Tag Archives: fantasy

The Spirit Thief, Rachel Aaron

Posted by Pip Hunn on February 2, 2011 1 comments

In Short

The Spirit Thief, by Rachel Aaron (Book 1 of The Legend of Eli Monpress)
Orbit Books, Fantasy, 310 pages, paperback edition.
My copy: Purchased.
Pros: Fast, elegant, Gentleman Thievery.
Cons: Some well-worn tropes and occasional exposition.
In a line: Master magician sets out to capture legendary rapscallion, hjinks ensue.
The Master of Security sighed. “He’s stolen the King.”
Score: 7/10

Gentleman Thief
I’m a big fan of the gentleman thief. Always have been. Always will be. Two years ago, I bought 25 copies of Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora and gave them away to bewildered friends and family. As a child, I used to dress up in a purple cape and mask and dash about my neighbourhood, terrifying small birds and mammals with dried-Hydrangea-stalk-swords. Emboldened by the inability of overfed, lazy mastiffs to do anything but blink bewilderedly at my passing, I would sneak into my grandparent’s house and try to sneak my way into their tin of delicious biscuits.

Unfortunately for me, my grandparents were cunning fiends, and so I learnt the most important lesson of gentleman-thievery early. Regardless of how clever one’s plan is, there will always be hiccups. So it has been, through every heist book, with every suave, intelligent thief, from Catwoman to Lamora, Irene Adler to Thomas Crown. I can’t resist any of them, and so when I saw a devilishly handsome, be-stubbled man smirking at me from the cover of Rachel Aaron’s The Spirit Thief, I was powerless to resist.

From the blurb:

Eli Monpress is talented. He’s charming. And he’s a thief.

But not just any thief. He’s the greatest thief of the age – and he’s a wizard. And with the help of his partners – a swordsman wit the most powerful magic sword in the world but no magical ability of his own, and a demonseed who can step through shadows and punch through walls – he’s going to put his plan into effect.

The first step is to increase the size of the bounty on his head, so he’ll need to steal some big things. But he’ll start small for now. He’ll just steal something that no one will miss – at least for a little while.

Something like a king.

What A Guy!
Eli Monpress certainly fills all our criteria for an excellent gentleman thief. He’s charming, and not just to the ladies. Actually, his capacity to charm seemingly inanimate objects – doors, trees, rocks, rivers – is what makes his thievery possible. In the world Aaron’s created, everything is possessed with spirit. Certain humans can interact with those spirits. Wizards don’t wield magic themselves, but cooperate with bound spirits for magical effects.

Eli is a wizard seemingly beyond compare. He can whisper dormant spirits out of deep sleeps, and his pleasant and convivial attitudes influence the world around him into cooperating with his schemes. Eli is also secretive, loyal to his companions, and never at his wit’s end. Entirely likeable, Eli is an excellent anti-hero who’s sure to prove popular with Fantasy readers.

Moustache Twirling
The villains in this book make no effort to hide themselves, announcing boldly to the world their intentions. This is a little crude, but also fits into Aaron’s boldly-let-us-adventure-forth motif which is so strong through the book. We know that there’s going to be fiery and bloody battles, and Aaron does a great job of letting us know in advance just how awesome they’re going to be.

There are a few backstabs and twisty-turns, but nothing that readers familiar with this sort of genre are going to be too surprised by. What plot twists exist are well executed, if a little by-the-numbers. There’s also a tad too much straight-out infodumping and expository dialogue. As a first novel, this is understandable, because Aaron has to build her world quickly and get us hooked in.

There is an element of moustache twirling to some of the opening scenes in The Spirit Thief. Some of the short chapters only serve to let us know how villainous people are. Happily, they fit in well with the overall tone of the book.

Kidnappings and mischief
The book opens with an amusing ruse, worth of the entertaining-crime genre. Monpress has set out to give himself a legendary cumulative bounty of a million gold pieces. In order to reach this heighty figure, he’s racked up an impressive record of thievery and other naughtiness.

