Tag Archives: epic fantasy

Midnight Tides

You would not think that by the fifth book of a ten book series, it would be prudent to be introducing what is essentially a completely new cast of characters in a completely new situation. And sometimes you’d be right. To my surprise, though, not always. Midnight Tides marks another high water mark in Stephen Erikson’s epic tragedy of the Malazan Book of the Fallen.

It has a lot of oddities relative to the rest of the series. It’s almost completely prequel, in that it tells the story of a character first met in the fourth book and how he came to the dire straits the reader found him in. (Or it pretends to do that, though ultimately it stops short, leaving us with only the flavor of that betrayal. Which is okay.) It essentially leaves out the Malazan Empire entirely. And there’s considerably less warfare than I personally am used to from the series.

Nevertheless, it has a lot of what I’ve come to look for, too. For one thing, the Crippled God is here in force, revealing enough of his nature that it’s finally fair to pick a side. But mostly I’m not talking about plot elements, because these aren’t books you come to for the plot, good though it is. It would be like admiring Monet’s work with stippling and never bothering to step back to see the actual image on the canvas. We have tragedies galore; mirrored families on both sides of the conflict, one betrayed by the empire they are sworn to uphold, one doomed by attempts to tear down the evils they see in an empire that has long since outlived whatever good it may once have brought to the world. And within the families themselves are betrayals and true brotherly spirit alike, sometimes from the same brother to the same brother, in the same action. It’s a complex tapestry against which to weave the fall of an old, old empire to the ascendancy of a bloody new one that has forgotten its own ancient past, wrought in bloodier betrayals still.

This is also the funniest of the books so far, perhaps in an attempt by the author to cut the horror and tragedy to bearable scales? It worked, in any case. It’s been a while since I’ve laughed so often at a book that wasn’t written to make me laugh. Best of all, there are a few people left to play meaningful roles in the future of the tale; I’m pleased, because these are all people I really want to see more of.

One off note, which I suppose is inevitable these days. Was I the only one who saw the Letherii Empire as a blatant caricature of a popular external view of modern America? It’s not that the overt politicizing of a really good story would bother me (although it does, a bit), so much as that on more than one occasion it forcibly pulled me out of that story. That, I really don’t care for.

A Game of Thrones

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thrones22To my very great surprise, my most recent book has been the opening entry in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones. What with my dad so much out of it via his time in the hospital, we needed something to do while visiting. I eventually started reading the series to him, figuring that he’d like it and also that it would give me a chance to catch up in time (well, okay, not exactly, but sort of) for the most recent volume.

But, the unexpected part is where I finished it so quickly. In fact, it read fast, and the politicking is sufficiently pleasant that I didn’t very much mind the relative lack of frozen zombies. (They are, after all, both the point and the pay-off.) But I get ahead of myself. What we’ve got here is a story about the end of the world, not by fire but by ice. Specifically, the undead Others from the polar north are on the verge of emerging for the first time in 8000 years to destroy the world of men. Only, nobody in the world of men is particularly aware or concerned; after all, there is power to be won, and money, and most importantly, a crown.

Westeros is a brutal land, but also an honest one. All too rarely do people get what they deserve; instead, they get what they can grasp and hold onto with their own two hands, and the penalty for a reach which exceeds that grasp can be dire indeed. And so the question becomes, can the honorable old Stark family of the North, the gold- and power-hungry Lannisters, the last daughter of a usurped throne, and all the men of Westeros settle vast gulfs of difference before Winter has come?

Thematically, it shares a lot with Jordan’s series. The goal appears to be to demonstrate exactly how divided man can be from man, and still manage to pull together in time to save the world. He outpaces Jordan in that mistakes have real consequences to actual characters in the storyline, not merely to the faceless masses. Prosewise, his errors are less glaring but nearly as annoying as Jordan’s can be. Or maybe it’s my own peeve, but quite frequently I’ll see the same word twice in a sentence or consecutive ones. Repetitive word choice drives me crazy. On the whole, though, excellent start to a series that appears to be over halfway through right now, and that continues to show a great deal of promise.

