Kay Kenyon is in a hurry, and it shows. Her first book, Bright the Sky, was like reading a thousand-year-old Persian rug. She created an amazing artificial world, the Entire, crafted by the mysterious alien Tarig and kept habitable only through the profligate expenditure of colossal amounts of energy. All her characters are richly developed, complicated, and fascinating. From the angst-ridden anti-hero Titus to the powerful and manipulative Legate Cixi, these are all interesting people that we want to know more about. The triumph in Bright the Sky is how skillfully every aspect of the setting and characters are developed, but the same can’t really be said for City Without End.

City Without End, the third book of four in the “Entire and the Rose” series, is essentially a power struggle between several mutually antagonistic groups. Titus Quinn has failed to stop the Tarig’s plan to burn our universe for fuel, and is desperately searching for a new way to save his home. His alienated daughter Sydney has been recruited by the High Legate Cixi to be part of her plan to supplant the Tarig with a human dynasty ruling over the Entire. The Tarig themselves are the ultimate proponents of Stability at Any Cost, willing to do anything imaginable to keep the Entire running the way it always has. The ambitious Helice Maki, brought to the Entire with Titus, has given up on her home universe and, with the help of the Miranda Corporation, seeks to buy an accommodation with the Tarig to ensure human survival.

Book 3 of “The Entire and the Rose” series


“He still had dirt under his fingernails from his grave. His massive hands with their knobby joints sported thick fingers, now grimed with soil. He had hoped for burial in a cloth sack. When he came to consciousness in a box with the sounds of shovels and light welling through the slats, he knew he’d have to work quickly.”

There’s a lot going on then, and the plot moves along very swiftly. The stakes are very high and everybody is desperate, because the end of the world is coming, for someone at least. This is actually the weak point of the book, because things move almost too swiftly. We have very little time to get to know any of the new characters or places that are introduced, because the story moves on almost immediately to the next point of action. It reads almost more like an airport bookstore thriller, something that wants to drag you along at breakneck pace so you’ll be done with the novel by the time you land in Dallas.

It’s not just the pace that’s troublesome. Characters are introduced that rather blatantly exist only to move the plot along in a particular direction, then vanish forever. There is a particularly bothersome deus ex machina introduced specifically to prevent the developing reconciliation between Tidus and Sydney in order to allow further conflict between them.

This sort of thing isn’t uncommon in series writing: as the action picks up, the desire to rush the action forward becomes difficult to restrain. I expect publishing deadlines may have had a bit to do with it as well, it’s hard to really indulge in rich detail when just getting the book finished on time is a challenge.

This is not to say that the book fails. Anybody coming to City Without End will be here because they’re already a fan of Kenyon’s epic scale, and there’s no shortage of that here. Kenyon is still the only current author successfully following in the footsteps of past visionaries like Phillip Jose Farmer, and make no mistake, City Without End is still a very good read. I only wish she’d take a bit more time and capture more of that luscious detail of setting and character that made Bright The Sky so brilliant.