Future-Tech und Kastendenken

Phantastik-couch.de, a German language online magazine of fantatic literature, has just posted a review by Frank A. Dudley of Alan Dean Foster's Sagramanda.

I don't speak German - I dropped out of German 101 in college in frustration - but Frank very kindly summarized his main points for us:

• Alan Dean Foster is the genre's globetrotting chameleon.
• Foster takes the Indian society with its castes as a backdrop and charges it with a techno plot reminiscent of William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy.
• His protagonists are dazzling, and Foster manages to maintain this strength of the novel until the end. He follows their thoughts and motivations with subtle irony while elegantly proceeding the parallel story lines.
• The finale appears to be a bit constructed.

Which sounds like a pretty good review to me. And even without running it through Babel Fish to make sure, I think I agree with this: "Was Japan in den 1980ern Japan für Cyberpunk war, das sind Indien und China für die SciFi-Techno-Thriller des noch jungen 21."