The World's Other Side
Community Rating
Description
Serialization Complete. Story available onAmazonormy Patreon.
George Boatman trained to be a priest, but his people need a criminal. Five centuries after the mighty Gondwanan civilization conquered the Northern Hemisphere, George leads a band of thieves and smugglers in the Ilinwa city of Shikaakwa. It's a bloody job, but his people need him. What George needs is vengeance.Bounce Nakmara didn't expect her post-graduate work to be so demanding. Placed without her consent into a home-stay with a bunch of incomprehensible Native Eurasian refugees, she does her best to settle in, help out, and pursue George, who has interesting depths. Except it turns out he's killed someone! Now they're all threatened by ruthless drug lords, the local authorities, and international religious extremist. If Bounce doesn't make George choose to save the future, he'll be consumed by the sins of the past.Love, loyalty, and cultures collide inThe World's Other Side, an alternate history scifi thriller.Edited by Georgi Shopov. Cover art by Stefan Tosheff.
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Information
- Status
- Completed
- Year
- 2023
- Author
- DanielMBensen
Royal Road Stats
- Rating
- 3.8/ 5.0
- Followers
- 6
- Views
- 2,583
Chapters(6 total)
Reviews
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Community Reviews(1)
- drewhead118Royal Road★★★★★ 5.0"Ours is a war of civilizations. There are no civilians. Only our armies and yours."
***
RoyalRoad is a lovely site--the community is supportive and enthusiastic, and the endless stories are all written by people whose love of writing shines from every chapter.
That being said, it's also a site for the young, the still-learning-to-write, and the trend chasers. If I had to don my English teacher's spectacles--and yes, I do teach English as my day job--the fact is that most of the writing on this site isn't particularly good, even if it's spirited.
But unquiet ghosts! This story is, in all ways, an exception to that norm. Best Practices dictate you read The World's Other Side as soon as possible.
To call this an ambitious story would be an understatement: at its core, this is a story about the meeting of cultures, and each of the story's cultures have been dutifully sculpted for the reader with wondrous, meticulous detail. Over the course of the story, readers will have to stay atop an ever-growing vocab list: Waapils, Moundbuilders, cradles, Best Practices. There's , names long enough to make your eyes spin, and cultural practices / attitudes unique to each of the story's factions.
But this is not meticulous detail for the sake of being detailed--nearly every single fact introduced by the story holds significance later on. It's this aspect that really drove home just how well-written this story is... what seems like throwaway detail at the time often ripples back by the story's end.
The World's Other Side didn't have a slow start, per se, but readers who are used to sudden conflict and instant stakes may find the beginning a bit dense. The conflict is inter- and intracultural more than physical at first, but that cross-culture friction is so thoughtfully contrived that it's a delight to read. Character perspective chapters are steeped in their worldviews--the things they emphasize, the things they note. The early acts of the novel a