Book Talk
More book-talk. All very spoilery this time. Sorry. >.>;
I'm going to start this one by talking about The Pirate King and The Ghost King, which are the second two books of R.A. Salvatore's Transitions Trilogy. The first book was The Orc King, which I read several years ago now and do not remember in great detail, although I remember the important outcomes of the plot.
I think one of the reasons that Salvatore's "Legend of Drizzt" series has been so long-running and so successful (apart from the fact that he is an excellent story-teller) is that from the beginning he has drawn in broader ideas as an integral part of the story-telling. Although the degree varies somewhat from book to book in the series, as a whole they make you think about things more than the typical adventure fantasy novel, particularly one set in a D&D based universe. Which isn't to say that other books don't do this, but that Salvatore has done it both well and fairly consistently. All that being said, he really dug into that aspect of his writing with this particular trilogy.
The trilogy is aptly named because it definitely lays out a series of transitions, for the main characters, the societies around them, and eventually for the entire world in which they live. Throughout the series the question of good and evil, and whether or not they are innate or chosen, has been a main theme. Given that Drizzt Do'Urden, a member of the supposedly all-evil race of drow, is himself decidedly not evil has made that sort of theme a necessity. But I was glad that Salvatore took it to the next level, so to speak, and started to question the whole D&D premise of "evil races," which categorizes a whole group to be evil by default. I think that you can get away with this in a fantasy setting if you want to, and generally it works well for D&D and the book series based in the system. But it is a problematic sort of thing if you then want to do what Salvatore has done, and have a character from one of the "evil" races who doesn't fit the mold.
He started in The Orc King by setting up an orc leader who, after carving out a territory violently for his people, is then willing to make peace with the nearby "goodly" races, a peace which then holds over the course of many following years. Although there are those on both sides who view the whole thing askance and continually question how long it is going to last, the actuality seems to be that the orcs are genuinely meaning to settle in and create a civilized land of their own, willing to, at the very least, live-and-let-live with their neighbors. This puts some pressure on the idea in this universe that the evil behavior of a race is necessarily innate and cannot be overcome no matter what the circumstances. It might better be categorized as social and cultural behaviors ingrained over so long that they seem innate, although that does then bring up the question of, when and why did those behaviors start in the first place, and why would it take so long and be so difficult to come up with even this one leader and group who are making an effort to change. I'm not sure to what extent Salvatore is going to delve into this in future books, but it has a lot of interesting potential.
The events of The Pirate King, also reinforce that idea that societal and cultural behaviors are chosen, and not always for the better. The main plot revolves around Captain Deudermont, the famous pirate hunter, ending the iron-fisted rule that a group of wizards held over the port city of Luskan. He then takes the on the role of leader himself, intending to try and improve the city and bring it out of its pirating, thieving ways, but ultimately fails. His failure stems in part from enemies within the city, old pirate captains who want to keep their grip on their own sections of the city, but also from a lack of willingness to change in the population at large. The people of Luskan want to keep on with their pirating ways (they have a "free city," as several characters put it), and don't want their "freedom" to be curtailed by anything like a rule of law. This is a city comprised in great majority by humans, who are not one of the "evil" races, but in this instance they make a choice to not embrace a better way of living, even with a leader like Deudermont ready and willing to help them through what would certainly be a rough transition.
I am very convinced that when he sat down to write The Ghost King, Salvatore asked himself, "Okay, what's the most epic thing I could possibly throw at my characters?" and then proceeded to write it. I swear his thought process was something like this: They've already fought a dragon, so it has to be better than that. They've already fought a magical, evil artifact (twice), so it has to be better than that. So how about we make it an undead dragon. And then let's have it mind-fused with said evil artifact. And then, since a dracolich-crenshinibon mindmeld isn't quite epic enough, let's make it a three-way mindmeld with an old, extremely intelligent, disincorporated illithid. That's pretty good for a boss...and then let's have the world be breaking apart too, so that magic no longer works properly, just to add a bit of challenge to it.
