The Dark Commands [Cover Art]

I’m generally staying away from cover art on here. It’s an interesting subject – at times – of course, but there seems to be little point when all I’d be doing for the most part is regurgitating what I learn at A Dribble of Ink. This is going to have to be a bit of an exception, though, because it’s just that foreboding. The Steel Remains had a great cover (or, at least, the UK/Subterranean editions did), but this one blows even that out of the water.

Or, on second thought, perhaps not. The cover’s as amazing as it was when I first saw it, but now there’s reasons to doubt its continued survival. On Westeros, Pat said: Got word from the folks at Del Rey not to pay attention to the Morgan cover, as it's only an early sketch. Now I’m torn between awe at the thought of that thing getting even better and terror at it being ruined. I suppose only time will tell…

UPDATE

New, ruined, cover art can be found here.

Alastair Reynolds Interviewed (Elsewhere)

I got home today having spent every waking moment anticipating diving into Alastair Reynolds’s newest. At times, it felt a bit like I was stuck in the Coming Attractions portion of the show, with standout scenes from his earlier novels replaying themselves in my head and a huge banner saying TERMINAL WORLD – COMING SOON popping up every few minutes. So, when I threw open the door to the mailbox, I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment when I was left bookless. Seeking to dull the edge of the craving, no matter how short lived the relief might be, I went onto the internet and found this interview.

First of all, Alec’s one lucky son of a bitch. On a more important note, Reynolds definitely has some interesting stuff to say. The misunderstandings about Terminal World are interesting, and they probably tie back to the Book of the New Sun inspiration. Something to keep in mind for my eventual review for sure. Of more interest still are the mentions of Reynolds new work. The trilogy looks to be both larger in scale than almost anything Reynolds has done (the mere thought of which boggles the mind) and also, at least at first, far closer to our present day.

Ian C. Esslemont - Night of Knives

“If you’d been born here, you’d stay put tonight, believe me. You’d know. The riots an’ killin’ and such this year prophesized it. Maybe even summoned it. A Shadow Moon. The souls of the dead come out under a shadow Moon. Them and worse.”

From the start, the thought of Esslemont cowriting Malazan made me nervous. Writing thousand page epics is a dangerous game. There’ve been some splendid successes in recent years, but it’s a form where a mediocre novel inevitably wears out whatever welcome it might once have had and simply becomes unbearable as it goes on and on and on (and on). How could a wholly untested author expect to jump into the middle of the largest giant in a field characterized by behemoths? Thankfully, I needn’t have worried. The helm is passed from one hand to another, but the ride proceeds smoothly.

A large part of that easy transition is that Esslemont didn’t just jump in and hope for the best. Night of Knives is far more streamlined than any of the preceding Malazan novels; though we’re seeing a key piece of the world’s history, the novel’s roughly a third of the length of Erikson’s slimmest contribution, and we’re doing it from two new, easily accessible view points.

Temper is a character type familiar to all Malazan fans: the grizzled veteran. Esslemont doesn’t do anything particularly new with him, but it’s not really needed. He’s a good way for the reader to acquaint themselves with the word, he’s a badass, and the flashback to just why he’s standing guard in some backwater shithole under an assumed name is the highlight of the book.

Kiska is, at first, another perfect archetype. We have the local girl, master of stealth and assassination, and we have the short sighted officials who just won’t see her skill for what it is. As the book progresses, however, Esslemont brings an enjoyable amount of depth to his up and coming rogue. Her endless early arrogance is hard to reconcile with her less than stellar performance, and we learn that, if she’d only been a bit more patient, she could’ve become a full blown mage. It’s worth noting, however, that this added layer is more of a bonus than anything else. This isn’t Abercrombie; Kiska is, primarily, what she looks like, just with a bit of spice added to the mix.

Night of Knives looks a bit odd sitting on a shelf with the rest of the series, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Esslemont has managed to condense one of Erikson’s epic arcs into a bite sized format. No, not quite. Night of Knives feels like the first fifty pages of Memories of Ice (all set up), then the last two hundred pages (all climax). The fast pace is handled quite well for the most part, and character development progresses consistently throughout. That being said, an unavoidable result of playing on ten all the time is that whole sections get lost in the din. An entire seemingly apocalyptic plotline is built up, only to fizzle out off screen.

