Thursday, September 10, 2009

The Star Mill by Emil Petaja



A science fiction novel based on Finnish nation epic, Kalevala. Pretty strange mixture - something which is essentially fantasy is retold as science fiction. It does not quite work, and the result is a book which starts as relatively straightforward science fiction and ends as pretty pure fantasy. The writing is really, really bad. It reminds me of Spindard's “Iron Dream”, but I somehow suspect that this time overblown pomposity was not intentional. The book contains a lot of Finnish words, but most of them are misspelled more or less. I honestly do not see any reason why they would have modified intentionally, probably Petaja just thought that he can spell Finnish, and was too lazy to check the correct spelling. The plot revolves around the Sampo, a mythical machine which can make everything. It was destroyed in Kalevala, but now it has been repaired. Unfortunately, it works in reverse and is spilling destruction everywhere. It is up to our hero to prevent the destruction of the whole universe.

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