I was sent author Micki Janae’s debut novel Of Blood and Lightning by her publisher in exchange for a review. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a while now, mostly because I wanted the review to come out close to release date and the book comes out next Tuesday. I felt like it was going to be right up my alley based on the description I got. And any time the cover of a book features a young Black woman holding a sword, I’m gonna pay attention. The blurbs about Micki Janae make it clear that a big part of the reason she wrote this book is she wanted to see representation of Black people and specifically Black girls in fantasy, and I absolutely, wholeheartedly support that goal.
The problem is the book really needs some more time to cook. Don’t misunderstand me; I know I was sent an uncorrected proof, and I’m not talking about, like, grammar errors or typos or the occasional clunky sentence. There aren’t that many to begin with, and “uncorrected proof” means uncorrected proof, and I’m not holding that against the book. No, this needs structural edits. Story-level edits. Big chunks of it need to be either beefed up or rethought entirely, and especially for something that boasts of the worldbuilding on the back of the ARC, I feel like a lot more thought needs to be put into the book’s basic premise.
And that’s all very general, I know, and it’s entirely possible that one of the problems is a me problem, which is that Micki Janae didn’t write the book I wanted her to write, or at least the book I wanted to read. And I don’t really like criticizing books for not being different books.
The problem is that my specific gripes about this book are probably not gripes that a white guy has any real business making about a book about a Black girl written by a Black woman. Particularly when it’s not like anyone is sending my books to her for review. And I think that rather than sticking my hand into the buzzsaw that that conversation could very well turn into, I’m going to refrain from going into details.
Of Blood and Lightning is not a bad book. But there’s a much better book hiding inside it, and I feel like it’s a missed opportunity, particularly in a world where Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn or Ladarrion Williams’ Blood at the Root exist, or, perhaps, a certain Greek mythology-themed megaseries that is already dominating the YA fantasy market. If you read those books already and you’re looking for more, or if you’ve got a young person in your life who you think might enjoy a book about a young Black woman who inherits the powers of Zeus, well, pick it up. I’d be happy to see this book be successful! I really would! I just wish I could be more enthusiastic about it.
I waited too long to write this– life, getting sick, and various other dramas intervened– so I admit my ardor has cooled a bit, but my admiration for Willow Smith continues to grow with every project she releases. It’s impossible to really know how much of Black Shield Maiden is her work and how much is Jess Hendel’s, of course, although I do find it interesting that Hendel is more or less given co-author credit here. Her name’s smaller than Smith’s, as one might expect, but not that much smaller, and I can easily imagine a world where this is simply ghostwritten and only Smith’s name appears on the cover.
Also, I found it at Target, of all places, which is not somewhere I’m accustomed to discovering books. I didn’t actually buy it there, but that was where I noticed it for the first time. The cover’s striking as hell, and it took me a second to actually realize who the author was.
Anyway, Black Shield Maiden is the story of Yafeu, a Ghanaian warrior who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, then rescued during a Viking raid on the camp where she’s being held. She’s more or less still a slave in the frozen north, but the Viking concept of slavery was quite different from American chattel slavery, and she serves as a handmaiden to the princess Freydis and ultimately becomes a mentor of sorts to the girl as well. I won’t spoil the story, but I can safely tell you that she ends the story in a very different place than she starts it, both literally and figuratively, and the book doesn’t quite end on a cliffhanger but the last fifty pages or so make me really interested to see what’s coming next. This is book one of what I think is a trilogy; the final page promises a forthcoming book two but doesn’t give a name or a date yet.
I don’t have a ton of criticisms of this; it’s a really solid book the whole way through, and not only am I onboard for more collaboration between these two women but I’m probably going to look into Jess Hendel’s work as a solo author– this book was my first exposure to either of them. The way Yafeu is integrated into Viking society doesn’t quite go the way you think it’s going to; she learns the language perhaps a bit quicker than she ought but I’ll forgive it because her being unable to understand anyone would have gotten annoying quickly, and it really seems like most of the people around her just literally decide she’s a dark elf and roll with it. The cultural differences and her outsider’s view on Viking society is neat to read about, too, and Yafeu and Freydis and a handful of others are compelling characters with interesting arcs over the course of the story. I don’t know that I liked it enough that it’s going to end up on my end-of-year list or anything, but it’s a well-written, action-packed, enjoyable read with lots of interesting female characters and if the plot tickles your fancy I’d recommend picking it up.