The combat is generally quite well written, which is good considering how much of it there is. I suppose that a convergence featuring assassins, demons, sorcerers, hounds, etc, would not be a peaceful affair, but some fights seem to exist for no purpose save to add to the already ludicrous body count. In addition, Esslemont’s ability to make battle feel, well, dangerous, is somewhat negated in the first half of the novel by needless dues ex machine, providing us with filler fights resolved in unbelievable ways.

In the end, Night of Knives’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The novel showcases the events surrounding Kellanved and Dancer, something that every fan’s no doubt been dying to see. The problem is that the big twist is given away in Deadhouse Gates, and the rest of the events are sprinkled throughout the following books. Though the anticipated event in and of itself is decently satisfying, there’s nothing at all unexpected about it. As a result, you’re far better off viewing this as Temper and Kiska’s story, rather than that of Kellanved’s, so that you get a well told tale with a cinematic background, rather than an already revealed twist with a bunch of filler stuffed in.

Night of Knives isn’t an amazing book, but it lays all of my fears to rest. Esslemont is worthy to write Malazan, though I hope he picks a less foreshadowed aspect of it to write in for his future works.

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in March

To be fair, this is out already, but I didn’t think to start this feature until now, and the book was released in March, so I’m doing it anyway. Spellwright is a high magic debut that seems like a much lighter, easier read than a lot of the other books coming out this month. That being said, it seems to set itself apart with its focus on disabilities (written by an author with firsthand experience). For a better idea of the work as a whole, I’ll refer you over to Aidan’s review.


The description sounds interesting, but what’s really got me excited about this (besides the Reynolds tag) is Wert’s review. Reynolds doing New Weird? Hell yes. Ever since the conclusion of the Revelation trilogy (and barring the Prefect), Reynolds writing and world building seem to have gotten steadily less oppressive, and this seems like the culmination of that shift. I’ve also always thought that Reynolds was often great with character, so it’s going to be good to read a book in which he capitalizes on that. As for when it comes out, try tomorrow (the 15th). Yes, that’s right. If you haven’t ordered this yet, and if you like Science Fiction, I don’t know what the hell you’re waiting for.


Billed as a cross genre anthology and focusing on fightin’ men, Warriors features more than enough huge names to get almost any genre fan salivating. Stories from Hobb, Beagle, Williams, and a lot more. Oh, and some Martin fellow has his third Dunk and Egg story in there. Though I don’t think that there’re any reviews out there yet, you can get a pretty good idea of what’s inside over at Westeros and Wert’s done a piece on the Martin story. The whole thing’s coming out on Tuesday (the 16th). UPDATE: Wert's posted a full, and glowing, review of the collection here.


Anyone who listens to Writing Excuses should have a pretty good idea of who Dan Wells is. I Am Not A Serial Killer’s been out for a while in Britain, but it’s first coming out in America on the 30th. Don’t let yourself be put off by the YA tag, this book is precisely written and has some great atmosphere. And that’s not mentioning the superb characterization of serial killer-obsessed lead John Wayne Cleaver. I’m not crazy about the direction the book starts to go in at around the halfway point, but I think that’s mostly a case of me and Wells wanting different things out of the story. If you want to head over to the Horror side of Speculative Fiction, this is something you should definitely check out.

UPDATE

I should point out something about the above list (and the feature in general): It's quite personalized. So, basically, I'm not claiming to represent every book coming out this month. The ignored ones almost all fall into the following category: Books that, for some reason or other, I have no interest in. I could, of course, throw up some cover art and paraphrase the amazon blurb, but what's the point? If you know of the book, and if I have nothing new to contribute to it, I'm sure I'm just saving both of us time.

Those that do not are ones that I have some ulterior motive for ignoring. And, by ulterior, I mean marginally paranoid. I wouldn't feel safe posting about Hobb's Dragon Haven, for instance...what if it contained some insidious spoiler about what awaits me in Ship of Destiny?