In an audacious move, Monpress lets himself get caught and imprisoned, escapes, and takes a King with him. His intention is to hold the King to ransom. Unfortunately, his plan starts to unravel when the King’s brother returns from exile, and isn’t so keen to lose his newly-gained throne…

Into this volatile mixture strides one of our heroines, Miranda. Miranda is an emissary from the ruling body of magicians in Aaron’s world. Accompanied by a specifically-designed-to-be-disgustingly-endearing ghosthound (a horse-sized magical dog with attitude), Miranda is tasked with capturing Monpress. As the story unfolds, she is repeatedly forced to let Monpress slip through her fingers in order to combat actual evil, instead of mere rascalliness.

Spirits Within
Aaron has woven a world thick with spirits. To go into too much detail here will spoil revelations spilled early in the book, but let me clearly say that Aaron has done some masterful worldbuilding. I love the system she has in place. Everything makes sense once explained, her rules of reality lead to some entertaining situations, and she’s got a clever twist on the decades-old ‘possessed sword’ trope that will be familiar to experienced readers.

Aaron’s secondary protagonists – a master swordsman and an erratically powerful demonseed, a woman with a demon’s spirit trapped inside her – serve to further colour the story and provide depth to the narrative. Aaron lays heavy hints about Eli’s companions’ backstories, and I’d be surprised if the rest of the books in the series didn’t resolve many of the mysteries Aaron lays before us.

Light and easy
The Spirit Thief is a light, fun and easy to read book. This is not a criticism I’m levelling, but it may divide readers who are used to darker, more dense fantasy. Fanatical lovers of Richard Morgan and Joe Abercrombie may find Aaron’s characters too purely heroic and the adventuring a little PG-rated for their tastes.

I kept wishing I had someone to read The Spirit Thief aloud to. Not that this is a children’s book – far from it. Aaron has a witty, lyrical prose that is worthwhile narrating. Reading the book is easy and a visceral pleasure, and at barely 300 pages, can be easily done on a few train trips or a lazy afternoon.

Good times.
The Spirit Thief is a great first book. It’s not going to shatter the boundaries of any writing conventions, but that’s not a problem. The characters are fun and well-rounded, with enough backstory and intrigue in them to keep me keen on the next two books. Aaron has crafted an excellent world, of which we’ve only seen the smallest corner. Her magic system is well thought out and cohesive.

I enjoyed The Spirit Thief in a light, summery afternoon’s read, and if that’s what you’re in the mood for, you’re not going to be disappointed. Perfectly suited for younger readers, young adults, and those getting into Fantasy. Grizzled veterans may find the going a bit light, but there’s enough substance to satisfy.

I give The Spirit Thief 7 possessed swords.

Rachel Aaron’s other books in the Eli Monpress series, The Spirit Rebellion and The Spirit Eater, have also been reviewed. Rachel has also had an interview with Write-Thing, which you can read here.

Tuesday Review: Ill Met In The Arena, Dave Duncan

Posted by Pip Hunn on June 1, 2010 1 comments

Overview
Title: Ill Met In The Arena
Author: Dave Duncan
Publisher: Tor
Length: 300 pages, trade paperback
Genre: Heroic Fantasy, with a splash of Romance
Review copy from: Purchased from Ellison Hawker, my local.

Ill Met In The Arena is an interesting, eloquent and somewhat unexpected fortieth novel by accomplished Fantasy author Dave Duncan. Departing in many ways from his holdfast of adventure fantasy, Ill Met In The Arena still gives the reader more of the same excellent quality that we’ve come to expect from this superlative writer.
Ill Met In The Arena, Dave Duncan
Refreshingly presented as a stand-alone in a genre often hampered by painfully drawn-out storytelling, IMITA keeps the pace flowing with superhuman gladiatorial combat, labyrinthine relationships and incestuous politics that would give the French aristocracy a run for their money. Somehow, Duncan also manages to squeeze in two perfectly-executed love stories, wrapping everything up in a healthy 300 pages.

The World of Aureity
Duncan builds his worlds in style, and this one is no exception to his norm. Pelagic’s math and basics are laid out briefly at the start of the book, so we aren’t left guessing as to how the world itself works. With twin suns that follow each other across the sky with a 60 degree lag, the day is neatly divided into quarters. Calendars divisions are non-standard but explained succinctly and add verisimilitude. Great stock is placed on the highborn’s system of tracking nobility through multiple generations, so it’s good to come to grips with it before you settle too deeply into the story. Once you get going, Duncan rockets the story along at a pace that’s fast enough to let you keep your breath, but if you don’t have a fine eye for detail, you may get a little lagged out.

