After a fairly secretive and short romance, Senlin, a single-room schoolmaster in a small town of people living along the coast of the vast nation of Ur, takes his new bride Marya, and travels to the Tower of Babel where they plan to spend the majority of their month-long honeymoon in the glorious luxury of the tower level of The Baths.
SENLIN ASCENDS portrays the story of Tom Senlin and his misadventures in the well-known Tower of Babel. Much akin to the way many others have made mention in their reviews of this book, I too must add my voice to theirs and say, “Thank you, Mark Lawrence, for a great review of a great book!” In the normal scheme of things, this book would likely have never crossed my line of sight, but I am ridiculously glad that it did. SENLIN ASCENDS ( Amazon) is the first of the Books of Babel by author Josiah Bancroft and another of the novels that was originally submitted to The Great Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off run by none other than Mark Lawrence. So, I decided to put my money where my mouth was–or more specifically, I guess, my money where Mark Lawrence’s mouth was–and I bought both of the currently self-published Books of Babel. So the situation left me wondering if I was a dummy, or if perhaps I might just like Senlin Ascends.
How then, I wondered, had it not won out in round one? I tried to read the story that had taken the proverbial cake in the first round of that group of stories, THE PATH OF FLAMES ( EBR review), and quit after about 65 pages. Specifically, he said that it was, “my best read, one of my favourite books of all time in fact. After finishing my read of ALL of them, I happened to come upon some comments that Mark Lawrence made about one of the books that hadn’t made it past the initial winnowing of the bevvy of novel hopefuls: SENLIN ASCENDS. It’s no secret (based entirely on my most recent SPFBO review) that I thought The Grey Bastards was head and shoulders better than any of the other entries that made their way into the final ten novels in the contest. I have my opinions, my habits, my modus operandi, but as the world is constantly changing I figure I had better allow myself to change along with it every once in a while as well. So every once in a while I’ll perform what I affectionately call a “dummy test” to check and make sure I’m not being a dummy about something in particular.
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