Brandon Sanderson - Way of Kings [Cover Art]

My first thought upon seeing the cover was that it was pretty uninteresting. I don’t mean bad, of course. It’s fine cover; it’s just not exciting. The BRANDON SANDERSON is huge, which is, I suppose, a necessary step to try and convince fans that they’re getting stuff of the same quality. The problem comes from it being so big that it dominates the whole cover and prevents any thought from entering my head besides BRANDON SANDERSON. Which is quite possibly what the publishers want, I’ll admit.

The art itself doesn’t really do all that much for me either. I’ve seen it compared to Dune in both positive and negative ways, but my issue doesn’t really come from any one comparison. It’s just that everything on the cover seems so familiar. We’ve got a guy with a really, really big sword. Standing far away is another guy with (presumably) another big sword. Are they talking in some form of weapon-based sign language? Are they preparing to fight at an immense distance, using the extreme length of their blades to their best advantage? Whatever it is, it doesn’t exactly make me want to go running to find out.

And then I saw this:


God damn. Suddenly it all fits into place. That thing is beautiful. That gigantic storm is terrifying, and the two guys standing up to it no longer look pedestrian but rather defiant and downright awesome. I suppose that they’d have to spoil it by adding at least some text, so I guess I should just be happy that I have the liberty of spreading flat my dust jacket, when it comes, and admiring the picture as a whole.

Of course, neither cover can really capture the intrigue displayed by the original:

Alastair Reynolds - Thousandth Night/Minla's Flowers

They called them Minla’s Flowers.

Thousandth Night/Minla’s Flowers is a gorgeous book. The artwork (for both stories) is excellent, and the text is nicely spaced out. Of course, simply being pretty is rarely good enough to necessitate a purchase. In that department, my mild obsession with everything Alastair Reynolds no doubt helped a bit. There’s plenty to like in his writing. He can write strong characters, both in very dramatic (Chasm City) and very realistic (Pushing Ice) ways; he is one of the absolute best world builders I’ve ever read; his explanations of mind boggling physics are enough to make me forget how incompetent I am at basic science; and his plotting is fast and filled with twists.

Despite all this, I’m always apprehensive when I pick up Reynolds, and Minla’s Flowers is a perfect example of why. It’s not that the ideas are inferior – I’m unsure whether Reynolds has ever thought of a concept that’s less than brilliant – but, sometimes, the execution leaves them floundering. See, Reynolds is always an intellectual pleasure. If you think about almost any of his stories or concepts, you’re amazed. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always succeed in crossing the gap and being a visceral pleasure as well.

The novella is primarily about viewing a person’s life through snapshots. Well, alright, there’s some other stuff. A ship crash lands, an inevitable doom is slowly coming, a people have to go through hundreds and hundreds of years of scientific progress in a century, etc. Really, though, this is the story of Minla. Merlin wakes from his cryogenic sleep once every decade or so, and each time he meets a changed Minla, as she does what she believes is necessary to save her people.

The concept is interesting, and some of the questions raised quite though provoking, but the snapshots are too rare for us to ever really get to know Minla. We can appreciate the changes, yes, but there’s no gut reaction when we go from seeing her as a girl to as an elderly woman, kept standing by a mixture of a cane and her own determination. In the same vein, we’re never invited into the society of the Skylanders, and we never grow to really sympathize with any of the characters outside of Minla and Merlin.

Thousandth Night, on the other hand, is certainly not a disappointment. House of Suns was one of my favorite science fiction novels, but it has the same problem that all tales of lost glamour have: sometimes you want to see the grandeur, not the ashes. Thousandth Night fulfills that desire perfectly, taking place thousands of years earlier than House of Suns and featuring the Gentian Line in its prime.

We get to attend a reunion, in which each member of the Strand contributes their memories to the collective pool, recounting their experience of the last two hundred thousand years. Of course, the problem with perfection is a marked lack of strife, and so some things pretty quickly begin to go awry. Over the course of the story, we get to solve a mystery, see a space battle, and witness Campion and Purslane embark on the character arks that wouldn’t reach their conclusion until House of Suns.

The problem with a novella that fills in so much background, however, is that I’m unsure anyone who isn’t familiar with the other text would get nearly as much enjoyment from it as I did. With no prior knowledge, the Gentian Strand might seem a bit too powerful, and the characters – though not flat here by any means – don’t truly become worthwhile without the bigger picture.

