Announcement!

Hey all. Something a bit different today.

Not fantasy related, I'm afraid, but I've just completed my summer project, which started out sort of as a personal challenge, but I'm actually really proud of how it turned out.

It's a supplement to DnD 5e, with a new character option for each class in the Player's Handbook. If that kind of thing sounds interesting to you, check it out!

http://www.dmsguild.com/product/190272/Subclass-Supplement

-Leo

worm

wildbow

So it's time for something completely different. This is a little out of my normal fare, but I've seen it recommended for years and never managed to get around to reading it, but I recently picked up a Kindle which made the prospect a whole lot more feasible. 

So worm is a web serial, and it's about 5k pages long. Yeah. Slightly over 5k, in fact. If that seems daunting, well it kind of is. Thankfully, the prose is incredibly readable, and quite fast paced (although there's a slow 500 pages or so around the 80% mark. I'm willing to forgive that, considering it's less than 10% of the book). 

But what is worm about? It's a serial about superheroes and supervillains, but mostly about supervillains. Set in an alternate Earth where people started getting superpowers around the 70's when a mysterious golden man appeared out of nowhere. worm follows Taylor, a teenage girl with the power to control bugs. And if that sounds like a lame superpower to you, well prepare to be constantly surprised over the the next five thousand pages. In general, it's just really fun to read through and enjoy the fucking rad superpowers and how they work in really neat ways.

I've never read a serial novel before, but I have read manga, and that's what worm reminds me of. Similar action focused+long overarching plotline+deep world+tons of character development, except, you know, it has probably between five and ten times the length and detail of even the longest running of manga. If you've ever read a really neat manga or webcomic and wished there was more to the world, that you'd get to discover all those secrets it's been hinting at, well have I got a book for you.

Important note: The first part (maybe 100 pages? honestly not sure) of worm heavily focuses on high school bullying. And it's disturbingly accurate. That slows down and disappears as the story progresses, but if that sort of thing makes you so upset you can't power through it, this isn't the book for you.

That said, the writing improves almost constantly as the story progresses (aside from the slow bit I mentioned before). Things keep getting more and more interesting and exciting, without feeling too overwhelming, except in the places it's meant to be overwhelming.

I could talk about worm for pages, but the summary of it is this. I really really really enjoyed it. It was deep, well-written, and scratched an itch I've had for years. If this sounds remotely interesting to you, I urge you to try it out. It may not be for everyone, but if it is for you I'd hate for you to miss out on it. Also, it's free (although you can support wildbow on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow)

(also the author is a machine. He wrote those 5k pages over 2 years, and then wrote another serial that's 3k pages long about demon magic over the next year, and is currently working on his third which I haven't looked at but is already huge. He updates chapters I believe two or three times a week. So if you need something to check in on and read every week, this will not disappoint)

That's all for now folks. Stay tuned for tomorrow, when I will have an exciting (although not precisely fantasy related) announcement!

-Leo

You can find worm at https://parahumans.wordpress.com/. If you want to read it on an ebook reader rather than online (which I wholeheartedly recommend), go to https://github.com/rhelsing/worm_scraper, which is a tool that scrapes the website and compiles an ebook out of it. There's some formatting errors, but by and large it works great.

The Craft Sequence

Max Gladstone

Getting back into the swing of things with a mega post! I'm reviewing all four currently released books in Max Gladstone's The Craft Sequence series. Some quick notes before I get started: 

1. I'm going to provide a quick description of each book, and my opinion on each one. At the end of the post there'll be a retrospective and overview of how I feel about the whole series.
2. These books are in a weird order. That is, the chronological order in which the books take place is not the same as the order in which they were written and published. I'm going to be reviewing in order of publication, and if I refer to "the first book", I mean the first book published. Fun fact, the chronological order is in the name of each book!

Alright, now let's get started!

Three Parts Dead

Man this is such a good book. Like damn, what a great book.

I remember reading a while back that this whole series was inspired by the financial collapse of 2008. I don't know if I made that up, but it sounds legit. If that seems boring to you, just wait.

Magic is Craft, the enforcing of contracts and obligations which use the starfire which power souls to bring water to the desert, hide great universities in the clouds, and bind the dead to service. And, you know, a lot of other stuff too. Magic too is divinity, the exchange of faith and soul for safety, fertility, and strength to fight.

Three Parts Dead takes place seventy odd years after the God Wars, an aptly titled conflict in which Craftswomen took to the skies and broke the gods on their own altars, freeing humanity from the divine yokes of brutal gods. At least, in most places.

The city of Alt Coulomb is the domain of Kos Everburning, god of fire who has adjusted to the world of the Craft, binding himself via contracts to Deathless Kings (Craftsmen who have transcended the mortal coil) and other gods alike, whose city is policed by Justice, a construct built out of the corpse of his consort goddess who died in the war. The only remaining divine city in the New World.

And then, suddenly, Kos dies. Three Parts Dead follows Craftswomen and priests as they seek to understand the cause of his death, and negotiate for his resurrection against those to whom he owed debts. 

