Fantasy

** Leviathan Deflates ** She was reaching for supernatural answers, when memory and mundanity were enough. * Frankly disappointing. Tiamat’s Wrath had managed to take what was good about the series and use the massive shared context with readers to satisfyingly increase complexity. Along with Winds of Winter, this was one of the books I was looking forward to taking time off work to inhale in a day. Unfortunately Leviathan Falls pairs back to the plot to a few main characters and a pseudo-science arc. ...

**‘Most Improved’ award slices both ways ** It’s a good promise of Blood wasn’t my first book in the Powder Mage universe, as I would have put the whole series down and missed out on Wrath of Empire. Frankly, there’s nothing this book that isn’t better done in Brian McClellan’s second trilogy. That might win McClellan the ‘most improved’ award, but also makes the first trilogy worth skipping. Most characters exist in differing shades of gray, but regrets, betrayals, and revenge left a sour aftertaste for the majority of POV characters. Women in the book are sidelined, shamed, or sex objects. Cringe. ...

** Defeat is More Interesting ** One of the most satisfying elements of a fantasy or sci-fi sequel is the opportunity to explore the consequences of the original story. Usually, the protagonists saved the world, but whatever the danger was had to have some sort of impact right? In Wrath of Empire, the protagonists lost the battle for the city they hoped to protect. Effectively, Napoleon has invaded Russia with easy early victories, but now rather than Kutezov needing to draw the French army out, there is a treasure hunt to find the remaining godstones. Tolstoy this is not, but I enjoyed the tactics and tone, which kept the pages turning far beyond when I should have been sleeping. ...

** Sins of Fantasy Novels to Support Authors Surviving in a Capitalist System ** You’re about the only decent person in this whole damned city. * Sins of Empire is likely a story you’ve read before. Main characters include a mage (Vlora), an oddly unstoppable brute (Styke), and a hard boiled spy (Michel), all involved in various machinations for power in the capital of Fatrasta, known as Landfall. While Sins is the first in its own trilogy, it’s the 4th novel in the powder mage universe, which helped the world feel fleshed out more than most fantasy books. There were no surprising character arcs, but the pacing was spot on: start with an intriguing mystery, then introduce memorable characters, let these plot arcs merge towards a trajectory that will also solve mystery but set up the inevitable sequel. ...

** Competent is Good Enough ** In special effects, faces are the hardest to passably recreate. This is because the human brain, through eons of evolution is trained to catch the nuances and twitches of every muscle, pore and stretch mark. When it comes to fiction, court politics are the equivalent of faces. Simple enough from the outside, but it turns out our evolutionary proclivity towards family-based power structures and small group social dynamics means that it’s easy to spot a fake in the uncanny valley. ...

**99 Names of Caeden ** Certainty is hubris […] it is arrogance and Bluster. * Like most trilogies, Islington has the unenviable task of setting up a broader story within the reasonable confines of the first story and for higher stakes. He lands it… mostly. In our world of magic oligopoly, the characters are limited but the plots many. This means that an Echo of Things to Come uses every literary trick possible to squeeze a maximum number of revelations out of its few characters. Time travel, amnesia, partial amnesia, disguises, deception and miscommunicated names all play their role in the gears of Islington’s mythology. These tricks mostly land, but by the end I was seeing a new alias for an old character behind every chapter heading.

** Fantasy Soup ** When it comes to fantasy, the author can chose different gini coefficients for magic-power distribution. Egalitarian powers aren’t fun, so few write such stories. It class based magic systems, an entire section of the population has magic powers, like the jedi of Star Wars or the wizards of Harry Potter. Islington chooses the most unequal distribution of all: a magic oligopoly, where a few named characters each have special powers in a nearly explicit hierarchy. Similar to wuxia novels, only a few of the characters are introduced in the first book to save the reader headache, and a self contained plot begs for sequels. ...

Fundamental Decision Making Error Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent. * Writing about fictional politics isn’t trivial. First an author must build out the raw events of reaction and counteraction building the plot from an omniscient viewpoint. But in a second step, the author must don a veil of ignorance, and place themselves within the viewpoint of a character, with incomplete information, irrational behavior, and uncertainty. At a third level removed, any time a character wants to plan for the reaction of others, such uncertainty needs to be accounted for to feel real. Otherwise, character interactions turn into an single player chess game where every move is known, planned for and predicted to absurd levels. ...

**18th book of 2021: How the world ends. ** It’s not difficult to envision childhood trauma and sexual frustration as the shaper of global catastrophe. After all, men with childhood trauma and issues with women are the ones who already nearly ended the world. (see: One Minute to Midnight ) Once the wrong fires are lit, * “[t]he whole world now, one vast uncontrolled experiment . . . and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate” * ...

** 79th book of 2020: Rhythm of ‘body keeps score’, followed by the rhythm of bore. ** Too often in fantasy, the hero’s journey consumes so much available bandwidth that, that the difficulties of high stakes situations are lost in the compression algorithm of novel writing. Elements like individual trauma or coalition politics are ignored entirely , leaving readers with conversation chess robots who plan every social interaction 4 moves in advance and stare at defeat and carnage unfazed in and deftness that mere mortals cannot dream of. ...