Thousandth Night/Minla’s Flowers is a collector’s item through and through. If you want to read everything that Reynolds has written, or if you were as intrigued by House of Suns as I was, this collection is well worth picking up. If, on the other hand, you’re just getting started on Reynolds, wait until you’ve read (and loved) his other stuff before looking into this one.

Richard K. Morgan - Market Forces

Conflict investment is the way forward…

Richard K. Morgan came to fame with his Takeshi Kovacs novels, gritty noir science fiction stories narrated by the titular antihero, featuring mind blowing action and an acute social conscience. Market Forces, the author’s first foray away from Kovacs, is at once Morgan’s best novel and his worst. His abilities to paint tragic, flawed characters are at their all time height, and yet other elements – world building, themes, etc – are occasionally so over the top that they shatter all immersion.

Market Forces takes us to the near future, where juggernaut corporations make their money by funding wars and dictatorships. It’s a brutal place, and Morgan doesn’t hesitate to make his views on capitalism clear, but believable (or, at least, this part is). The questions of ethnicity brought up aren’t quite as black and white as you might think, and Morgan makes us carefully consider just what our duty to our fellow man is.

Morgan’s novels have always been character driven, but in the past the hardboiled protagonist’s past and inner depth would only be revealed only as it interacted with the fast paced plot. Not so here. This is wholly Chris Faulkner’s story. The plot is loose as can be, essentially detailing Chris’s internal struggle as he tries to combine working for Shorn with maintaining some shred of human decency. Surprisingly enough, the few twists that the plot develops are mostly slight, unwelcome distractions from the crushing inevitability of the main storyline.

Chris Faulkner is not, and never was, a truly good man, and perhaps that’s what makes it so easy to sympathize with him. Some comparisons to John Grisham’s The Firm could undoubtedly be made, but Faulkner shows a degree of humanity a cut above the bestselling Mitch McDeere. Perhaps a part of that is, as I’ve said, his guilt. He is not, as Mitch was, almost blameless, but tempted to betray what he stands for. No. He’s an amateur suddenly thrust into the big leagues and horrified by the brutality of what he now sees, and yet his protests are never wholly stated. It’s occasionally hard to tell if what he despises is the practice, or the efficiency with which it’s carried out. Spending our time in Chris’s head, living through his interactions with those around him – from wife to competitor – it’s impossible to not be moved. The ending is, perhaps, predictable from the first few chapters, but that only adds to the poignancy of the journey.

Morgan’s writing has always been so gritty and raw that you can’t possibly disbelieve a word of it, and it’s just so here. The novel’s hardest hitting moments all come when Morgan shows us the cruel reality of his – and our – world and doesn’t let us look away. This isn’t nice and pretty, and there are no easy solutions. One of the best scenes of the novel occurs in a slum. The Do Gooders (Vasvik, Erik) are speaking to the Corporate Tyrant (Chris), while, next door, a man beats his wife, and a child cries. The solution seems so obvious, when analyzing it like this, doesn’t it? But no, this isn’t an empty morality play. This is real. People do horrible things to each other in Morgan’s world, and the punishment is worse than the crime. The good can’t act, and those that can don’t care to.

Vasvik stared into the middle distance with no emotion than a cat.

Another shriek. A meaty thump. Chris stared around and coughed out a laugh.

“You guys are fucking hysterical, you know that. Erik, with your fucking writing, and the fucking ombudsman here. All you going to change the fucking world for the better.” Suddenly he was yelling himself. “Look at yourselves. You’re fucking paralyzed, all of you.”

Something hit the wall, big enough to be a body. Blows followed, regular, spaced. Chanting.

you cunt, like that? your cunt like that? you fucking like that cunt?

He was in motion, and it was like the Saab ride home all over again. Embodied purpose, unstoppable. He went out, along the tiny entry hall, out the front door, left along to the next door. He kicked it in. Cheap wood splintered in the frame, the door flew back. Slammed into the wall, rebounded. He kicked again and erupted into the space beyond, through the hall and into the living room.
…
Bang.

