Ruins: Artifacts (The Ruins Series Book 2)

Redshirt syndrome that conveniently leaves the two love interests alone together and so on. This did get somewhat better as the book went on and, to its credit it's finding out how the characters will continue from their first adventure that's got me wanting to read the second book. The setting didn't especially grab me, maybe because I've read one too many stories about being trapped in view spoiler [reconfiguring mazes hide spoiler ] , although this is the most gentle one of the type I've read so far.

And the background setting is kind of your generic semi- dystopia, although it does tie into the protagonist's own story well. Dec 31, Dan rated it really liked it Shelves: I found this book by clicking an ad on a webcomic site. It had its moments of interesting scifi. The aliens were nicely done but the humans were a bit flat.

The Trilisk Ruins

For most of the story they didn't seem to have a coherent goal other than to survive, and when survival was not an immediate problem to poke at alien artifacts with sticks. But if you t I found this book by clicking an ad on a webcomic site. But if you touch it with your internet-link active, I'm guessing the evil third of the alien mind imprints on your internet-link and you get mind-controlled.

In the usual way of things, I'm also guessing that the evil head of the Human Empire is secretly being mind-controlled by ancient aliens. But we didn't see any of that in this book; it seems to be deferred to a sequel. Jan 01, Emily Leathers rated it liked it Shelves: Acceptable premise, fairly interesting plot, but I had a lot of trouble connecting with the story at more than just-a-story level. I enjoyed the characterizations of the aliens. One thing that drove me a little crazy was the author's insistence on explaining that characters were accessing their link each time they stared off into space.

It felt insulting that he didn't expect me to be able to remember that, and it broke up the flow of the narrative. If he really thought it was going to be that ha Acceptable premise, fairly interesting plot, but I had a lot of trouble connecting with the story at more than just-a-story level. If he really thought it was going to be that hard to figure out, he should have just removed the mechanism altogether.

May 15, Daniel Lemire rated it really liked it. In the Trilisk Ruins, Michael McCloskey describes a far future universe where human beings have encountered alien ruins on diverse planets. These ruins have obvious commercial values: Meanwhile, the government has restricted access to these ruins to its own military. The main character is a xenoarchaeologist who is frustrated by the lack of access to these new findings. The novel touches on a common theme in scifi: I really enjoyed this book, I found it by clicking a link down the side of facebook not ordinarily something I ever take for a recommendation.

Despite its dubious origin I quickly found myself absorbed and by the time I'd read the first three chapters I was off to order and pay priority postage for part two. The aliens are ALIEN, the human society is frankly fascinating, and the entire premise of the books leaves me curious for more. Jun 05, Thibaldo Manrique rated it it was amazing.

Very enjoyable A really good book. Great plot and great characters. Fast paced end very interesting.

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You will enjoy it. Mar 25, Ben Wade rated it really liked it. Great world-building While I like to give new authors a chance, I have high standards. This book met them. It is well written despite a few awkward word-choices and well edited. The best part of this novel and potentially the series, is it's good use of the idea of integrated technology.

While it's disappointing to see that the author has ignored the undoubted life extension technologies that will soon be in use, his vision of people being intimately linked to their e amazing for a first novel. While it's disappointing to see that the author has ignored the undoubted life extension technologies that will soon be in use, his vision of people being intimately linked to their environment through an advanced "Internet of Things" is excellent. I look forward to reading his upcoming books. Mar 09, J Walsh rated it it was amazing.

Fantastic read great characters and well developed alien cultures! Truely an outer space adventure of excitement and wonder! On to the next book! Mar 10, Brad added it. Great read Can't wait to read more about these characters. The description of the stories current filter and collect alien artifacts is very entertaining. Jun 26, J. Dobias rated it really liked it Recommends it for: SFF and adventure fans.

At first I thought I was headed into yet another so so spy action thriller disguised as a Science Fiction novel. It really seems that way through the first half. Even to the point where they were trapped in the cheesy alien building with the shifting walls I was still thinking this was only mildly interesting. What saves it all for me was when Kirizzo's part kicked in. The alien, though only one of three major characters in the story steals the whole thing. Kirizzo is at war, stranded and under attack of the Bel Klaven he has vital tech from the ruins of the Trilisk.

He must evade the Bel Klaven and get this tech to his people. In a last ditch effort he enters a strange circular portal of the Trilisk that is still operational. The story then slips over to Telisa Relachik daughter of an infamous UNSF Captain, is applying for a job with Parker interstellar Travels in her capacity of a xeno-archaeologist in a universe where only the UNSF has legal need for those services. In other words these are smugglers and Jack and Thomas decide that Telisa will be a perfect addition to their team. Along with Magnus, a trained fighter formerly of the UNSF, they all take off aboard the Iridar to a recent new find of Trilisk artifacts.

This venture is illegal, but they have a good team and have covered all the bases. What they don't plan on is the danger of the artifacts themselves. After finding a portal similar to the one Kirizzo disappeared into the story becomes interesting. The smugglers, an agent of the UNSF, and the alien Kirizzo are all trapped in some strange alien trap set by Trilisk technology.

