Bamboo Horses (Science Fiction)

by Hugh Cook

Publisher: Lulu.com (August 5, 2005)

Softcover, 530 pages

A disappointing book from one of my favorite fantasy authors. Hugh Cook is listed as a “cult” fantasy writer, meaning that his work never sold a lot, but he had a dedicated fan base. The base is dwindling over time as pretty much all of his books are out of print and none are available as digital copies. This one, for example, was print-on-demand and cost way too much for what the book is actually worth. It seems his estate isn’t interested in keeping his work going. For those who are interested, try reading Chronicles of an Age of Darkness for some truly different fiction.

The central story of Bamboo Horses revolves around protagonist, Ken Udamma, trying to sell his ancestral land to an international business consortium. The family business, animating bamboo horses, is about to go bankrupt and the majority of his extended family are scroungers. This then introduced several suspicious deaths, attempted fraud, an-oddly underplayed supernatural element, and, finally, a violent ending

It’s difficult to describe the genre as it seems to be a modern day world (at least by 2005 standards) with some mystical elements tossed in. It is a fictional world and in a fictional country, but the differences seems to be in name only. The world is developed backwards in the novel. The differences are mostly related slowly at the end, rather than up front where we can get a sense of it. And the fact of it is there are many little details which crop up about the world with explanation. Each character has an inner and outer name (which sometimes is confusing) and they eat with scissors. But these interesting details are few and far between.

Author Hugh Cook

  If you feel that your world doesn't need much development, then that's fine, but you have to at least make up for that with character development or a plot which flows. This story has neither. Not to say that Cook was incapable of creating a character arc, but that didn't happen in the five hundred plus pages in this text. All the characters are flat, just names with no personality to put them apart.

It reads as if he were making it up as he went along. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Many writers begin a story with only a vague idea of how it will end, but part of making this work is going back and editing, adding polish, and taking out what redundancies. He sure didn’t do this here. There are entire chapters that simply rehash what went before without adding anything new to the story. I don’t know if he actually wanted to write this book, or lost interest halfway through, but it is rushed. I understand that going back and editing your work can be an interminable process, but it is one that simply has to be done.

For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.