No, seriously. That's exactly what happens.
It was definitely a cool plot, I just can't get over being amused by how epic he made it. The "evil is not innate" theme didn't come out quite as strongly in this one, or at least not on quite as big a scale. Everyone was pretty busy, so that's not too surprising. Salvatore kept the theme running mostly through Jarlaxle, who I think still falls quite firmly in the "neutral" alignment, but seems to be drifting slowly towards the "good" end of the neutral spectrum. He has clearly come to, if not outright care for, then at least be sympathetic to Drizzt and his friends. I don't have any objections to this development, as Jarlaxle is a great character and hopefully this means we'll see him around a bit more. Salvatore leaves this book with very few things resolved, other than that the dracolich will no longer be a problem. The world is still breaking - colliding with a plane of "Shadow" - magic both divine and arcane is unwinding. I assume that he means to go on and explore the rest of this in the Neverwinter Trilogy, which comes after Transitions.
SPOILER regarding character death
I admit that I did tear up at the end of the The Ghost King, as he actually killed off both Regis and Catti-brie.
The one thing that I am actually disappointed with Salvatore about is how he dealt with Catti-brie throughout most of this trilogy. She and Drizzt finally get married (I think right before or perhaps during The Orc King), and if I remember correctly, she is certainly around during that first book. But she is gone the whole second book, training her newly developing magic, and is comatose for all of the third book, and at the end passes away. It is very frustrating, as it feels like she was kind of shunted aside, and then gotten rid of, as if Salvatore got her and Drizzt together at long last, but didn't really know what to do with it. This may be unfair to him (his description of their "after-life" leaves me wondering what is actually going on with her and Regis' deaths) but taken at face value I don't really like how he dealt with it. This is unusual, too, because she has been a strong female character throughout the series, and it seems unlike him to do that kind of shunting, so I'm not really sure what to make of it. I think it might be best to mostly reserve judgment and see where he goes with things in the future, because this may be part of something bigger that he has planned. He is a good enough writer that I find this plausible, at any rate, so hopefully this will be the case.
Needless to say, I am very interested to see what happens in the Neverwinter trilogy. I'll have the first book from the library soon, and the second is coming out October 4th, so I won't have to wait too long for it.
Intrigues is the second book of the Collegium Chronicles, and there will be a third book which is actually coming out in the next couple of months, if I remember correctly. There are bonuses to being gone for a couple of years, I guess.
I enjoyed this book too. It was more angsty than the first, in some ways, for Mags (still being an outsider in many ways) is the brunt of some unpleasant suspicion for most of the book. Lackey has always done a fairly realistic job of portraying the Valdemarans as suspicious of outsiders, especially when things start to go wrong. This book is no exception, and vague portents seen by those who get glimpses of the future are interpreted by many around the Collegia as showing that Mags has ill intentions towards the King. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it is only through the intervention of his closer group of friends that Mags is shielded from the worst of that ill-feeling.
His friends do protect him and support him through much of the book. There is an incident at the end of the book, however, that really, really made me angry. I must reserve some judgment about it, because it really was right at the end and she may deal with it further in the third book, but as it was left I really was unhappy about how she handled it. (This is definitely spoilery for the end of the book, and normally I wouldn't go into this much detail, but it just really pissed me off.)
Mags' two closest friends, other than his Companion (Dallen), are a Bardic trainee (Lena) and a Healer trainee (Bear). They both have problems and issues of their own, which is fair. Towards the end of the book, Bear lashes out at Mags for not doing more to help him solve a family problem, and in the process reveals a great deal of resentment against Mags that he has clearly been hiding for some time. Then, shortly after that, Dallen is injured while they are training together in an attempt to cheer Mags up. At that point, with Mags absolutely sick with horror and fear and pain, Lena shows up and immediately blames him for the accident, and then adds that oh by the way, if he can "do" such a thing to his Companion (as if he had done it on purpose), then he probably is capable of killing the King. Mags, pushed past his breaking point by this, snaps back at her and says some mean (but at least partially true) things. She leaves in tears, and Mags then gets another visit from Bear to berate him further for the accident, for upsetting Lena, and to add that he too thinks Mags probably will kill the King.