Knife of Dreams

So, I’ve been kind of dreading this review, in the back of my head, ever since I got going with the whole ‘review things’ idea. (Which, clearly, was mine alone, never before conceived in the scope and breadth of human experience.) It’s like this. I’ve got these books that I started reading in 1993 (when there were just the four of them) (sidebar: I can still remember reading over my girlfriend’s shoulder about some guy named Mat whining about whether to go home with Perrin or what he should do if not that; funny how much better I like him now than I did in that moment of first exposure), and they’ve shaped my life, if only to a small extent. Sure, none of my big life decisions have been informed by them, but they account for about half of my friends and at least a quarter of my entertainment budget; and when you think about it, the stuff you do because you enjoy it really is the important part, so I guess it’s fair to say they’ve shaped my life to more than a small extent.

My point is, there are these influential books, only the quality has declined over the past, well, sadly, more than half the years since I first picked one up. And every time a new one comes out, there’s this balancing act between sufficient excitement to get and read the book and sufficiently lowered expectations to not loathe it afterwards. And now I have to review Knife of Dreams. So, yeah, that’s the source of the dread.

Only: it wasn’t that bad. I can do you one better. It was actually pretty good. Sure, there’s the overdescription gene he got from Tolkien. Sure, there’s a chapter that had me rolling my eyes at the pointlessness of dwelling on a single event for that many pages. (In fact, it involves Elayne being wet, just like in the last book.) But that stuff was the small part, not the large as it has been for so long. Plotlines advance in significant ways, and some of them resolve. Some of them even resolve satisfactorily. And if some others seemed like he was working on completing a checklist rather than presenting high drama, well, at least the little box did get checked.

And I can do better than that. There were multiple scenes that had me talking to the book, in anger, in disbelief, in excitement. None of them bad things about writing or lameness, though; all about plot elements that I was engaged by. Better still: there was a solid sense of wonder moment, and I thought those had been long gone, this far into the series (because of familiarity with the world as much as because of the author’s failures of late).

If the author wrote like this for a standalone book, I’d roll my eyes a few times, but I’d have enjoyed myself. It’s nice to be able to say that again, even if it’s not the ‘You have to read these books, now!’ diatribe I inflicted on people until about 1998 or so.

A few spoiler-like materials lay beyond. Before that, though, one thing. As much as I enjoyed myself, and as much as I was impressed by the way the plot appeared to have momentum: No, I don’t believe he can finish in one more book, unless he really does cram in 1000 pages of small font with as much plot density as the sixth book. Still, this one was a lot longer than they have been since, well, they were last good. So I suppose that’s a positive sign.
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House of Chains

Sometimes, it is unreasonably hard to keep up, for no particularly good reason. The upshot of all the happenings in my life (and various irrelevancies that also slowed me down, mind you; I’d never claim after being more than a week late that it was exclusively the fault of how busy I am) is that I have far less to say about Erikson’s fourth tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, House of Chains, than I feel like I ought to have.

Four books is a long way into a series to feel like one finally has a handle on what’s going on, it’s true. I can completely see why it would put people off. And it’s not like I can explain the first book well enough to talk people into reading it, so far. What I do know is this: despite consistent four-digit page counts and a real struggle to figure out what’s up, these are the only new books in the past several years that have made me want to drag them out and avidly reread them, despite a hip deep to-read pile. (As opposed to, say, the Martin series, which I feel like I should reread to know what’s up, but the task fills me with dread.) Mind you, I won’t be doing so for some months yet, but my point is, I resent that I don’t have time to.

In summation: it’s nice to read a book where the human emotion and the sweeping events are balanced well enough that readers looking for either one as their key ingredient will think this is the right fantasy series for them. Gardens of the Moon is available in America these days, which means (as I probably already said once before when I did book three) people should start reading these now. Lots. (Caveat: Yes, the cover is terrible. But it looks like all the other books are being published with their original covers instead of stock fantasy crap covers, so don’t let that fool you.)

