Have you read Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites? It's the third Discworld book. Yeah, take a little time to remember what it's like. Okay.
Now remove all humor. Make it over twice as long. Add a whole bunch of characters, but not any particular reason to care about them. That's Feast of Souls.
If you haven't read Equal Rites...
Okay, so, in Feast of Souls, the magic system is a pretty brilliant premise. Basically, everyone has a fixed amount of life-force (the book calls it "athra"... think of it as your soul) that, in a normal person, will eventually weather out and die in however long that person's natural lifespan is. To do magic, you need to call upon that life-force within yourself, but doing so means you're going to die that much sooner. A fun quote to illustrate this: "It was easy to part with a second of your life to learn a man's name; it was another thing to offer up years of your existence for a single fragment of knowledge." People who do this kind of magic are called witches, whether they are male or female.
But some people aren't willing to accept the fact that magic forces them to die early. And when they've used up their entire athra, they are somehow able to reach out and grab someone else's and use it to fuel their life and their magic. Because they no longer directly sacrifice anything to do magic, and because you can do pretty much whatever you want with magic if you're willing to spend the power, these people are very nearly immortal and all-powerful, restricted largely only by laws they've set up between themselves to prevent total chaos. These people are called Magisters, and they are all men. They theorize that a woman just can't handle the whole kill-someone-else-for-life-and-power thing, over and over and over again. (When the person a Magister is draining, called their consort, dies, the Magister has to get a new person to keep them alive. That's called Transition, and the seconds between consorts is one of the few times a Magister is actually vulnerable. I should also mention that Magisters have no idea who their consorts are--they're just random people, somewhere out in the world. They make no effort to find out.)
But lo and behold one woman isn't satisfied with killing herself for magic, so instead of being a witch she wants to be a Magister. And she manages to do it, and... okay, so the plot similarities with Equal Rites are mostly gone after a hundred pages or so. But it's what came to mind as I started reading it.
While this is going on there's all sorts of boring political stuff, and then a whole lot of the plot leads towards the apparently separate threads meeting, and when it happens it's supremely anticlimactical, and oh yeah the whole world is in danger from some other threat but I really didn't care because the main character was busy not developing.
Other fun facts: I don't think the main character's hair was described in any way other than as a "corona" throughout the whole book. And the word "patina" was used three times in the first 52 pages, once metaphorically.
It's the first of a trilogy. I won't be getting the rest of it. I really do like this magic premise, I just wish it hadn't been wasted in a boring book.
February 2009 Archives
This book looks like it should be only about 300 pages long. It's actually about 650. I guess publishers have gotten even better with the whole thin paper thing.
So. I will start by saying that I am, in fact, very impressed by the obvious thought Sanderson put into his magic system(s) here. Not just in how it works, but in how it can be used effectively, the ramifications for it all--some of it barely even peeks into the novel itself, but I can tell it's there. The world as a whole, actually, is rather well developed past what was necessary for the novel. That makes me happy.
But... there are maps in the beginning of the book, right? Like many fantasy books have. Except they're completely superfluous. After the prologue, everything takes place in or near the main city, so I never cared about where this far-off place was in relation to that far-off place. There's also a really dense map of the city, but I didn't even realize it was there until I was almost done, and even then I didn't bother to look at it because there's absolutely never any sense of needing to know how to get around the city.
Also, the title of the book is... interesting, because on amazon.com it's listed as The Final Empire (Mistborn, book 1). The book itself is titled... um, Mistborn. This is a case of the title of a book becoming the title of the trilogy... there's only one place the book has even the subtitle "The Final Empire," and that's on the title page. Nowhere on the cover. I think--I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect--that this is because Mistborn was originally a standalone, and then it got expanded into a trilogy. The book does reach a conclusion... but it also leaves some honkin' huge sequel hooks. You know how I mentioned that balance between standalone and allowing a sequel that Stroud reached in Heroes of the Valley? Yeah, this totally doesn't have that.
I haven't actually talked about the story much, have I? Okay, well, plot development... I'm not entirely sure what to think, because while a big portion of it is portrayed as the work of a big manipulator-genius, it seemed pretty straightforward to me. It worked well and fit all together, though, so he gets credit for that, I guess.
Meanwhile, characters... There were a few times throughout the book I had to look at a page or so and just say to myself, "Okay, that's clumsy writing." One such time was when the main character (or one of) is introduced... not a great start. In fact, it was pretty interesting to see how he handled writing her, but not in the good way; in the end, she was in fact a good, compelling character, but it just felt like he had a lot more trouble writing her than he did everyone else. Especially, heh, in the romance scenes.
I call them romance scenes, but they're not actually. They're just the scenes that have interaction between the two characters who will inevitably end up together. (And, you know, I'd love to be wrong about that just once. Please, someone, write a book in which two characters meet and I immediately say "Those two!" and I'm wrong. Thankfully, there are far more instances of it taking a lot longer to figure it out... which is rather more realistic than boom first meeting they are fated!) Anyway, because I could tell that they would end up together, when she eventually thinks to herself "I love him," I accepted it because I saw it coming, but I didn't agree with her. By which I mean she didn't love him. Granted, I'm not sure she's really supposed to be able to tell the difference between infatuation and love... this may be another case where complaining about the main character's flaws will just end up as complaining about silly teenagers in general. Sigh.
In the end, though, quibbles aside, it's a pretty decent book. I'll probably look into the second one at some point, and that's more than I do for a lot of trilogy-starters.