Mags, not surprisingly, runs away at this point. He comes back eventually, when his Companion has healed enough to not be entirely sedated and can actually speak with Mags. He is injured in the process of coming back, and also fully exonerated from any doubt about his intentions towards the King. When he wakes up both of his friends are there to see him. He apologizes to them, and Lena refuses to let him do that much really, and it is clear that they have both forgiven him. But neither of them apologize directly to him.
Now, it is possible that I am over-reacting about this. But this just pisses me off, so much. The fact that they, when dealing with their own troubles and upset over the Companion's accident (for he is their friend also), lash out at Mags is understandable, if not admirable. And there is some truth in some of what they said. But the fact that they both a) blamed him entirely for the accident when the Companions are fully sentient creatures and b) said that they thought he would kill the King...those things are just not, in my opinion, forgiveable without (at the very least) a direct and thorough apology. Sometimes people get angry at friends and say things that they don't mean, yes. But who accuses a friend of being capable of murder just because you're angry at them? I feel like you don't say that kind of thing unless you've already thought it for some other reason for a long time. Which indicates to me that they had listened to the rumors and doubted their best friend enough to believe it possible that he would kill the King...and then didn't apologize for it. That's the part that really gets me.
Anyway. I will not rant about this more. The summary of book 3 indicates that all three of them will need to resolve their own troubles, so it's possible that she will bring this up and deal with it further. It was just the first time in a long while that I ended a book and felt like that towards characters who are supposed to be protagonists. As a whole, I liked the book, though, and am looking forward to the third one.
That is all my book talk for now. I am reading a couple of Eric Frank Russell's novels that I haven't read yet, and then I will have read much of his work. :) There will be some podfic-type readings of some of his short stories coming from me in the near future, I hope. Next, I will read for Book Club and that first book of the Neverwinter trilogy, Gauntlgrym.
I'm going to start this one by talking about The Pirate King and The Ghost King, which are the second two books of R.A. Salvatore's Transitions Trilogy. The first book was The Orc King, which I read several years ago now and do not remember in great detail, although I remember the important outcomes of the plot.
I think one of the reasons that Salvatore's "Legend of Drizzt" series has been so long-running and so successful (apart from the fact that he is an excellent story-teller) is that from the beginning he has drawn in broader ideas as an integral part of the story-telling. Although the degree varies somewhat from book to book in the series, as a whole they make you think about things more than the typical adventure fantasy novel, particularly one set in a D&D based universe. Which isn't to say that other books don't do this, but that Salvatore has done it both well and fairly consistently. All that being said, he really dug into that aspect of his writing with this particular trilogy.
The trilogy is aptly named because it definitely lays out a series of transitions, for the main characters, the societies around them, and eventually for the entire world in which they live. Throughout the series the question of good and evil, and whether or not they are innate or chosen, has been a main theme. Given that Drizzt Do'Urden, a member of the supposedly all-evil race of drow, is himself decidedly not evil has made that sort of theme a necessity. But I was glad that Salvatore took it to the next level, so to speak, and started to question the whole D&D premise of "evil races," which categorizes a whole group to be evil by default. I think that you can get away with this in a fantasy setting if you want to, and generally it works well for D&D and the book series based in the system. But it is a problematic sort of thing if you then want to do what Salvatore has done, and have a character from one of the "evil" races who doesn't fit the mold.
He started in The Orc King by setting up an orc leader who, after carving out a territory violently for his people, is then willing to make peace with the nearby "goodly" races, a peace which then holds over the course of many following years. Although there are those on both sides who view the whole thing askance and continually question how long it is going to last, the actuality seems to be that the orcs are genuinely meaning to settle in and create a civilized land of their own, willing to, at the very least, live-and-let-live with their neighbors. This puts some pressure on the idea in this universe that the evil behavior of a race is necessarily innate and cannot be overcome no matter what the circumstances. It might better be categorized as social and cultural behaviors ingrained over so long that they seem innate, although that does then bring up the question of, when and why did those behaviors start in the first place, and why would it take so long and be so difficult to come up with even this one leader and group who are making an effort to change. I'm not sure to what extent Salvatore is going to delve into this in future books, but it has a lot of interesting potential.
