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Daniel Abraham
Apr. 9th, 2010 07:46 pmRead Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet. It's a fantasy set in a vaguely Japanese-ish setting, so gets meta points right away for that. I want to call it an epic fantasy -- epic things happen: there's a war that consumes, well, maybe not the entire world, but all the parts of the world we know about, and enormously powerful magical beings, and a hero... but to call it epic fantasy brings up visions of Robert Jordan, and it's just about as far from that as possible. For example, the enormously powerful magical beings, the andat, are also slaves to poets, who capture them by crafting very specific descriptions, and have (as one might deduce from the preceding clause) extremely specific powers: Stone-Made-Soft can do exactly what his name implies with any sort of stone, but can't do anything else.
It reminds me a bit of KJ Parker or Joe Abercrombie, but with actually likeable characters. (The relationships between the characters are the most important and interesting part, to me.) And, while Parker's Engineer trilogy might be summed up in the word "engineer" or perhaps the phrase "Rube Goldberg machine," I would describe these books as... elegant? The overall impression I get is one of elegance, anyway.
I liked the first two books in the quartet much more than the latter two. The first two are more about people, and the latter two are more about the epic (though both have aspects of the other). The latter two suffer a lot, I thought, from the plot arcs being driven by (large) actions of the andat, which to me smacks a little of deus ex machina. (I also had a fairly severe problem with one of the motivations for a key plot point in the fourth book.) The first two books, of course, have andat actions as major plot points, but the actions themselves are quite a bit smaller and therefore seem less like authorial manipulation. However, that caveat aside, I think this is the best epic fantasy series I've read since... since Attolia? (Though I do not love and adore it like I do Attolia; that would be entirely too much to ask.)
Speaking of which, though, I have also read A Conspiracy of Kings, which I love to little bits and pieces, although my favorite is still King of Attolia.
It reminds me a bit of KJ Parker or Joe Abercrombie, but with actually likeable characters. (The relationships between the characters are the most important and interesting part, to me.) And, while Parker's Engineer trilogy might be summed up in the word "engineer" or perhaps the phrase "Rube Goldberg machine," I would describe these books as... elegant? The overall impression I get is one of elegance, anyway.
I liked the first two books in the quartet much more than the latter two. The first two are more about people, and the latter two are more about the epic (though both have aspects of the other). The latter two suffer a lot, I thought, from the plot arcs being driven by (large) actions of the andat, which to me smacks a little of deus ex machina. (I also had a fairly severe problem with one of the motivations for a key plot point in the fourth book.) The first two books, of course, have andat actions as major plot points, but the actions themselves are quite a bit smaller and therefore seem less like authorial manipulation. However, that caveat aside, I think this is the best epic fantasy series I've read since... since Attolia? (Though I do not love and adore it like I do Attolia; that would be entirely too much to ask.)
Speaking of which, though, I have also read A Conspiracy of Kings, which I love to little bits and pieces, although my favorite is still King of Attolia.
