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.

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.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

N.K. Jemisin

This book is great. It starts out as your classic "Hick from the country is suddenly heir to the kingdom what do", and becomes so much more. A story of captive gods, beautifully characterized. Honestly, Jemisin's gods are one of the book's huge strengths. They are utterly godlike, and utterly flawed, and honestly brilliant.

Not a lot actually happens in this book. If you're looking for Epic Fantasy, look elsewhere, although the fate of the world does happen to be at stake. This is about one person, one family, and the actions in one palace.

There is a lot of "intrigue", but it is by no means a political intrigue book. I'm honestly not sure what category to put it in.

The concept is great, the writing is mostly good. There are occasional moments of brilliance, and even more occasional mild burrs in the writing that pop me out of the story for a second, but the bad ones are minor, and the brilliant ones are truly great. But it's really the character's that make this the story it is. The characters, and the gods.

Also, I hate that this is significant enough that I feel obliged to mention this, but the protagonist is a black woman. If you're looking for diversity in fantasy protagonists (which is kind of abysmal I'll be the first to admit), this is a great place to look.

I would recommend this book to fantasy readers, or those who are interested in exploring what the genre has to offer. I'm trying to think of what books are like this, and it's certainly not easy. If I come up with something, I'll edit it in.

This is a complete trilogy, and the second and third books are both excellent. I'll write them up at some point. There is an accompanying novella which is also quite good.

And that's all for the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms ladies and gents.

-Leo

Gardens of the Moon

 Steven Erikson

This book is confusing as all shit. All books, especially fantasy books, have a certain number of chapters or pages where they just throw you into the mess, and explain things later. I have heard that this explanation begins to occur a little bit around the third book in this series.

That said, I'm enjoying being confused so far. It's well written, and Erikson can do an incredible brutal scene. There's some cool ideas that I think I'm picking up on, and some interesting characters, although those supposedly change every book as well.

This book sorta follows a group of soldiers, who used to be the elite guard under the previous emperor, and what they do when the new empress turns against them. But really, that's probably less than a third of the book. There's all sorts of stuff with meddling gods, wizard fighting, Totallynotdarkelves who live on a moon, and worldbuilding out the ass. It's hard to give a summary.

Erikson does a good job of compensating for the confusion. There's some lovely maps, as well as a glossary, and a Dramatis Personae section listing the names of all the characters, what category they belong to (Bridgeburners, regulars at the Phoenix Inn, etc.), without which I would be totally lost.

It has the added benefit of being the first book in a completed epic fantasy series. I personally plan on continuing with the series, at least until I cease to enjoy being totally lost.

I would recommend this book to hardcore fantasy fans. If you enjoyed Game of Thrones but thought it could use more unexplained magic and about three times the characters, odds are good you'll like this book. This is not for the light reader. Amazon tells me the kindle edition is about 500 pages long, but it feels longer because of the dense writing style Erikson uses, as well as the amount of time you'll spend looking up names of characters.

If you do enjoy, there's nine sequels after it, as well as a host of accompanying novels. I'll review the books as I finish them, and if I manage to make it to the end without losing interest, I'll do a series retrospective.

That's it for Gardens of the Moon ladies and gentlemen.

-Leo