The events of The Pirate King, also reinforce that idea that societal and cultural behaviors are chosen, and not always for the better. The main plot revolves around Captain Deudermont, the famous pirate hunter, ending the iron-fisted rule that a group of wizards held over the port city of Luskan. He then takes the on the role of leader himself, intending to try and improve the city and bring it out of its pirating, thieving ways, but ultimately fails. His failure stems in part from enemies within the city, old pirate captains who want to keep their grip on their own sections of the city, but also from a lack of willingness to change in the population at large. The people of Luskan want to keep on with their pirating ways (they have a "free city," as several characters put it), and don't want their "freedom" to be curtailed by anything like a rule of law. This is a city comprised in great majority by humans, who are not one of the "evil" races, but in this instance they make a choice to not embrace a better way of living, even with a leader like Deudermont ready and willing to help them through what would certainly be a rough transition.
I am very convinced that when he sat down to write The Ghost King, Salvatore asked himself, "Okay, what's the most epic thing I could possibly throw at my characters?" and then proceeded to write it. I swear his thought process was something like this: They've already fought a dragon, so it has to be better than that. They've already fought a magical, evil artifact (twice), so it has to be better than that. So how about we make it an undead dragon. And then let's have it mind-fused with said evil artifact. And then, since a dracolich-crenshinibon mindmeld isn't quite epic enough, let's make it a three-way mindmeld with an old, extremely intelligent, disincorporated illithid. That's pretty good for a boss...and then let's have the world be breaking apart too, so that magic no longer works properly, just to add a bit of challenge to it.
No, seriously. That's exactly what happens.
It was definitely a cool plot, I just can't get over being amused by how epic he made it. The "evil is not innate" theme didn't come out quite as strongly in this one, or at least not on quite as big a scale. Everyone was pretty busy, so that's not too surprising. Salvatore kept the theme running mostly through Jarlaxle, who I think still falls quite firmly in the "neutral" alignment, but seems to be drifting slowly towards the "good" end of the neutral spectrum. He has clearly come to, if not outright care for, then at least be sympathetic to Drizzt and his friends. I don't have any objections to this development, as Jarlaxle is a great character and hopefully this means we'll see him around a bit more. Salvatore leaves this book with very few things resolved, other than that the dracolich will no longer be a problem. The world is still breaking - colliding with a plane of "Shadow" - magic both divine and arcane is unwinding. I assume that he means to go on and explore the rest of this in the Neverwinter Trilogy, which comes after Transitions.
SPOILER regarding character death
I admit that I did tear up at the end of the The Ghost King, as he actually killed off both Regis and Catti-brie.
The one thing that I am actually disappointed with Salvatore about is how he dealt with Catti-brie throughout most of this trilogy. She and Drizzt finally get married (I think right before or perhaps during The Orc King), and if I remember correctly, she is certainly around during that first book. But she is gone the whole second book, training her newly developing magic, and is comatose for all of the third book, and at the end passes away. It is very frustrating, as it feels like she was kind of shunted aside, and then gotten rid of, as if Salvatore got her and Drizzt together at long last, but didn't really know what to do with it. This may be unfair to him (his description of their "after-life" leaves me wondering what is actually going on with her and Regis' deaths) but taken at face value I don't really like how he dealt with it. This is unusual, too, because she has been a strong female character throughout the series, and it seems unlike him to do that kind of shunting, so I'm not really sure what to make of it. I think it might be best to mostly reserve judgment and see where he goes with things in the future, because this may be part of something bigger that he has planned. He is a good enough writer that I find this plausible, at any rate, so hopefully this will be the case.