The alternate title that I almost went with was “In which I am disappointed, and disappoint”.
Here’s the thing: Robin Hobb doesn’t need my help, and it’s faintly ridiculous for me to be terming anything I write regarding the Farseer trilogy as a “review.” Assassin’s Apprentice turns 30 next year, and there are fully thirteen more books comprising four more series to go in her Realms of the Elderlings series. I read Assassin’s Apprentice many years ago, couldn’t really get into it, and I think I abandoned it, because there were lots of bits in the beginning that were familiar and that feeling vanished after the halfway point or so. (Spoiler alert: they killed a dog, and I think that’s where I bailed.) I have definitely never read Royal Assassin or Assassin’s Quest prior to the last couple of weeks.
The Farseer trilogy is the first use I’m aware of (go ahead, correct me) of a device I’ve previously referred to as “being like Name of the Wind,” a series narrated by the main character but from the perspective of a much older person writing about astonishingly well-remembered events from their youth. Recent examples include R.R. Virdi’s The First Binding and Richard Swan’s Empire of the Wolf series. It’s also an early example of another trend, that being a series supposedly about an assassin who does very little assassinating. Now, in the case of FitzChivalry, the main character of this series, technically he does a fair amount of assassinating, but it’s nearly always kept off the page– we’re told that he spent a summer or a year or whatever doing jobs for his grandfather/king Shrewd, and that he sure assassinated some folks real good during that time, but we almost never see it, and the one time we get to follow him along in a mission he decides, to my complete lack of surprise, that he isn’t going to assassinate anyone after all.
Lemme back up: the series begins when FitzChivalry, at the time referred to only as “boy,” is dropped off on the keep’s front door by his maternal grandfather, who explains to the guard who answers the door that he’s the prince’s bastard, and his mother and grandfather are tired of him so the prince gets him now. He looks just like his daddy, so he gets brought into the keep and basically handed over to the stable master for the early part of his life and ignored. Eventually King Shrewd decides he’d make a good assassin, and has him trained, and we’re off to the races, so to speak.
Here’s the thing: I really enjoyed the first two books, and I really wish I had just left it there, because — and just stop reading right now if criticism of this series is heresy to you, because I know a lot of people really love these books– Assassin’s Quest is Not Good, and it’s Not Good in the worst possible way: in a way that makes the books that came before it retroactively worse by highlighting all of their problems, which were previously able to be minimized or disregarded on account of all the other legitimately cool stuff going on.
Assassin’s Quest is eight hundred and sixty pages long and could have been an email easily half that length with nothing of value being lost. It’s bloated to a level that makes a disintegrating whale on the beach look svelte and demure. Nearly nothing happens, and most of what does is annoying or ultimately pointless. The second book ends spectacularly, with a whole bunch of shit going wrong and Fitz angrily swearing in front of Jesus and everybody that he is going to kill a certain dude or die trying, because That Guy has ruined his life and destroyed everything Fitz cares about and the only thing left is to make him good and dead.
Then Book Three starts and Fitz fails in this quest almost immediately, and fails in a particularly bewildering way– he is not able to directly kill the person, but the book goes into a bit of detail about just how many things in this guy’s bedroom Fitz poisons, right down to the studs of his earrings, and … nothing. No word about him barely surviving the poison, no word about him realizing it’s there and aggressively cleansing or throwing out everything he owns, nothing. He just isn’t dead. It’s as if the poisoning never happens.
Then they spend six hundred pages walking, with an interlude in the middle where Fitz takes an arrow to the middle of his back and convalesces for a hundred pages, and maybe he gets injured one other time, I barely remember. The villain damn near disappears from the narrative along with basically every problem mentioned in the first two books as Fitz and a handful of other relatively unimportant characters (and yes, I’m including the Fool here, because it’s never really very clear what his deal is other than to be mysterious and annoying) head off to go find his uncle, who has gone off on his own quest and gone missing.
