Recent Reads: The Continuing Time, by Daniel Keys Moran
Once upon a time a bit of a punk of a young writer informed the world that he had 33 books planned in a time-and-space-spanning saga called The Continuing Time, and the world sat up and took notice.
Life happened, and so far there are only five books in it, but I love every one of them into the depths of my soul, and I will wait patiently for the other 28 until the end of time. (Well, there’s six if you count the collection of short stories, but those are more filler for things we already know than new story arcs, per se, so I don’t precisely count it.) I re-read them all periodically, often when I intend to read something else but instead come across them in my e-reader and go “oh yeah no I’ll read that instead.” So far this has never been an error.
EMERALD EYES is the first, and I think the most difficult, of the Continuing Time. It has something of a structural problem, to me, which is that it’s kind of two closely-related novellas more than one story; the first half is about a character who is not at all likeable, and the second half is about a different character who is. Carl Castanaveras, the protagonist of the first half of the book, is a genetically engineered telepath, the first in history, and he’s both crazy and furious with it. He’s very understandable, but not at all likeable, AND YET I CANNOT RECOMMEND skipping this book and starting with one of the others. So many characters are introduced in their inception in this book, and the way they develop over the next books is so worth dealing with Carl’s story. And so informed BY Carl’s story. So I don’t necessarily like this one all that much, but I also never, ever skip it when I’m doing a re-read.
THE LONG RUN is…if you could only write one book in your career, you might very well want it to be this one. Our hero, Trent, is part of the same genetic engineering program that produced Carl and the other Castanaveras telepaths, but Trent himself is not a telepath: he’s a thief and the best webdancer (internet user, but jack it up to a million) the world has ever seen. And he’s in trouble, and on the run, and…this is a great, great book. I wouldn’t be lying if I said there were parts of it that I adapted into my own core functions. Also, this is the book where I started noticing that all of Dan’s books have one Doctor Who reference, and one Jim Steinman reference. I didn’t notice that until my third or fourth re-read, but yeah. It’s a great, great book.
THE LAST DANCER is the first Continuing Time book I read. The Long Run follows Trent; The Last Dancer follows Denice, a Castanaveras telepath, and I loved it so much I went and found and read everything DKM had written before it. The scope of this one is tremendous: it’s really the first time we get entangled in the actual Continuing Time; several of the characters are effectively immortals, and Denise becomes entangled in what is in some ways a proxy war for a fight that’s been going on between a couple of them for tens of thousands of years. It’s also where the deep dive into the worldbuilding really starts (although that may just be my bias, having read it first, but there’s an argument for it because we do start to see more of the big picture with it). It’s not always easy to be sympathetic to Denice, but I find her journey in this book to be a really good one, and the moral conflicts she and the people around her deal with are always well-done.
THE BIG BOOST was the first DKM book in like 20 years and I spent like $240 to read this book and it was worth every penny. :) (It was digital-only, I bought an e-reader back in the days of them being Quite New And Exclusive, and then also bought the book, ofc. :)) It returns to Trent’s story and brings back–well, not that these characters aren’t also in The Last Dancer, but it brings back Mohammad Vance and Melissa du Bois, who are law enforcement officers and two of my favorite characters in the entire series, and puts them into the impossible positions that interacting with Trent puts EVERYBODY into, and I love the tension in it so much I could scream. It’s also only the first part of the story (which ends on an incredibly Trent-like cliffhanger), and IDK if he’s working on the second part with his various ongoing projects but I’m very much looking forward to reading it when it eventually comes out. And it accomplishes enough in and of itself that you don’t feel like you’ve been robbed when you get to the end; it’s just that THE END is SUCH a Trent thing that it’s like AAAAGH! :D
THE GREAT GODS is the most recent Continuing Time book and the only one I’ve only read twice (because it only came out 15 months ago). It starts an arc of its own for Camber Tremodian, a character who we glimpse in the earlier books, and provides what is probably a very solid entry point to the Continuing Time as a whole, although in my SOUL I think you should read ALL OF THEM IN PUBLICATION ORDER because I think the payoff of FINALLY learning more about Camber in this is more delicious than starting here could POSSIBLY be. But go forth, do as thou wilt. :)
These are absolutely desert island books for me (I’m not so mean as to make people take only ten books, you can take ten SERIESESES by my rules, but even if it was “only ten books” I’d take at least three of them as part of my ten), and I really never get tired of re-reading them. The links are all Amazon-affiliate; Dan doesn’t have them up on any other sites, and I have no idea how to wrap this up except with a happy sigh. :)