Needless to say, I am very interested to see what happens in the Neverwinter trilogy. I'll have the first book from the library soon, and the second is coming out October 4th, so I won't have to wait too long for it.
Intrigues is the second book of the Collegium Chronicles, and there will be a third book which is actually coming out in the next couple of months, if I remember correctly. There are bonuses to being gone for a couple of years, I guess.
I enjoyed this book too. It was more angsty than the first, in some ways, for Mags (still being an outsider in many ways) is the brunt of some unpleasant suspicion for most of the book. Lackey has always done a fairly realistic job of portraying the Valdemarans as suspicious of outsiders, especially when things start to go wrong. This book is no exception, and vague portents seen by those who get glimpses of the future are interpreted by many around the Collegia as showing that Mags has ill intentions towards the King. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it is only through the intervention of his closer group of friends that Mags is shielded from the worst of that ill-feeling.
His friends do protect him and support him through much of the book. There is an incident at the end of the book, however, that really, really made me angry. I must reserve some judgment about it, because it really was right at the end and she may deal with it further in the third book, but as it was left I really was unhappy about how she handled it. (This is definitely spoilery for the end of the book, and normally I wouldn't go into this much detail, but it just really pissed me off.)
Mags' two closest friends, other than his Companion (Dallen), are a Bardic trainee (Lena) and a Healer trainee (Bear). They both have problems and issues of their own, which is fair. Towards the end of the book, Bear lashes out at Mags for not doing more to help him solve a family problem, and in the process reveals a great deal of resentment against Mags that he has clearly been hiding for some time. Then, shortly after that, Dallen is injured while they are training together in an attempt to cheer Mags up. At that point, with Mags absolutely sick with horror and fear and pain, Lena shows up and immediately blames him for the accident, and then adds that oh by the way, if he can "do" such a thing to his Companion (as if he had done it on purpose), then he probably is capable of killing the King. Mags, pushed past his breaking point by this, snaps back at her and says some mean (but at least partially true) things. She leaves in tears, and Mags then gets another visit from Bear to berate him further for the accident, for upsetting Lena, and to add that he too thinks Mags probably will kill the King.
Mags, not surprisingly, runs away at this point. He comes back eventually, when his Companion has healed enough to not be entirely sedated and can actually speak with Mags. He is injured in the process of coming back, and also fully exonerated from any doubt about his intentions towards the King. When he wakes up both of his friends are there to see him. He apologizes to them, and Lena refuses to let him do that much really, and it is clear that they have both forgiven him. But neither of them apologize directly to him.
Now, it is possible that I am over-reacting about this. But this just pisses me off, so much. The fact that they, when dealing with their own troubles and upset over the Companion's accident (for he is their friend also), lash out at Mags is understandable, if not admirable. And there is some truth in some of what they said. But the fact that they both a) blamed him entirely for the accident when the Companions are fully sentient creatures and b) said that they thought he would kill the King...those things are just not, in my opinion, forgiveable without (at the very least) a direct and thorough apology. Sometimes people get angry at friends and say things that they don't mean, yes. But who accuses a friend of being capable of murder just because you're angry at them? I feel like you don't say that kind of thing unless you've already thought it for some other reason for a long time. Which indicates to me that they had listened to the rumors and doubted their best friend enough to believe it possible that he would kill the King...and then didn't apologize for it. That's the part that really gets me.
Anyway. I will not rant about this more. The summary of book 3 indicates that all three of them will need to resolve their own troubles, so it's possible that she will bring this up and deal with it further. It was just the first time in a long while that I ended a book and felt like that towards characters who are supposed to be protagonists. As a whole, I liked the book, though, and am looking forward to the third one.
That is all my book talk for now. I am reading a couple of Eric Frank Russell's novels that I haven't read yet, and then I will have read much of his work. :) There will be some podfic-type readings of some of his short stories coming from me in the near future, I hope. Next, I will read for Book Club and that first book of the Neverwinter trilogy, Gauntlgrym.