This is an interesting book–a little slow to get started, but an
interesting book, and a remarkable achievement. Ringo has created a
fantasy realm with all of the usual trappings–warriors, great heroes,
elves, dragons, orcs, demons, wizards, and so forth–and he’s set it in
the far future and given it a science-fictional explanation. That’s
right, it’s really a science-fictional world (O the wonders of
nanotechnology) in which all of the trappings of traditional heroic
fantasy make sense!

It’s that last bit that makes the premise so remarkable. It requires extremely
high-tech, the kind that’s indistinguishable from magic, to breed elves
who live forever, orcs who will fight whenever, and dragons that can fly
whereever, and yet given the pre-industrial setting that tech can’t be
available to the general public. If it were, everyone in the book would
be a wizard.

And so, in fact, they were. Earth was a veritable utopia. Every citizen
could spend his time doing
anything that interested him, with every need met by the nanites of the
‘Net. Even food production was no issue–Mother, the vast AI that
maintained and protectedthe ‘Net, had records of every kind of dish one
could wish for, and the nanites could assemble it from atoms in moments.
Indeed, one could have one’s body sculpted into almost any form

And then came a division in the Council, the small group of individuals
who oversaw Mother and the rest of the ‘Net. The division turned deadly,
and soon the two factions were fighting in earnest to wrest full control
of the ‘Net from each other. As all power reserves were drawn upon to
this end, power became unavailable to the rest of the population–and all
that nice, juicy high-tech magic became unavailable. Civilization crashed
over night. Only a very few people retained any kind of use of the ‘Net.
The remainder were forced to learn to grub for food and build shelters
out of natural wood, and all manner of archaic unnatural acts.

Unnatural, that is, except for a handled of “reenactors”, descendants of
our present day Society for Creative Anachronism, who knew how to farm,
and to forge iron and steel, and raise animals, and mine for ore, all
because, in their long lives, that’s what they had become interested in.
And around the settlements of such folk, civilization slowly began to
grow again.

As I say, it’s an interesting book, with a number of memorable
characters; and though there are some parts I disliked, I plan to
keep an eye out for the sequel.