Unfortunately, it’s the incredible strength of Morgan’s realism that makes it such a pity when his brilliance is mixed with lukewarm satire. While on one hand we have a world falling apart, on the other we have corporate executives battling each other to death on the freeways. Yes, you read that right. The same corporate people that sponsor wars and control nations pretend they’re in Mad Max. On one hand, I understand what Morgan was trying to do here. If capitalism leaves all but the elite behind, crushing the dreams and life out of everyone else, what better personification of no-safety-net, ruthless, merciless capitalism could there be than a literal duel to the death? Unfortunately, it doesn’t come off this way as one reads. When Mike Bryant rams some hopeful newcomer off the road and into oblivion, I’m not thinking about the cruelties of an amoral capitalist society. I’m thinking about Burnout Paradise, and nothing better combats gritty, horrifying realism than the mental image of a slowly spinning crashed car, played out in slow motion before the respawn.

Furthermore, the class system in Morgan’s London surpasses believability. Yes, I understand that we’re supposed to believe that the gap between poor and rich has widened, that more and more of the world’s wealth is going into fewer hands, etc. Fine. But when you’ve got 97% of your population living in The Zones (think turbo slums, complete with near-total lawlessness and an unemployment rate to shame the Great Depression), I’m no longer so sure I can agree:

It was an abrupt transition. In the financial district, street lighting was a flood of halogen, chasing out shadows from every corner. Here the street lamps were isolated sentinels spilling a scant pool of radiance at their feet every twenty meters of darkened street. In some places, they were out, lamps either fused or smashed. Elsewhere they had been destroyed more unambiguously, rendered down to jagged concrete stumps still attached to their trunks by a riot of cables and metal bands.

Poverty’s one thing, but it becomes hard to believe when the divide essentially amounts to either being a corporate demigod with personal access to the rough worth of New Zealand, or living in a closet and making six cents a decade.

Market Forces is far from a flawless novel. In terms of world building and immersion, it often falls well behind his other works. And yet, I’m unsure that I’ve ever been as emotionally affected by a novel as I was by this one. Over the course of Market Forces, I felt Chris Faulkner’s elation, and I felt his devastation. By the ending, I was shaking with emotion. Yes, the large themes occasionally fall down the stairs – but they don’t matter. Everything they could ever have done and more is conveyed through the plight of a human being as sympathetic as any you’re likely to encounter. Recommended if you want to ruin your day in the best possible way.

Stephen King - Carrie

If only it would be today and Jesus coming not with a lamb and a shepherd’s crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickerers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaming – a terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness.

And if only she could be His sword and His arm.

Everyone has, no doubt, heard of Stephen King and his first work, Carrie, and yet it is paradoxically easy to distance oneself from the giants in the field. After a point, it’s easier to think of everyone on the subway holding a newly released copy of Under the Dome than it is to remember the realities of King’s writing. When I began Carrie, my first King novel in two or so years, I was immediately reminded of all the reasons that I read twenty of his novels in a period of just under three months. By the time I finished Carrie, I also remembered the annoying aspects of King’s writing that are just as much a part of his style as the positive parts.

Carrie is a mercilessly mocked misfit that comes to embody supernatural revenge through her latent telekinetic powers. The structure of the story is built entirely around a single massive set piece. The events are deserving of the focus lavished on them, but the extensive early foreshadowing serves to dampen any sort of surprise. The novel is told through an untold number of viewpoints, both pseudo-nonfiction and a standard third person. This cornucopia of perspectives leads to both great and terrible things. On the upside, we come to sympathize with (almost) every side of the equation, and therein lies the novel’s greatest strength. On the downside, the pacing of the book is often slowed down at critical moments. Learning about a man running terrified as he’s pursued by what feels like every demon of hell personified in an endlessly wronged schoolgirl? Awesome. Learning about sixty of them for every street that Carrie crosses? Not so much.

The strength of the novel comes from the characters, and the star of the cast is, of course, Carrie White. The number of truly innocent characters in fiction is fairly low, but Carrie is without a doubt one of them. She is both naïve and cynical, both pitiable and, by the end, reprehensible. In her character, King has taken a phenomenon as common as anything else in the world – the outsider, mocked by the whole for being different – and turned it into a tragedy as personal and as unjust as any global atrocity.