Isn't that just fuckin cool? Is that just me?

Ahem. Anyways. It's a legal thriller and a mystery and a urban fantasy and whatever the fuck else. It's unique. It's like nothing I've really read before, and that's amazing! 

Two Serpents Rise

We leave our protagonists of Three Parts Dead and Alt Coulomb for the city of Dresediel Lex, once the domain of savage and brutal gods who traded human sacrifice for grace, now overseen by Red King Consolidated and the Red King himself. 

The book follows Caleb Altemoc, a mid-level risk manager at RKC who also happens to be the son of the last of the Eagle Knights, the warrior-priests of the old gods.

One day, there are demons in the water. More things start going wrong. A god commits suicide to bring down the main power station of the city. The water runs black. People dream of great snakes, writhing in the fire beneath the earth.

More of a mystery than the previous book, this is less of plot-focused story and more of a character driven one. That's not a bad thing at all, but it is a bit of a change. Thankfully, the characters are strong enough to bear the burden. 

This isn't as wow as Three Parts Dead, but I think that's just because it comes after such a unique concept, and by fleshing it out, is relegated to the background by necessity. Still a very fun book, and well worth your time.

Full Fathom Five

Chronologically the last book in the series, we again leave our previous protagonists behind and are brought to what can only be described as an offshore tax haven for souls. The priests of Kavekana construct idols, shadows of gods which fulfill only the basic exchanges of soulstuff for grace. One day, an idol dying of a bad investment speaks in her death throes, something they're absolutely not supposed to do.

Familiar faces begin to show up in this book, side characters from the previous novels play subtle but important roles as the story progresses. It's fun to see what old characters have gotten up to, but it's probably the weakest entry in the series. Not by much, and it's still a fun read, but somehow it's less memorable than the others, even though it has it's share of really cool moments.

Sidebar: I will say this: Gladstone has a way of coming up with absolutely the worst police forces one can possibly imagine. First Justice in Alt Coulomb, and now the Penitents of Kavekana, giant stone statues in which criminals are put to be tortured and brainwashed until they can be considered reformed enough to join society as broken creatures, forced to conform. 

Last First Snow

We return to Dresediel Lex, twenty years before the events of Two Serpents rise. This time, the protagonists are Temoc, Caleb's priest father, and Elayne, the mentor of Tara Abernathy, who was the main character in Three Parts Dead.

Elayne is working with the Red King and the ostensible owner of one of the slums of the city, attempting to rework the wards and protect the area from disaster while opening it up for development. Temoc represents the people living in the slums, as they protest the actions which will drive them from their homes.

This is a brutal book. The fact that it's chronologically before the second book makes the inevitable conclusion incredibly hard to bear as you watch and wait for everything to devolve into chaos. 

I think, in the end, it's a book about choices. About people who don't have choices, or who feel like they don't have choices, and about why they make their choices. I don't think there's a single person who I can say is wrong in the choices they make (okay maybe one, and although they're important they're not one of the real main characters). These are people who feel real, fighting against the inevitability of conflict. The fact that Gladstone pulls this off without making it sappy or grimdark is remarkable. 

This is tied with Three Parts Dead for my favorite entry in the series. That is saying something.

Final Thoughts

Like I've said, these books represent such a unique take on the fantasy genre, like nothing I've seen before and yet somehow familiar in the way that all the best ideas are. As if they were out there all along, just waiting for someone to find their perfect expression.

The prose is excellent, serving the plot well in most places, and shining through with phrases that make me sit back and read them again with goosebumps in a few beautiful moments. Perhaps my one complaint would be that the fight scenes tend to be a little confusing, lacking the flow and beat of Butcher or Sanderson. 

I really strongly recommend you read these books.  Even if you don't normally like fantasy novels, these are something else. At least give the first one a try. If you don't like that, you won't like the sequels. If you do, you'll like the rest of the series, to varying degrees.

Also, the final? book is coming out this July, entitled Four Roads Cross which returns to the city of Alt Coulomb and the characters from Three Parts Dead. I'm excited.

Is this the return of blog posts? Find out next time on LeoTalksAboutBooksALot

-Leo

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin

 The Fifth Season is post-apocalyptic fantasy. Well. Post-post-post-post-apocalyptic. The world of the Fifth Season has undergone so many apocalypses that most of the people who are there are used to it by now. They have plans for it, rules to follow, storage caches, roles within communities, everything a society needs to survive apocalypse number fifty-three.

But that's not what the book is about. Not really. The book is, in a way, about you. That's right folks. About half of the book is written in the second-person.

When I first heard that from my brother, I was skeptical to say the least. After having read the book... meh. After the first chapter or so, it sort of fades into the background. It stopped bothering me pretty quickly, but I can't really say it added anything to the book. So, meh.

