| | |  | SHOP BY TYPE | Home » » The Lord of the Sands of Time (Novel) | | | | | | | Description: | | L to R (Western Style). Sixty-two years after human life on Earth was annihilated by rampaging alien invaders, the enigmatic Messenger O is sent back in time with a mission to unite humanity of past eras—during the Second World War and ancient Japan, and even back to the dawn of the species itself—to defeat the invasion before it begins. However, in a future shredded by war and genocide, love waits for O. Will O save humanity only to doom himself? | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Issui Ogawa | | Paperback:
| 260 pages | | Publisher:
| VIZ Media LLC | | Publication Date:
| July 21, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1421527626 | | Product Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.28 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.59 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.49 pounds | | Package Length:
| 7.87 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.12 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.63 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.49 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 5 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Add a star for alternate timelines fansAug 12, 2009
By Argenteus
I enjoyed this novel, the underlying premise involves time-travelling soldiers of the future attempting to thwart an alien invasion by going to earlier eras and readying the people to fight the aliens. Ogawa handles the premise deftly, weaving in AI and alternate realities ideas into a multiple-timestreams fabric without bogging down in the details. In fact, for a book so full of heady concepts, it's a surprisingly quick and straightforward read. Whereas most alternate realities novels tend towards epic length and breadth, Ogawa keeps a tight focus on characters and plotline, and doesn't lose track of things as he tells the back story in flashback while progressing the current timeline story. Despite the tight focus, and naturally being based in Japanese history, his canvas is indeed world- and epoch-wide. There's plenty of sci-fi action propelling the thought-provoking concepts, I think this one would satisfy most action fans, "hard" sci-fi fans and "deep" sci-fi fans. I'm kinda all three and I enjoyed it.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Something different and amazingAug 20, 2009
By J. W. Mattern
I picked up this book while traveling for work, and I was astounded at how good a story it was. I read the majority of it in one sitting. While it is truly a sci-fi story, it is rounded out very well with philosophy and a bit of romance. The writing itself is also quite excellent considering it is a translation. The writing style is very direct and yet elegant at the same time.
The main focus of the plot is on ancient Japan, however it isn't an overwhelming cultural tsunami. A great deal of the story also takes place in the future and focuses much more on humanity as a whole for its thought-provoking sub-story.
It would definitely be worth a read by anyone interested in the sci-fi genre.
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 charming story, but not for hard SF fansSep 07, 2009
By M. Mix
Artificially intelligent semi-organic beings were created to battle aliens bent on annihilating humans. The story follows one of them as he learns who he is and what his purpose is. He falls in love even though he knows he's going to be sent away and will never return.
The story is much better than the cover blurb and the title led me to anticipate. Overall I enjoyed the story. Most of the time the author allowed the reader to discover the world, but occasionally had expository dialog where one character tells another something he should have known. The characters were appealing and the dialog was fun. There were a lot of battle scenes that were interesting to a point. Ancient Japanese weapons and tactics versus space aliens. Over all I saw it as a love story. The ending was quite satisfying.
Some of the story didn't make sense, particularly the timestream travel limitations didn't seem consistent, and the aliens' motivation for the total destruction of humanity. The author also really didn't seem to understand what anti-matter really is.
I read this story because our book group was interested in reading Japanese science fiction. I offered to read it first since I had some experience reading translated Japanese fiction (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the Word, and an anthology Speculative Japan ), I have children who are into manga and anime, and I spent two weeks in the country while attending the Worldcon. I would not have chosen to read this book based on the blurb. This story is consistent with the other translated japanese stories I've read. There is more interest and authenticity in what the characters think and feel than there is in the external world. From my limited experience: for a taste of Japanese SF try the anthology first.
Terminator Done RightOct 05, 2010
By Sean
Japan, AD 248
(A story set in Japan before the emergence of samurai? Oh, Issui Ogawa. That explains it.)
Miyo, the oracular Princess Himiko, has left the palace to walk through the countryside with her bodyguard Kan. They climb Mount Shiki and spy the distant harbor of Suminoe. Kan wonders if any of the ships they see might be from Wei, or Kentak, or Roma.
(Roma? Did the 3rd Century Japanese know about Rome?)
Miyo answers that the distance makes it unlikely -- the embassy she sent to Roma had lost half its ships on the roundtrip voyage.
(Diplomatic contact between Japan and Rome? That doesn't sound right at all.)