Of the other characters, most manage to come to life through their dilemmas and problems. Undoubtedly the greatest of the secondary characters is Sue Snell, who tries to right the wrongs done to Carrie. Of course, she’s far from black and white. She was there along with everyone else, taunting Carrie, and only now does she feel the cruelty of what she did. Often, it’s impossible to tell whether her actions are motivated by a newly found compassion, or whether they’re merely empathy in the guise of selfishness. And it’s not just that we don’t know, the character doesn’t either, and she admits it.

The only character that really falls flat is Carrie’s mother, Margaret White. For the first, but certainly not the last, time in his career, Stephen King investigates religion, this time in the guise of Margret’s zealotry. Unfortunately, this is probably his worst treatment of it. The early glimpses of her views are disturbing, but you soon come to the realization that there isn’t much under the surface, and some of the more outrageous aspects make the entire affair seem kind of silly. Dirtypillows, for instance, are just not a very frightening, nor realistic, term for breasts. I mean, fine, sexuality’s evil, but I just have trouble conceiving of the sheer act of puberty being sinful.

King’s prose in Carrie is similar to his writing throughout his career: down to earth and easy to follow. It’s easy to imagine these events taking place in some nearby small town, and King’s diction is a definite part of that. His writing feels like the raw speech of the average man and as such conveys a sense of time and place like few others are able to. The most interesting element in it here is his conveying of thoughts – often contradictory to the majority of the prose – in parenthesis, such as:

Carrie tried to swallow an obstruction and only
(i am not afraid o yes i am)
got rid of part of it.

Carrie isn’t flawless, but its successes – primarily the characterization of Carrie White – are so powerful that you’ll be haunted for days to come. Without the faintest aura of pretension, Stephen King manages to show the reader something about the consequences of their actions on others. Highly recommended, if you’re in the mood for a bleak novel that may just show you some things about yourself and your interactions that you didn’t wholly realize.

Steven Erikson - Bauchelain and Korbal Broach

Manservant required. Full time. Travel involved. Wage to be negotiated depending on experience. Call at Sorrowman’s Hostel.

Steven Erikson’s Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas are at once everything you’d expect and nothing at all like what you think you’re getting. In Memories of Ice, we’re briefly introduced to the enigmatic Bauchelain and the mildly sociopathic Korbal Broach. One is tall and suave; one is short and kinda insane. Both are incredibly powerful. What we get in Memories of Ice is never more than a taste, and it was obvious there was far more under the surface. I came to this collection expecting to have the cloth pulled back. I wanted to see figure out who these people were, and I wanted to see what they got up to when they weren’t messing with caravan guards. The second is satisfied in spades. The first…not so much.

Erikson’s style here is fairly different from his more epic works. The novellas are, by necessity, far more focused than their gargantuan brethren, and Erikson proves himself more than capable at telling a concise story. In addition, his talent for easily understood, yet chaotic, action is present in full force, abetted by his usual grasp of atmosphere.

“Every child should know terror, and are not my little ones terrible?”

Though humor has always been a part of the Malazan books, it’s never played nearly as central a role as it does here. In addition, while the jokes in Midnight Tides, etc, are almost wholly dependent on clever phrasing and wording, here Erikson takes a far more slapstick approach. If you’re easily offended, you might want to stay well clear. Erikson knows what he wants to convey, and he spares no punches when doing so. You’ll laugh, but you also just might feel the tiniest bit queasy as well.

The first novella is Blood Follows. It is exactly what I was expecting, a phenomenon no doubt aided by Memories of Ice giving away the ending and the back cover giving away the beginning. The killers are obvious from the first page, but everything falls together perfectly for a time. And then, before getting to delve into the psyche of the two, the story comes to a conclusion both abrupt and unsatisfying. Ah well, I thought, all will be revealed in the next.

It was not to be.

What follows is just over two hundred pages of murder and laughter. Now, that hardly sounds so bad, and it’s not. It’s just that I was expecting something more. The whole experience is roughly akin to sitting down to watch an anticipated movie: the beginning is highly promising, doing nothing but whetting your appetite…and then comes an hour and a half of a protracted gun battle, with a few car chases sprinkled in the middle for variety. It’s entertaining, sure, but it’s not particularly satisfying.