That said, the Fifth Season is great. Apocalypse, earthquake mages, mad feels in a few places, and great characters. And as expected of Jemisin, a subtle and beautiful handling of discrimination, identity, race in a way that means something but isn't in your face at all. Speaking as a white male, I read the book through to the end and then when thinking about the characters noticed "Huh. She was transgender. He was gay. These people are the discriminated against race of this world. Those people are black." And all of them felt like real people. Not caricatures, not tokens, not facades defined solely by their minority status. Just people who mattered. To me, that was just a moment of notice. To people who can actually relate to those depictions, I can imagine it would be even more impactful. And we need more of that in fantasy.

Simply, if you've enjoyed any of Jemisin's other work, you're probably gonna like this one. If you haven't, I'd suggest you start with the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms instead.

When the sequel comes out, you can bet I'm gonna grab it. See if the book interests you.

Later folks
-Leo

Traitor's Blade

Sebastien de Castell

I'm gonna start off with a minor rant. I'll get to the book soon enough, don't worry.

There's a trend in fantasy that I hate. It's become very popular over the past five or so years, especially with the rise in popularity of Game of Thrones. More and more books have been released which are described, and often self-described as "grimdark". Basically, in a grimdark novel, everything sucks, the world sucks, the main character is usually an asshole because everyone's an asshole, the world is a shitty grim, dark place.

It might seem like I have a certain degree of vitriol towards grimdark books. That's... not exactly true. I have read and enjoyed a number of them, and I'll be writing about my experience a number of books by Joe Abercrombie, the self-described LordGrimdark, which has been by and large positive. I do profoundly dislike the trend that most popular new fantasy fiction that I have run into is grimdark.

Mostly, my problem lies in the fact that everyone is bad, including the main character. The most common reason I see justifying this is that people are generally assholes, why should fictional characters be any different? Now, I'm as cynical as the next man (probably moreso), but damnit, if I'm committing to a five hundred page novel, much less a series, I need some people to root for. I need someone who, even if they aren't the nicest individual, is generally likeable by at least me if not the people around him, and pursues good goals that I feel okay about cheering for. Maybe I'm weird that way. Who knows.

Finally, we get to the book. Sebastien De Castell gave me everything I wanted. In Traitor's Blade, the world is definitely shit. The King is dead, the Greatcoats are disbanded and treated as scum, people are getting killed and tortured all over the place, and the main character has had some serious tragic shit happen to him, as revealed in a number of short flashbacks.

But damn if Falcio val Mond isn't the most goddamn righteous character I've ever read. Not self-righteous, mind you. This is a man who despite all of the horrible things in the world and in his life never stops fighting for justice. Does he have flaws? Absolutely. Of course. But his flaws don't turn him from a hero to an asshole. They just add dimension.

Also, the Greatcoats are a band of traveling warrior judges who sing their verdicts. And there's some fantastic speeches, which I will quote a blurb on the back jacket of the book as being "Aaron Sorkin-esque". It's great. It's a great book. After I finished it I was sad because things were sad, but I enjoyed every minute of reading it.

If you enjoy "gritty" books but wish that you had some people to root for instead of Asshole v Asshole, this is your book. Read it. There's a sequel too. I'm waiting on a library hold, but I'll write about that one too once I'm down.

Disagree with me about grimdark shit? Have any more recommendations of new fantasy that buck the trend? Lemme know in the comments or something. 

We back boyz

A Brief Update

Hey ya'll. Summer and shit. Here's the books I've read (so far as I can remember them). I'll get to these as I can.

In no particular order:

Peter V. Brett's Demon Cycle
K.J. Parker's The Hammer
Ken Liu's Grace of Kings
Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni
James Cambias' Corsair
Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore
Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself
N.K. Jemisin's Killing Moon
Megan Whalen Turner's Thief, Queen of Attolia, King of Attolia
Samantha Shannon's Bone Season
Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief
 

There's probably a few that I've missed. That's all that come to mind. I'll try and get those reviewed up over the next week, and I'll post links in this blog once they're done.

-Leo

Annihilation

Jeff VanderMeer

In a word, this book is spooky. A giant spooky trip fest. Tracking an expedition made up of members referred to only by their various occupations into an unknown and unfathomable landscape known only as Area X. Yeah the name's kinda corny.

Irrelevant sidenote, I don't think there's a single personal name used in this entire book. I mean, it's only 200ish pages, but still. Huh.

Anyways. Area X is some spooky ass shit. There's hypnotism, and weird ecologies, and everyone is batshit crazy.

The book is written as a journal by the biologist of the expedition, who *spoilers* gets crazier and crazier as the book goes on. This makes it really fucking fascinating, but it can be kind of hard to follow at times.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book. It was not in fact 3spook5me, it was the exact amount of spook that I wanted. In daylight. I picked this up off a recommendation without knowing anything about it, and read it for the first time at 3am. That was a mistake. Don't do that.

As for who I would recommend it to. Um. People who like sci-fi, and who came up to me and said "I want a trippy ass sci-fi crazy spookfest". That's who. If that sounds like fun to you, pick up Annihilation at your local library/bookstore! There's two more books in the series which I plan to read as soon as my library gets them in.

And that's all for Annihilation. Have at it.