They must work together to get out and that means that Telisa needs to find a way to communicate with Kirizzo. No one plans on the Seeker arriving with Telisa's estranged father aboard. The plot definitely thickens as you go along in this story. There are familiar themes of abuse of power and the fragility of tentative alliances. Magnus at first has some distrust of Telisa because of who her father is.

As it is there will be plenty of reasons to justify that. It would seem that although she has been afforded a lot of freedom, the daughter of an UNSF captain is actually on a shorter leash than she knows. This has it all, a little romance, lots of adventure, smugglers versus the authorities and lots of alien artifacts. It may prove out though that the alien at war might shift the balance here and prove that everything else is just petty squabbling. Great Science Fiction story telling for those who like a bit of adventure and romance.

Of the three main characters Telisa, Magnus and Kirizzo none out shine the other, they make a nice balanced ensemble. This tale reads somewhat formulaic but it makes a great stepping stone into a new series. Jun 13, Nicky Kyle rated it liked it. The good news is that the alien species, technology, culture, etc all seem to be interesting and nicely developed -- at least given the caveat that this is the first part of a series, and one can only expect so much exposition to be included in the opening book; some details have to be left unrevealed for future teasing-out All three of the species we catch a glimpse of seem to have their own individual an The good news is that the alien species, technology, culture, etc all seem to be interesting and nicely developed -- at least given the caveat that this is the first part of a series, and one can only expect so much exposition to be included in the opening book; some details have to be left unrevealed for future teasing-out All three of the species we catch a glimpse of seem to have their own individual and distinctly non-human perspectives, history, technological development, sensory perceptions, etc.

The one we get our closest look at view spoiler [, Shiny -- as the humans nickname him, anyway -- isn't even bipedal and has no auditory senses which makes communication between the species a more complex procedure than usual. Admittedly it doesn't take too long to circumvent this challenge, but given the level of intelligence and technology that we seen Shiny demonstrate, I'm willing to accept the realism of that development being a quick one once he puts his mind s to the task.

It's possible the third species will never be met in great detail -- or then again, perhaps they will be! Either way would work given the way this first story leaves-off. The bad news is that unfortunately the development of all the human characters as well as their whole society leaves me quite bored. The characters themselves are bland and generic view spoiler [in some cases because they die pretty quickly once the main plot begins, but in my opinion a good author will make an effort to introduce details even about the "sacrificial" characters to a make them seem real and b make their deaths mean something to the reader Even Telisa -- arguably the main character -- seems to get over the trauma of seeing two people blown to pieces on top of her with great speed, despite that she doesn't seem to have experienced any such horrors before in her life.

I'm willing to cut Magnus some slack given that he's a former soldier, but still -- he gets over his co-workers' deaths with considerable ease and neither one of them hesitates to befriend and trust the one who killed them both. Granted he has a good reason for why he believed pre-emptive self-defense was necessary, given that he was himself attacked without provocation or warning to start with, but still It has too many rules!

It wants to control people and be in charge of all knowledge! It won't let random people go poking-around willy-nilly among alien artifacts! Granted you can do interesting things with that kind of set-up, but the only thing that really gets done with it in this book admittedly the first of a series, so perhaps we get more into the meat of things in later volumes is to give Telisa a reason to have had a falling-out with her daddy view spoiler [who, conveniently, is the guy who ends up in charge of the military mission that goes hunting her and her fellow smugglers so he can, conveniently, give them a little more chance to escape than they would justifiably have had otherwise.

If one can't even manage to depict a society that's at least as socially diverse as our own, let alone extrapolate toward possible future developments Oh yeah, and I'm pretty sure that everybody is white. At the least, the only physical descriptions we get admittedly sparse are all slanted heavily toward whiteness, which is thus treated as the default state.

The fact that we've got a "one pretty girl in a group full of men who definitely take the time to note that she's pretty even though they're ostensibly hiring her for her brains and her connections rather than her looks" set-up doesn't help my lack of interest in the human characters either. At one point the text actually has her narration asking something along the lines of, "How many times had she thought about engaging in fun sexy-times with mister hunky since this whole disaster started? Pretty sure it was just the once, actually.

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In a roll-all-the-eyes kind of way. It is nice that mr-super-soldier thinks of her as a competent individual who doesn't always need to have a Big Strong Man swooping around to save her, and that the text allows her to demonstrate her newfound combat prowess; all of that is a pleasant bone to throw the reader -- but it's not quite enough to compensate for the otherwise flat romance between incredibly generic characters. I just wish the author had put half as much energy into making his human characters and their society interesting and unique as he did into crafting his aliens and alien technology.

Especially given that of our four main character perspectives, three of them are humans, the book really suffers from the fact that all three of them and the culture they come from are incredibly, incredibly bland.

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While I am interested in learning more about Shiny's people and the vanished alien cultures whose artifacts our characters have been recklessly stealing collecting -- and I don't have any especial dislike for Telisa the way one occasionally does for badly written main female sex objects characters; she's not objectionable, she's just not compelling -- I don't think I'm interested enough to be enticed into further reading of the series.