The Lees of Laughter’s End reads like the climax of your average fantasy. From the first few pages on, we get to witness the supernatural slaughter of just about everyone and everything on board the Suncurl, but without any context or real depth, the procession of murdered crew members never compels a real reaction. In the past, Erikson’s novels works partly because they’re such a mess. The Chain of Dogs was nothing but a string of climactic battles, but spaced out amongst other, less explosive narratives, and it suddenly worked. Here, there’s no breather room whatsoever, and the narrative soon becomes nothing but tiring.

The third novella, The Healthy Dead, is not quite as overwhelming as The Lees of Laughter’s End. Breakneck pace and scattershot plotting still dominate, but the whole affair is far more focused. Primarily, this is a brutal satire of healthy living, a fact that’s perfectly clear from the introduction: WARNING TO LIFESTYLE FASCISTS EVERYWHERE. DON’T READ THIS OR YOU’LL GO BLIND.

Bauchelain and Korbal Broach is a decently entertaining read, but not much more. In his central Malazan novels, Steven Erikson succeeds and conveying character depth with a mere handful of pages. Here it is the opposite. In three hundred pages dedicated to the scheming sorcerers and their diabolical manservant, we never learn a whit more about them than we did at the end of Memories of Ice.

If you want a good time, don’t hesitate but don’t expect anything particularly mind blowing. A new novella was released recently by the name of Crack’d Pot Trail, but as much as I love the mainstream Malazan novels, I have to admit that I’m going to wait for the other novellas to be collected in paperback form before purchasing them.

Robin Hobb - Farseer

All too often I find I have wandered far from a history of the duchies into a history of FitzChivalry. Those recollections leave me face-to-face with who I once was, and who I have become.

Robin Hobb is, in many ways, a one trick pony. Wait, wait! Don’t leave yet. I don’t mean that in a particularly negative way. There’s nothing wrong with the majority of her style; it’s just utterly overshadowed by one aspect. She has less in common with a dog standing on its high legs and more in common with a dog learning to drive a racecar.

As anyone who’s ever read Hobb can likely attest, her strength is not plot. Farseer’s plot is, ultimately, fairly generic. There is an abandoned bastard son, brought to the castle to serve as an assassin. There are three brothers, two honorable and brave, one spiteful and cowardly. There are barbarian raiders from another land, and there are magics both old and very old. Have I intrigued you yet? No, I thought not.

Her strength is not setting. We’re in the Six Duchies, a confederation of six former states, all ruled under one king. The coastal Duchies fish; the inner Duchies farm. There is conflict between the two; the coastal Duchies are reluctant to pay taxes to defend a coastline they do not share. It’s thought out better than most of its ilk, I’ll admit, but it’s still not exactly the kind of thing that you view with your jaw on the floor.

Robin Hobb’s strength is character. It’s not an intellectual strength; I’m not talking about revolutionary backstories, or motivations, or anything like that. Her strength is visceral. These people feel real in every way possible. We see Verity trying to fill his older brother’s shoes, trying to guard the kingdom. He does everything he can, and he is wasting away, and it is not enough. We see him, and we know that he cannot succeed, and he knows he cannot succeed, and yet he cannot – will not – stop.

Fitz is the main character, the aforementioned bastard son of Price Chivalry. He has a depth that can only be had when the reader experiences his growth alongside the author, alongside the character. When we first meet Fitz, he is a blank slate:

My memories reach back to when I was six year old. Before that, there is nothing, only a blank gulf no exercise of my mind has ever been able to pierce. Prior to that day at Moonseye, there is nothing. But on that day they suddenly begin, with a brightness and detail that overwhelms me...

It’s said that our experiences shape us, and so it is here. We experience everything that Fitz does, and so is it that surprising that we are shaped in the same way the he is? In book one, we see Fitz develop loyalties in friendships. In book three, these loyalties are tested. The reader cannot look on with detachment, cannot wonder if he will stand fast or not. There is no intellectual contemplation, no thoughts that he should simply bite the bullet and move on. By that point, it is not Fitz that is being tested, at least not wholly. The reader is invested along with him. Every bond that Fitz forges is shown with meticulous detail, and the reader himself becomes friends with Prince Verity, Molly, and Burrich. These friends may not speak to us directly as we read, but there interactions with Fitz are, on every level that matters, interactions with us.