Superpowers and grooviness
The glorious worldbuilding continues with the emergence of supernatural powers attributed to those of royal caste. The men manifest psychic abilities physically, giving themselves the ability to teleport, move massive objects through force of will. Both of these skills are used to great effect through the story. The protagonist, Quirt of Mundil, traverses the continent the story takes place in in a series of ‘ports’.

Male royals can teleport to locations they have memorised previously, leading to a whole host of ingenious logistical problems.
This is one of the things that Duncan does best – creating a system that’s unique, and then deconstructing the challenges it poses to protagonists.

Combined with this teleportative ability is the capacity to psychically ‘heft’ objects. This can mean both themselves - giving them the capacity to fly in a limited fashion – and an ability to hurtle around solid objects with terrifying force. These two abilities are shown off in the gladiatorial contest that let the political shiftings of the story take place around them. Gladiators progress in a single-elimination tournament with increasingly challenging rounds.

The recurrent theme of porting is used throughout the story to great effect. The story skips locations rapidly and gives the narrator an excuse to cut to the action directly in each scene, which keeps things moving along freshly. Having every second or third paragraph interspersed with a heavily-typeset:
***PORT***
is a little off-putting at first, but you quickly adjust to the at-times-bewildering pace. I liked it, though. The excitement of instantaneous travel is worth having to drastically re-orient yourself as a reader much faster than normal.

Matrilineality and strong women
The women in the story are, if anything, more powerful and intriguing than the men. The ruling system is matrilineal, and with hegemonic rule. Women manifest their psychic strengths mentally, able to wield prodigious powers of illusion, perception and compulsion. Men compete for attentions of royal ladies, hoping to be assigned as a consort in order to raise both their standing in the world and provide a greater lineage for their offspring. With nobility followed four generations back, this adgerence to family lines and ties allowes for deep, complex political maneuverings to be palyed out, and played out well they are.

The women’s strengths in illusion create some interesting results. Most touched upon is a woman’s capacity to change her appearance. In the world of the nobility where women can look as tall, young and beautiful as they want, it is considered an honour and a sign of respect for illusions to shrink or fade and the real woman to be visible for an audience. They have truth-telling and memory-searching capabilities that are enhanced by proximity. Through this system crimes are meant to be controlled and prevented, for anyone with a guilty secret would give themselves away to any noble woman within close physical range.

The punitive measures the ruling women can deal out are mesmerising. The darkly hinted-at ‘improving’ robs a miscreant of some element of their personality. A skill used through physical contact, some hegemonics use it to trim elements of aggressiveness or other untoward behaviour from their spouses. More terrfying, though, is that ‘improvements’ can only take AWAY from a victim, so the process is more like a psychic lobotomy.

The plot thickens
Of course, no system is perfect. Quirt’s mother was brutally raped by the unknown Enemy on the eve of her betrothal, made helpless by a soporific drug. Quirt has spent his life searching for revenge, and it soon emerges that not only are some secrets being, impossibly, kept, but that Quirt’s quest may be in vain. His struggles against a web of power far outstripping his own means he needs to tread carefully through layers of secrets going back generations, where each truth he unearths earns him nothing but more enemies.

As mentioned above, the unique setting Duncan has created in Auriety, combined with the hegemonic powers the nobility of the story possess, make for some interesting problems.

In a world where people can teleport to locations they’ve been previously, how do you maintain security?
How do you escape an enemy?
How do you set up an ambush?
How do you imprison someone?

All these questions and more get addressed through the story itself, which has enough twists and turns to keep readers experienced with political drama guessing until the very end. Doomed to find a fearsome, yet seemingly invisible Enemy, we meet our hero who has just had a hint of the enemy he’s been tracking for a third of his life.

More setting
Names and places hew closely to Greek styles of naming, giving the entire story a distantly familiar feeling. The physical setting of the story is familiar enough that Duncan doesn’t waste much time on physical world-building. Once again, the familiar naming structures show us that Duncan’s capable of building a comfortable, relateable world, with enough twists and variations in it to keep us intrigued. He doesn’t have to resort to alien-sounding-and-inevitably-unpronouncable gibberish in order to impress us.