Oh, and he’s in love with this one chick, and knocks her up and then abandons her, and he’s not exactly nice to her before the abandonment.
I didn’t like Fitz very much, and that was a problem even before book three.
I don’t mind travelogue fantasy, y’all. I love worldbuilding for its own sake. My love for The Lord of the Rings is unparalleled and pure. But they spend so. much. time in this series just walking and walking and walking, and there’s a road made of magic or something and it feels like it’s important but it’s really not, and then after six hundred pages of walking he finds the dude he’s looking for, who then proceeds to solve all of the problems of the previous two books, off the page, in one of the most fucking ridiculous and epic Deus Ex Machinas I’ve ever seen. Aeschylus himself might suggest that maybe they tone it down. The villains themselves are hella weak as well; there are Red Ships raiding the coast and sometimes they turn people into these conscienceless zombie-things and turn them loose? Where do they come from? What are their motivations? Who exactly are they?
Never discussed; never mentioned, ignored in the last eight hundred pages of this series, and I’m starting to think I’m angrier about how this ended than I previously thought. We aren’t at How I Met Your Fucking Mother Oh Never Mind I’m Gonna Fuck Aunt Robin, Kids, Even Though It’s Been Made Clear We’re Goddamned Terrible Together levels, but it’s close.
Magic is called Skill in this series, right? It’s basically telepathy except when Hobb needs it to be something else in which case it’s that too. Fitz and his people are being tailed by this group of Skilled individuals through most of book three. They’re presented as really dangerous. There’s a bit during that last fifty or sixty pages where it’s Suddenly Revealed that oh no there’s not just one group of Evil Skillzards, there are three!!3!one!!!
You’d think that would be trouble, but they’re literally all dead two pages later, in a book that couldn’t make a sneeze take less than a thousand words. I don’t even remember if any of them got names. It’s just OH NO MORE SKILL WIZARDS oh they’re dead never mind.
Yeah, I’m definitely pissed.
The worst thing is I might still check out the next series at some point. Again, I liked the first two books until Assassin’s Quest ruined them, and the next series changes venues pretty severely from what I’ve seen. And again-again, this is a hugely influential and popular series and everyone loves it but me, apparently, so you may have wasted your time reading this. I dunno.
I was gonna go see Deadpool & Wolverine today and life intervened, so let’s review a whole bunch of books.
The Tide Child Trilogy, by RJ Barker: Excellent, although it took me fifty pages or so of the first book to get used to RJ Barker’s writing style. Nautical fantasy is a sorely underexploited subgenre, and damn near the entire trilogy takes place on a boat. Now, it’s a boat made from dragon bone, and it’s sailed with the help of a walking bird-thing who can magically create wind, but outside of that I can’t imagine anyone who enjoys historical fiction would want to pass on this, and the fantasy elements are not as extensive as a lot of the other books I have read this year. Combine that with some lovely, subtle world building and a feminist perspective that is omnipresent and will still fly over the heads of some readers and you have something I really enjoyed.
Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa. This is the second of Abulhawa’s books I’ve read this year and is actually her debut novel, but in all honesty it’s superior to Against the Loveless World in nearly every respect, and Against the Loveless World is a book I enjoyed quite a lot. Abulhawa is a Palestinian author and this book begins with the creation of Israel and follows a small handful of characters up to, more or less, present day (the book came out in 2006, and ends … 2002-ish, maybe? So close enough.)
All of the trigger warnings, and if you’re remotely human this book will leave you incandescent with rage at several different points. I need to do a whole bunch of research and then read it again. It might be the most important book I’ve read this year; everyone needs to read this one.
The Hunter, by Tana French, is the second book she’s written about Cal Hooper, the main character of her previous novel The Searcher. I don’t have a lot to say about it that I didn’t have to say about the first book she wrote about this guy; Cal is an American ex-cop who moves to Ireland in search of a slower, calmer life and ends up in the tiny (fictional) town of Ardnakelty, where he quickly forms a bond with Trey, a local teenager with some trauma in her background. In the first book, Cal got pulled into the disappearance of Trey’s brother, and in this book, her father reappears for the first time in years and brings all sorts of pain with him. This book is less about the central mystery (it’s technically a murder mystery, but the murder doesn’t take place until about the 60% mark) and more about the relationship between Cal and Trey and what it’s like to be an outsider in a small town, and I really feel like this and The Searcher are both triumphs. I’d love to see more about these two.