We become so deeply immersed with Fitz that his reasoning becomes our own. I would wager that everyone has had the unsettling experience of having someone tell us our own motivations and realizing that what we thought we were acting for was just blissful, comforting delusion. It is the same experience when Fitz’s motivations are called into question. Acts that felt so pure at the time are suddenly given new light, and we feel almost sullied as we contemplate them afresh.

A large portion of your enjoyment of Farseer depends on how much you like to meander. Hobb is anything but direct. I’ve heard it said that her writing is eighty percent filler, and it’s hard to really dispute that claim. All the same, I think that it’s the so called filler that makes Hobb worth reading in the first place. The reader lives through Fitz’s life, and I do not mean just the important moments. No, the books – and Hobb – shine through the monotony of day to day existence. If you are willing to simply cut yourself loose, to lose yourself in Fitz’s existence, you’ll find yourself living a life no less complete and complex as your own.

I suppose that that is, quite literally, escapism. All the same, I’ve never understood the term completely. It’s defined as: “Habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine.” I suppose I can’t argue with that, but the term seems to far more often carry a negative connotation. I’ve often heard it said that it’s taking refuge from the real world. Ignoring the tone of the novel in question, something has never struck me as accurate about this definition. Just because what we’re doing does not directly tie into our own lives, why is it inherently meaningless? I’m not defining meaning as a simple recharging of the batteries here, either, though it can do that too. But books can do so much more. Who says that, just because the terms in question are not those of the real world, we are not learning, are not experiencing?

Besides which, if I was going to escape to somewhere else – a Hawaiian vacation for the soul, say – I’d make it somewhere les depressing. The titles and covers all seem quite carefree, but the actual text is anything but. This is, despite all appearances to the contrary, anything but standard fantasy. We are in Fitz’s head for his triumphs, yes, but also for his tragedies, and we feel both with equal force. Just because Fitz tries something, and just because Fitz is one of the “good guys,” does not mean that he will succeed. Be prepared for disappointment of the most bitter flavors while reading.

“I always believed, perhaps childishly, that if you followed the rulers, you would be protected, that things like that would not happen to you. Afterward, I felt…tricked. Foolish. Gullible, that I had thought ideals could protect me. Honor and courtesy and justice…they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them up like shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.”

Of the individual books, the first is at once the one with the fewest flaws and the weakest. The second, by contrast, has glaring problems, and yet it’s undoubtedly my favorite. The first book lays down the connections, and it is half the size of the others. It’s not focused, no, but it never meanders too much, and we always have our ending goal in sight.

The second, on the other hand, is almost nothing but meander. It’s an attempt to preserve the status quo as seen in book one, but for half the text exactly how we’re doing so is quite hard to see. That being said, Hobb’s writing gets better as it goes on, and every interaction between Fitz and another character only makes the overall story that much deeper.

The third novel is an odd mixture of the two. It should, by all rights, be the most driven. A goal is immediately established, and Fitz sets out to accomplish it. Perhaps because of this, it’s the first time where the repetitive nature of the story began to become somewhat irksome. When there’s no set destination, I’m fine with exploring every little town that I pass on a long drive. When I’m late for something, however, I’m far more tempted to ram the pedal to the ground and get somewhere. This is not an urge that Hobb shares, and the cycle of Capture-Escape goes on to the point of insanity. At which point we’re finally given a break, and the book takes a hard right turn. Everything changes, and it’s at once totally brilliant and anything but. The ending is powerful, yes, but also rushed. As it is, it’s a decent closing to a brilliant series, but it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it could’ve been an amazing ending.

If you’re looking for something exciting, or something uplifting, Farseer is not for you. This isn’t about a gripping plot or fascinating locales. This is about people living their lives, and, though it’s fantasy through and through, Fitz and Hobb’s other creations feel as real to me as anyone I know. If character driven is what you’re after, I’m not sure it’s possible to do better than this.