Heroes of the Valley. It gets a whole lot of points for great cover art. It depicts an actual scene in the book, the scene is actually rather important, the characters shown are directly related to the title (gasp, could they be the heroes of the valley!? well...), and the scene is further than, like, 20% into the book. Either ths particular cover-artist actually read the book, or he did a fair better job at pretending than most. Also: the whole cover is shiny. Literally, not Firefly-ly. Except there's one problem: the title on the cover (and the spine) doesn't actually spell "Heroes of the Valley." It spells "Heroes of the Vλlley." Lambda! What the heck? (Also, the text on the back is, other than the promo quote blurbs, an excerpt. And I have no idea what that particular excerpt is doing on the back cover...)
I wasn't sure what to expect from Stroud this time around--something big and epic and, frankly, quite good, like Bartimaeus, or something that tries to be a little epic but doesn't really succeed like Buried Fire, or... something like The Leap, which I don't really remember except that the ending was weird? Well, it turned out to be reserved and self-contained, and there's nothing that actually makes it fantasy (outside the invented world) until the very very end. I approve of this, at least in this case, because at least in this case it works. Another postive thing: I'm pretty sure this is a standalone book, but if he writes a sequel, it will work naturally. It's not easy to get that balance right, at least not if evidence is anything to go by.
Well, enough praise. One thing I wasn't entirely satisfied by was the character growth of the two main characters. Halli's I will accept, because he does go through some character-growth-forcing things, some of which are off-screen, and anyway the disjoint is early enough that it feels more like a hiccup in his background than in his mid-story development. But Aud feels kind of like there are two of her, one for her first appearance, and the other for when she shows up again through to the end. Or that's an exaggeration, but it feels a little weird... for what it's worth, her second version is a much better character.
Also, those two are the only two characters I liked at all. Now, this is partly because everybody else is portrayed not very pleasantly, and Halli and Aud don't exactly like them either, but still... actually now that I think about it, I didn't always really like Halli, either. At least when Aud was being annoying she was reacting to Halli being annoying. Oh, and I forgot Halli was supposed to be 14 half-way through... and Aud 15? Jostein Gaarder writes a much more convincing 15-year-old girl, and Sophie just sits around talking about philosophy all the time. (Okay, so not true.) Sorry, Stroud. (Now I'm trying to remember how old Kitty was supposed to be, in the Bartimaeus books...)
There's an annoying amount of hype surrounding this book, including this lovely bit on the back cover: "[...] Shelve THE NAME OF THE WIND beside The Lord of the Rings ... and look forward to the day when it's mentioned in the same breath, perhaps as first among equals."
Nope.
Don't get me wrong. It took a while, but I did eventually start liking it. I realized on page 400 (not around, exactly on... I was amused.) that I was actually emotionally invested in what was going on. Of course that didn't stop me from being terribly annoyed at it at some points.
The first fifty-odd pages are all the frame story. I might have suspected it if I had read the back of the book first, but of course I never do that. And I'm not sure that "frame story" is exactly the right term, as there are several interludes throughout the book which look back at it, sometimes for truly trivial reasons. In any case, the frame story allows the book to be a little different in that, though the framed story is a mostly-typical first-person prodigy-child-to-hero narrative, the frame story is him, older, telling the story. It gives it a concrete point of reference to the future, which allows both comments like "I thought X... I was wrong" without being incredibly annoying and a certain amount of dramatic flair that serves to remind you, every so often, that this is supposed to be a story being told out loud.
The main narrative itself is, unfortunately, pretty conventional. I'm honestly getting tired of prodigy children. I think my biggest problem with these kids is that, really, they're only as smart as their writer. Kind of like how computers are only as smart as the people who make them? Well, not quite, but a character can be written to, say, have really good memorization capabilities and be really fast at picking things up when taught and be really good at doing things (including, by the way, being a really good musician) but when it comes down to it, when I'm left shaking my head over his stupidity, he's not as smart as he's supposed to be... well, that, or I have to blame it all on him being young, but I don't want to do that because it makes me feel old. Yes, his lack of foresight is pretty typically teenaged, but honestly, he has no common sense at all.
On the other hand, if he were that good and that smart and that sensible, there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? And there are times when the narration comments on him being stupid (it's him telling the story, remember) so at least there's that.
Oh, yeah. He gets orphaned. Spoiler. And his desire to learn more about the people who killed his parents pretty much drives the rest of the plot... at least he doesn't want to kill them, because then it would be an even more standard revenge plot. Bah.
The story really only gets interesting when he gets to the Academy... I don't know if it's for me or everyone, but an academic setting automatically makes everything more interesting. Of course, with the academic setting comes the more politically powerful student w
Ah well. By the time the book was over, I was enjoying it, and I did want to read the next one. Too bad it hasn't come out yet.
It was apparent right away that this book is aimed at younger people. It was actually apparent before I even read any of the novel, because Miéville put a note in the beginning saying that American and British English have some differences, and if you're confused, look to the glossary in the back. The choice of words glossed (and, especially, the definitions given) made it very clear that it was trying to be, if not for kids, then at least accessible to them--which is largely the same thing in the publishing world.
In Un Lun Dun, Miéville plays with subverting expectations a lot. So much so, in fact, that it overshadows most of the rest of the book. It's difficult to talk about this without spoiling things, though, so it shall be hidden.