the book of elsewhere, by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville. I was super excited about this one, so I’m sad to say that this is quite easily the single most disappointing reading experience I’ve had this year. I don’t have any idea how the co-writing process worked between Reeves and Miéville; Reeves also “co-writes” the comic book series that this book builds upon, but I can say that the only thing in this book that felt like Miéville was the vocabulary. Had those two names not been on the cover, I’d not have made it past the prologue, which is so choppy and poorly-written that I can barely believe it made it to publication. I made it through about 120 of the book’s 340 or so pages before deciding I had other things to do, and I don’t see myself picking this back up. You should avoid this unless you’re a huge fan of BRZRKR, the comic it’s based on … and I don’t really think BRZRKR has any “huge fans.” Definitely stay away if you are a fan of Miéville; just pretend this book never happened.
I generally write three different kinds of book reviews. The first kind is for books I’m enthusiastic about. That’s the most common type, by far. Rarer is a pan of a book; firstly, because I genuinely like most of the books I read (there are lots of books, and I’m pretty good at picking out ones I am going to like) and secondly because I generally don’t like shitting on a book unless 1) I think it really deserves it and 2) I think I can do it entertainingly. The least common is mixed reviews. Why? Mostly because I don’t bother to write them– “this was meh” is hard to make entertaining or interesting, and if I finished a book with not much of an opinion of it either way, it’s frankly easier to simply not write about that book.
A subtype of the mixed reviews is books that I liked but everything interesting I have to say is negative, and that’s kind of where we’re landing with The Empire of the Wolf. It took me … five days? Six? to read all three books in the series, most of which are around 500 pages each. In general, I had a good time with them, but almost everything I have to say that I think people might be interested to read is negative, and a lot of it ends up a little more political than I like my book reviews to be. There are Bad Books, and there are Books I Didn’t Like, and this series fits more into This Is Not The Book’s Fault. Or maybe it is! I dunno.
So, the story: the narrator of the series is Helena Sedanka, a young woman in the story but telling it much later in her life. The main character, on the other hand, is Sir Konrad Vonvalt, an Emperor’s Justice. The Justices are effectively judges who ride circuit and double as investigators and police; Vonvalt has authority over basically everyone except the Emperor himself, and is able to decide on his own how crimes are punished. Helena is his clerk; she travels with him and is responsible for recording the details of the cases that are brought to him and the resolution of same, and she’s in training to become a Justice herself. All Justices have the power of the Emperor’s Voice, which can compel people to tell the truth, and most have other abilities as well; Konrad can also speak with the dead, for example, and other Justices can speak with animals.
The setting is, effectively, the Holy Roman Empire. Note Holy Roman Empire; think Charlemagne and Germany, not Caesar and Italy. Most of the names are pretty clearly German-adjacent and the Empire’s war of expansion is actually called the Reichskrieg, which was an actual term the Holy Roman Empire used.
The first book starts off as a murder mystery, and absolutely blows the fuck up over the course of the next two books to where they’re dealing with literal threats to reality from a demonic parallel dimension. I don’t want to spoil anything and I almost didn’t want to give you that much; you have no idea where this series is going to end up from where it starts, which is a compliment. Predictable, it’s not, and the twists and turns of the plot over the three books are tremendously well-done. To be clear, I’m about to spend the rest of this review complaining, but I’m absolutely on board for whatever Richard Swan does next. My dude has got chops; he just didn’t quite hit the mark on this one in certain ways.
Just for example: Konrad Vonvalt is an unbearable asshole.
Like, I’ve disliked characters in books before. I’ve disliked main characters in books before. But Vonvalt is unbearable in a lot of ways that make him really hard to put up with and even harder to understand why the other people in the series put up with him. Roughly a third of his dialogue involves telling other people to shut up. He is absolutely insufferably long-winded, completely full of himself, and will not listen to anything other people have to say. He would be the worst boss in human existence.