But sea trade has been improving, and it's only a matter of decades before permanent trade routes can be established. Already Japan has had contact with the red-skinned men of Kentak beyond the Eastern Ocean.
(Wait what?)
The men of Kentak and Roma had been eager to exchange laws and discover that Japan, like all lands they know, follow the Law of the Messenger, an ancient commandment for all people to cooperate with their neighbors to ward of the Disaster that must eventually come.
Suddenly a mononoke, a giant insect-like monster appears and tries to kill Miyo. Kan defends her, but he's no match for the beast. Then a mysterious figure appears and slays the mononoke. The man introduces himself as O, a messenger from the future, and warns Miyo that this mononoke was just the vanguard of an army that's gathering beyond her borders.
O, we soon learn, is an android from the year 2598. The mononoke, or ETs, have wiped out all life in the inner-solar system, and humanity has retreated to the outer system and extra-solar colonies. The war had stalemated, with what little momentum remained on the side of humanity, so the ETs constructed time machines to take the war into the past. Humans respond by dispatching an army of androids to the past to defend the timeline.
All fairly standard stuff. But the book is much better thought-out than most time-war stories I've read. For one thing, neither side mucks about with subtelty -- no one bothers with covert-ops to kill great leaders before they're born, or to wreck some important historical event. In fact, the Messengers have totally written off their original timeline and only wish to establish *a* victorious future. When they emerge in a past era, they immediately contact the powers that be, tell them the situation, and ask for help. Unfortunately this doesn't always help, and many of the new timelines fall to the ETs. And even if the Messengers do emerge victorious in one era, the ETs can just travel downwhen a few more centuries and start over.
As both sides move further into the past, they deplete their supplies. The ETs have to rely upon what they can build in each time, while the Messengers bootstrap local cultures to a level that can stand against the enemy. By the time both sides reach the 3rd Century ... well, things are pretty grim for both sides.
However, no matter how bad the situation gets, the book itself remains optimistic. Our Heroes may be fighting against a massive zerg rush with their backs literally to the sea, but the tone never flips to "Doomed, doomed, doomidy-doomed" mode. Just as in Tolkien, you know there's a eucatastrophe waiting to happen. When it finally comes, it borders on a deus ex machina, even though it follows logically from the rules laid out for time travel.
One thing I dislike about much SF is the way protagonists always have a post-Enlightenment mindset no matter what sort of culture they're from. Ogawa avoids this nicely, having Miyo be more alien than O. At one point, O describes the American Civil War to her and Kan, and they both respond in horror at the cruelty of the North for wanting to free slaves (they believe slaves would die without masters). Although Miyo's a strong female character, she is in no way a feminist in the way Robert Jordan's or George R. R. Martin's women are. She dislikes her position of mystic royalty, for which she was selected Lama-like, but she doesn't whine about it the way most Western heroes in the Campbellian style do. Instead of avoiding the Call to Adventure, she shoulders the responsibility because it's her responsibility.
O, for his part, is more than human without any of the pinnochioisms usually found in such characters in Western science fiction. He's not the sort to ask, "What is this love which you speak of?" He does have a quest for meaning in his life, but it's an entirely human one, not much different from what Mandella goes through in The Forever War.
The ETs, however, get no development whatsoever. They're nothing more than your typical bug horde, with no signs of reasoning despite their obvious technological prowess. We eventually discover that they were created by an alien race to wipe out humanity for reasons that would make the Minbari say, "Dude, that's screwed up."
The book is a mere 200 pages but packs more in than a thousand page doorstopper. One subplot of the book involves a Messenger who's composing a novel about caterpillars defending a tree from crabs that want to prune it. This allegory of the war, even half finished, is said to be longer than the Mahabhrata. We're given ten pages about timelines that Harry Turtledove could turn into a ten book series, and glimpses of dozen more equally epic. But Ogawa restrains himself to keep the story on track.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
I'm not sure why I liked it so muchMay 23, 2010
By Kevin Mccarthy
This book was a very interesting experience for me. I'm still not sure why I liked it so much. With some books, it's the characters or the plots/ideas or the technology.
All I can say was this was a very powerful book for me. It seems like such a formulaic situation, go back in time to prevent the time traveling bad guys from destroying humanity (even David Weber did it). But the depth that this book goes to both in terms of time travel and the effects on the future and a branching time-line was, if not unique, then very well done.
I was disappointed that the book was so short, but that's all that was needed to tell the story.
This is one that will stick with you for a while.
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