Basically if I stumbled across a copy of the next part in a library I'd probably go ahead and borrow it, but unless it falls into my lap like that this is probably where my interest in the series ends. Trilisk Ruins was an entertaining enough read that I certainly don't regret the time spent on it, but it's not a series I can see myself ever bothering to seek out purposefully. Feb 18, Steven rated it really liked it. This is one of those rare books that suffers not from being bad, but from being too close too good for its own good.

Thanks to the presence of such clearly non-fantastic elements, The Book of the New Sun is often described as science fantasy, with its merging of fantasy tropes into a setting that must be our own far future, taking the dreams of its readership and mercilessly forging them into the ruins of Urth. While the ruins in Middle Earth and Wolfe's Urth alike are significant in the setting and in the mind of the reader, they are rarely so attractive to the characters.

Even during Roman times, early tourism centered on the locations of great battles and other moments of legend and history. This enthusiasm vanished for centuries, as peace was overtaken by collapse and war, the Roman roads fell into ruin themselves, and travel became a difficult and dangerous pursuit. Religious travel remained important, but travel for its own sake emerged later on, with stability in local governments easing their way. For the wealthy European, this often meant an expedition to an exotic locale, perhaps cruising the Nile River to view the pyramids of Egypt, or even mounting camels to cross the desert to the rock-cut tombs of Petra.

As explorers and travelers ventured deeper into the unknown, the ruin became a tantalizing destination, a place of mystery and discovery, and the lucky tourist might even take home a mummy or chip off a bit of statuary as a souvenir. In this role, ruins are often divorced from those who created them.

They represent not some Golden Age of our own history that we might mourn or aspire to, but a strange realm already half-fantasy, now invaded, however benignly, by the blundering foreigner. In fact, some hypothesized that the most wonderful or challenging ruins could not have been created by the locals at all, but required the intervention of outsiders.

Even today there are those who claim that wonders like the Great Pyramids were created by aliens or at least with some extraterrestrial engineering expertise. A new generation of authors, questioning the values of our own societies as well as the legacy of the early fantasy writers, bring a somewhat different approach to the ruin. David Anthony Durham's The Sacred Band features the juxtaposition of these two views—a post-colonial take on the role of ruins—when a party of travelers composed of a wealthy prince and a few of those apparently fallen indigenous people stops outside a ruined city.

The prince displays excitement, eager to explore and learn about this fascinating place, a perspective armchair explorers are likely to echo, wanting to get inside the walls.

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But to the native travelers, the ruin is a reminder of their former glory, a piece of their own history rather than just a pretty place. The view of earlier peoples on discovering a ruin is often less positive, with the ruin serving as a source of corruption and superstition. In Europe, attitudes toward pre-Roman ruins reflected concerns about the pagan past. Standing stones and barrows did not represent the wisdom of a greater time, but rather the sinister lurking of a troubling past. The stone circle at Avebury presents a startling example.

During a restoration effort in the s, one of the stones was lifted to reveal the crushed remains of a medieval barber, apparently killed while engaged in the popular hobby of pulling down the stones to bury them as pagan artifacts. Dangerous magic may linger in places like this, places we no longer understand or relate to. Even the travelers in Farland's work know to fear and respect the power represented by the stones at the heart of the enchanted forest, and do not tread there lightly.

Carol Berg uses this charged atmosphere to shroud the ruins of a magical rift town in The Spirit Lens. Destroyed by the battles of a sorcerous family decades before, the place remains a bit outside of reality, where magic is more acute. The hero comes to grief while searching the ruin—even as his companion is tempted by the power that it represents. Power lurks at the heart of ruins both real and fantasy. Though many visitors to ancient ruins are merely tourists, willing to take photos and stand in awe beneath the sublime destruction of the past, others come deliberately seeking knowledge—and willing to risk the dangers to acquire it.

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in by Howard Carter revitalized the thrill of the ruin for many who followed the story: He opened a chink in the wall into a cave of gilded majesty. Just as familiar is the legend of the Mummy's Curse, which then pursued Carter and his team, warning against the seeking of treasure and hidden knowledge. There is, alas, no truth to the legend of the inscription said to curse the tomb-breaker although such curses do exist elsewhere.

But a tale combining extraordinary riches with great tragedy is sure to retain its appeal throughout the ages. While Berg's travelers are searching for kidnap victims, the seekers in Daniel Abraham's An Autumn War explicitly brave the dangers of the ruined city to bring back forbidden knowledge which they hope will help them to defeat magic once and for all.

The reader does not witness the journey of General Balasar Gice and his men, only the terrible aftermath as the handful of survivors stagger back from the desert, successful, but forever haunted by what they experienced. The knowledge concealed by the foreboding ruin is dangerous, seductive, but often vital. In Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn , the palace of men is built atop the ruined palaces of the conquered Sithi—similar to elves—but the voices of centuries of combatants linger in the shadows, distracting the unwary. Discoveries of lost cities, stone circles, ancient monuments and ruins; scroll fragments, manuscripts and artifacts.

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