And Helena is in love with him, for no clear reason, and at various points he claims he is in love with her, despite being twice her age and her immediate supervisor, which is ick. I do not want to read about ick right now. There is enough ick in the actual world and I don’t need it in my books. I would like it if men in the actual world would stop trying to fuck their subordinates and I don’t want to read about that type of man in my books. Even then, it would be easier to put up with if the two of them had any chemistry at all; they do not. He orders her to do things and he tells her to shut up. The word “insolent” appears more in this book than any thirty other books I own. Their relationship is ridiculous in the extreme, and I don’t believe in it even before I get to the part where it grosses me out.
(Helena herself, in general, displays … not great taste in men? She has a brief relationship in Book One where she stops pining over Vonvalt for a while, and he’s not a good idea either for a whole different set of reasons. I went back and forth a lot over how I felt about Helena through the course of the series.)
And this one may not even be the author’s fault, but see the guy on the cover of book three? That’s Bartholomew Claver, the bad guy. Bartholomew Claver is a very good villain. But if he’s ever described as being Black on the page, I missed it, and by “missed it,” I mean that I looked at the cover when I picked up The Trials of Empire, thought “Wait a minute, who the hell is that?”, then realized from his clothes that it had to be Claver, and went back to the first description of him looking for any evidence at all that he was supposed to be Black, then read the entire third book paying close attention to the physical descriptions of Claver and saw nothing to indicate anything about his skin color. And yes, I’m fully aware that there were people of color living within the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore as an empire you would expect these folks to have absorbed some non-white cultures, but whiteness is very much the default in this series.
So we have two possibilities here: either Claver is not meant to be Black, which makes the artist’s choice rather curious, or he is, but Swan never described him as such or did so in such a subtle way that when I went back looking for it I still didn’t see it, and either way it means the only Black guy in the whole damn series is the bad guy, which is also sorta squicky.
You see what I mean, though, when I say that the reasons I didn’t like the book were kind of political, and that they maybe might not be the book’s fault? There are some structural issues too; this series could have used a fourth or maybe even a fifth book, because when I say everything goes to Hell in book three I mean that absolutely literally and a whole lot of shit happens really fast, and Swan either lost some control over his own story or had to cut some stuff back or both, and the third book feels really rushed and kind of muddled in a way that the first two didn’t. And if you’re less annoyed by Vonvalt’s personality than I was you will have a better time overall than I did. So, yeah: this is a mixed review. I had a mostly good time with this series, with the caveats as listed above, but the stuff I liked mostly outweighs the stuff I didn’t, and I’m in for Richard Swan’s next series. I just hope to hell Sir Konrad isn’t in it.
I am going to deliberately not use the name of the book I just finished, either in the title or in the body of the review itself. I have sprinkled clues here and there, however! I didn’t like this book at all, and I feel like talking about what the book did wrong, but I don’t just want to shit all over it. It has this weird enthusiasm to it that got me through 740 pages in, like, two days. It’s not entirely shit! It’s just … not very goddamned good.
So. Let’s provide some advice to authors.
Don’t base your magic system on dragon shit. That’s not a fucking joke. The magic system in this book series is based on gunpowder made from dragon shit. Gunpowder made from certain different kinds of dragon shit has different magical effects. None of them make any fucking sense. Gunpowder made from dragon shit doesn’t make things float. Other gunpowders made from dragon shit don’t make light or darkness or Jesus Christ the magic system is so fucking dumb.
If you’re going to load a fuckton of exposition in the first chapter, don’t put it in the middle of a chase scene. Because for fuck’s sake you guys are running for your lives please stop fucking explaining things to each other that you already know. This was shitty anime levels of overexplaining and while the dialogue was at its worst in the first chapter it never really got much better.
Your main character should have a personality.
Your main character’s long lost love that he’s obsessed with should be interesting. Imagine having someone built up for hundreds of pages as your MC’s Lost Eternal Love and then when she shows up she’s, like, a cashier or something. And “cashier” is her personality, not just me taking a shot at a job that for the record I have had.
Don’t introduce fucking time travel into your plot with just a hundred pages left. Because that happened. The entire resolution to the book suddenly involved time travel. Fucking stupid dragon-shit-based time travel.