Memories of Ice

51B5H7HRP0LThe problem is, I’m about to gush here, and I don’t really want to, because who would take that seriously? Anyway, I decided to pick up Gardens of the Moon last year after seeing it praised so often on my Usenet hangout. And I gotta say, good book. I was confused for the first few hundred pages, and in some ways I still am, but it wasn’t a ‘story is incomprehensible’ confusion, just an ‘I know there’s a lot more here that I can’t see yet’ confusion. (The book is now being published by Tor, which means that it’s more available at a slightly cheaper price, but has worse cover art.)

I grabbed the next one a few months later, was a lot less confused, and by the end… wow. This Steven Erikson guy knows what he’s doing. I’m thinking that each of these books has its own enclosed theme, and that the theme of this one was sacrifice. Also, I’m thinking that he has, independently of whatever else he hopes to accomplish over the ten volume Malazan Book of the Fallen series, set out to become the definitive author of war imagery. There might be a better depiction of an army on the march through hostile territory, bereft of supply lines out there in the vast expanses of the written word. I know I haven’t found it, though.

And now, Memories of Ice. Both it and the second book, Deadhouse Gates, are sequels to Gardens of the Moon. As such, one could probably choose to read the pair in either order and not have the story spoiled. Of course, the reveal of his world’s secrets is linear, so a few parts of that aspect would be ruined. Most importantly, though, if book 2’s theme was sacrifice, book 3’s is redemption, and that’s not really the kind of thing that you’d want to get out of order, for fear of cognitive dissonance.

Although there are lot more familiar characters that have returned for this volume than for the previous, Erikson never stops introducing new ones. Characters that are almost instantly likeable and, more importantly to me, that are often instantly important to the overall story being woven. The problem is, characters die almost as often as characters are introduced. This is inevitable, though. The very title of the series demands a price in blood. What’s hard to distinguish, from an external perspective, is if the price is ever worth the gain. Don’t take that as a criticism, though. It’s almost always worth it from the perspective of the players, and that’s important. It’s only from my perspective, where characters that I like die to save faceless and often explicitly unworthy civilians, that the cost is high.

Speaking of war, Erikson’s grasp for the definitive this time is the siege. For about a hundred pages in the middle of the book, the city of Capustan is surrounded and assaulted by (of course) vastly superior forces. He put together a chapter that covers a straight 24 hours, in excruciating detail, while at the same time managing to convey the fog of war. And the horror of it; I will now digress for a moment. The soldiery is, for the most part throughout these first three books, very egalitarian regarding gender. As close to a 50/50 split of men and women as makes no difference. Erikson presented evidence of a female soldier having been raped by a male of the invading forces, and I had to do a triple take before I realized that the point they were making is that this kind of thing basically never happens. Brutal though that world is, I was impressed at how much more right they have it than we do, sometimes.

I have three complaints. One is that there’s a decided Fizban factor at work. It may not be the direct analog I was sensing early in the book, but until I find out exactly what’s going on, I’m going to stay annoyed by it. And quite possibly after I find out, if I’m correct. The second is minor, because it’s so brief. There’s a 5 page digression where a few of the main characters meet up with the army’s assigned painter (to capture the history and all, you understand) and his critic, a talking toad. It came from nowhere, and led almost nowhere. (There’s a slight bit of payoff loosely attached to my third complaint, but not enough to justify the jarring weirdness of it all.) The third… well, I’m not sure how to go into it while avoiding major spoilers, so it will go below the cut.

In any case, read these books. They’re each very long, so I can understand how they might seem like a slog if the first book doesn’t immediately do it for you, but there is some real payoff later in the series. And more to come; after reading this one, the titles of the next two (House of Chains and Midnight Tides) mean enough to me to expect more of the same out of the overarching story that ties it all together. And the quality of the writing is enough to expect more of that buttery goodness.
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