their culture's old and beloved theories/beliefs/dogma out of the water.
However, I don't regard Sawyer as one of science fiction's great stylists in the way he puts words together. I'm not saying he's so bad he bores me to death; I'm just saying I don't find him exceptional in that regard. He makes a conscious effort to create character development, but somehow I don't find myself falling in love with his protagonists as I might do with some of the viewpoint characters used by Lois McMaster Bujold or Roger Zelazny. In other words, I recommend reading him mainly for the sake of the interesting puzzles he lays out for us, and the fun of trying to sort things out on our own before the protagonist of the tale does it for us. If you appreciate that sort of thing, have fun! If not - if you prefer authors with a greater flair for characterization and/or poetic language - then you had best pass him by and seek your entertainment elsewhere.
Just as teasers, two interesting points in their culture are the question of how they keep from overpopulating and eating all the game animals into extinction, and the fact that any Quintaglio who deliberately utters a false statement (unless he's so crazy he doesn't know the difference) immediately has his muzzle turn blue, an apparently unavoidable physiological reaction, don't ask me why. It's interesting to see a culture in which honesty is practically inevitable - and if you think there must be someone on the continent who has a way to cheat, you have a nasty, suspicious mind! Shocking suggestion!
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