If you spend half the book worrying about who betrayed you, the betrayer has to have been mentioned in the book. Two of the three MCs suspect each other or the third MC of betraying them and feeding information to the king. It turns out to be some random shopkeeper who overheard them and — get this — set up a listening device in the chimney so she could feed information to the king. Bullshit.
Pick an adversary. You can have an evil king or a zombie disease or a big heist but if you’re going to try and cram all of those things in you probably ought to decide who the big bad actually is. It was never clear what the big heist was for– mainly because the guy behind the heist refused to tell anyone– and then he died and the payoff just fucking sucked all around.
Did I mention the dragon shit. There is a hundred pages dedicated to feeding a dragon some stolen dragon shell that used to be part of the king’s crown and “regalia” and then following it around and waiting for it to take a shit.
You can only say “ruse” so many times before it loses all meaning. The main character apparently doesn’t like being called a con artist? So it’s a “ruse”? His cunning attempt to trick me becomes annoying after the 3,000th use.
Your title should make sense. Does that title imply anything to you? That thing doesn’t happen. Not once, not a thousand times. There is one reference late in the book to a thousand people, specifically, dying, but if that is what the title is based on an editor should have stepped on it. It’s a great title! Has fucking nothing whatsoever to do with the book.
Your love relationships should make sense. They all suck. You can only lie to someone, directly to their faces, so many times before they refuse to put up with your shit any longer.
No one spends as much time thinking about their own name as the main character of this book does. It’s like the author was really, really proud of the name and felt the need to repeatedly explain what it means. It’s a noun! I know what it means!
If you aren’t writing a Star Wars book, you don’t get to use Star Wars names. I have never read anything with stupider names, front to back. Absolutely awful. I’m not going to go into the other room and get the book to find examples but literally just put some clumps of letters together and you’ll have a name from this book. Unk Sphyz. Worx Bormfork. Shibble Knif. Goddamned awful.
Put the story in the story. The number of times that a chapter would end with the characters going off to Do Something and then jump, at the beginning of the next chapter, to after they had done that thing was fucking unacceptable.
Dragon. Shit.
God, there’s more, but I two-starred this on Goodreads and the more I think about it the more I want to go back and change it to one. That second point is just for enthusiasm. If this book made a whole bunch of right turns where it chose to make left turns it might have been a good book, and I can almost see where this author might be writing stuff I like in the future. But Christ, this book was a Goddamned mess.
I am tempted, in writing about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ten-book, 6000+ page, nearly two million word series Shadows of the Apt, to be terse: read it.
But, like, that’s kind of a big ask, y’know? The series is 1.924 million words long. As a comparison, the Wheel of Time series is 4.36 million words. A Song of Ice and Fire is currently at 1.749 million, with two imaginary books left to go. James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series is 1.493 million words. The entire length of this blog: 1.563 million words. The King James Bible is around 785,000, depending on how you count and who you ask.
Oh, and there are apparently four volumes of short stories outside the main story? I just found out they existed, finding out they existed made me want to die, and I don’t know how much they add.
It’s a lot. And what fascinates me is that Shadows of the Apt has got to be the least well-known of all the big fantasy megaseries. Tchaikovsky writes seventeen books a year (he has, no joke, released five new books since I’ve been reading this series. I mean it. I’m not kidding.) and I don’t feel like the guy gets nearly enough credit for being as amazing as he is. Shadows was written between —
— you may want to sit down, as this is ridiculous —
— 2008 and 2014. All of those books came out in six years, and I’d bet money that he released books unrelated to SotA during that time, plus, remember, those four extra books.
I do not know a single other person who has read this series, and I never see anyone talking about it. I can’t explain this.
I picked up Empire in Black and Gold in October, and I finished Seal of the Worm earlier this week, obviously with a lot of detours. The series breaks down rather nicely into a four-book series, Empire through Salute the Dark, and I took a decent-size break in between that and picking up The Scarab Path. Path and Sea Watch feel pretty stand-alone, as they do a Two Towers sort of thing and don’t share a lot of characters, and then the last four books go in a big gulp, but they follow pretty closely on the events of Path and Sea Watch.
I haven’t said a single word about the actual fuckin’ story yet.
Adrian Tchaikovsky likes bugs. Outside of John Irving he may be the most “Oh, there it is” author I’ve ever read. Every John Irving book is going to include weird sex, an amputation, a bear, a hotel, and wrestling. Adrian Tchaikovsky books without bugs are rare. And in Shadows of the Apt, every character is a bug. Every single one.
Well. Sorta. The human race is divided into something called kinden, and each kinden has the characteristics of a type of bug, which somehow sounds weirder than it is. They’re all still human, mind you, and kinden can interbreed, but there are Beetle-kinden and Wasp-kinden and Mantis-kinden and … let’s see, spiders, flies, bees, ants, moths, mosquitoes, scorpions (there’s a reason I said “bug” and not “insect”), dragonflies, woodlice, and, uh, Mole Crickets.
I admit it, I burst out laughing the first time a Mole Cricket-kinden showed up in the book. That’s not an exhaustive list by any means, especially since a handful of the kinden are spoilers, and I never got the feeling that Tchaikovsky had sat down and written out an exhaustive list that he was never going to break away from. I’m pretty sure there’s a stick bug kinden in there somewhere that only gets mentioned a handful of times, and there’s exactly one butterfly-kinden in the entire series. I think if he got an idea for a character with a new kinden, he just put them in and rolled with it.
oh my god I just googled mole cricket for the first time oh my god OH MY GODWHAT the FUCK
Anyway, most of the main characters are Beetles and Wasps, with a few significant Mantises and Spiders, but by the end of the series the list of characters is like eight pages long. Some kinden have, effectively, powers– Wasps have a sting that is basically a force blast they can shoot from their hands, several kinden can fly, and Ants are effectively a hive mind, and not all of them are completely human-shaped– Mole Crickets (brrrr) are ten feet tall, for example, and Mantis-kinden have some spiky bits that the rest don’t have. Some can see in the dark. Some can dig basically as fast as they can walk. You get the idea. There are cultural differences as well, although the series does take some pains to not be completely “orcs are like this, and elves are like that,” if you know what I mean. Spiders are gonna be Like That, but then he’ll throw a Spider at you that isn’t Like That, just to make sure you realize there’s diversity in the kinden.
So yeah, the first four books are the Wasps basically trying to take over the world. That war ends in book four. In the back six they basically consolidate what they lost in the first war and then try again, and the entire tenth book is a spoiler. The big problem with maxiseries like this is that there can be a lot of filler– I will never get tired of pointing out that the entire second book of The Wheel of Time could be a ten-page prologue to book three without losing anything– and it’s amazing how well this series keeps the plot moving. If anything, I felt like Book Ten could be broken into two books with another 300 pages and I’d have been fine with it, as some of the developments in that book feel like they come kind of out of left field. The flabbiest part of the series is The Sea Watch, which is the only book that’s remotely skippable, and even that one is stuffed full of tons of crazy cool ideas. It’s just that they don’t pay off sufficiently in subsequent books, which is part of why I feel like Seal of the Worm could be two books.
The different kinden are broken into two categories, the Apt and the Inapt. Apt kinden can use technology, and the work various groups of Apt artificers do over the course of the series to forge new ways to kill each other is genuinely impressive. Inapt kinden simply cannot use technology, and I’ll admit that figuring out what this exactly meant was one of my few complaints about the series. What is meant by that is that you can literally hand a crossbow, powered by a trigger, to an Inapt Mantis-kinden and they will be unable to figure out that pulling the trigger will shoot the thing. Most of the races that have major characters are Apt, and you don’t really get into the head of an Inapt character until really late, so it takes a while for it to sink in that Tchaikovsky really means it when he says at one point that if a door is opened by a button, an Inapt character will not be able to figure out how to open that door or understand how it works even if someone else shows them. Ultimately, this is a fantasy series, with swords and armor and such, but the artificers and the Apt kinden give a nice soupçon of science fiction to go with it.
(Yes, I wrote that sentence just so I could say soupçon.)
There is also magic, but … Christ, that’s a whole thing, and it’s practically a spoiler just to say that, but let’s say that the back part of the series is more about magic and the Apt vs the Inapt than the first part is, where that distinction is really in the background.
So much for being terse.
Please read this series. Come back in two years and let me know when you’re done. I need someone to talk to about it.