Also notably absent is the common Fantasist’s curse of over-capitalisation. Considering we deal with several politically powerful, and royal families, the wielding of titles and formal address is kept to a minimum, and the narrator’s conversational tone as he relates his story is friendly without being off-putting.

Early on Quirt meets up with Humate, a delightfully arrogant young hegemon. Mudar is able to overcome Hewat at the first gladiatorial game we experience, although, interestingly, this is more through trickery and cunning than any surplus of psychic strength. As the story progresses, the belligerent Humate proves himself to be superior to our hero, which makes his wavering allegiance all the more dangerous. The danger of potentially plotting against the family of someone who can snap your neck at any time, and teleport your corpse miles out to sea, gives the story a tingling sense of edge about it.

The gladiatorial combat itself is fantastic. Interestingly, there is only a miniscule amount of swordplay. Given Duncan’s proven facility in eloquently narrating the freneticism of combat in his other books, this is a bit of a surprise. Regardless, when action takes place – and there’s enough of it – it’s fast, brutal, and shockingly real in its abruptness. Duncan has eschewed the speech-laden monologuery that romantic and political novels tend to enjoin and has gone for cast, brutal combat that’s over quickly.

The harsh realities of the arena make for compelling reading. This is heightened by a stunning juxtaposition between the glorified, ritualised combat as we’re exposed to it, and the harsher realities that emerge outside the Arena.

What’s this? Real relationships?
The relationships in the story are another highlight. Deep, rich and complex, we get dumped into the machinations of royal families with an outsider’s experience, discovering how the world functions along with Mudar. Without any greater reference than the squabbling political families of Europe to go by, it’s a challenge at times to see all the connections being woven. As they’re touched on over time, though, we get to develop a feeling for the politics of the world.

Duncan is relentless in these developments; his characters are more familiar with the situation than we are and make logical leaps in instants that would take me five minutes and a diagram to wrap my head around. Luckily, Duncan weaves the exposition cleverly enough that you keep pace without feeling lectured to.

So….
This is a book that took some warming to. I’ll happily admit that the starred review from Romantic Times on the blurb had me thrown for a bit. With Duncan happily jumping about in his timelines, as characters reveal pieces of family history to each other in the form of flashbacks, the cohesion of the story lags a bit in places. Once we get a solid grip on the world, characters and setting about half-way through the book, though, Duncan’s in his element and nothing shakes him from producing a superb finale to the book.

Read this book if you: want to see how romance, gladiatorial combat and general swashbucklery can fit together.
If you don’t read this book, I’ll: be a little disappointed, but recommend you check out Duncan’s other books regardless.

Standard disclaimer: If you click on an affiliate link, and then buy something, I’ll get a small percentage. Wheee!

Fantasy fiction: The problems with prophecies

Posted by Pip Hunn on May 19, 2010 5 comments

Using the ideas of prophecy and fate in Fantasy creates serious problems. Despite these flaws, authors continue to use an out-of-date and over-used trope, often to the detriment of their writings. Let’s have a look at the big issues with using prophecy in Fantasy.

For the balance of the article, I’m going to use ‘prophecy’ to describe any future visions, observations by mystical elders, village shamen, mutterings of the Gods, assignations of Fate or good ol’ Oracular divinations. Feel free to mentally replace ‘prophecies’ with ‘fate’, ‘doom’, ‘god-given quest’, ’geas’, ‘narrative imperative’ or other synonym of your own choosing.

Why Generic Prophecies are Boring Rubbish.
Let’s start with a few definitions. I’m almost-certain that, in your miscellaneous readings, you’ll have stumbled across a suitably clichéd Heroic Fantasy Prophecy before. They’re about as reliable as a plucky dog in a using-the-power-of-friendship-to-outsmart-some-Nazis Enid Blyton book. The story goes like this:

  • -Hero(/ine, but that’s less common in these tacky novels) is born / comes into the world.
  • We, the omnipresent Reader, are given a flashback / abbreviated summary / infodump by a Wise Elder archetype letting us know of this Hero’s Prophecy / Fate.
  • This infodump takes the place of a movie trailer – a quick thirty-second ‘highlights reel’ of everything that’s going to have to happen to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.
  • Hero may very well rail against his / her fate, or get distracted a little along the way, but eventually…
  • Fate / Prophecy fulfilled. Hurrahs all around, apart from the Bad Guy, who is dispatched forcefully.
  • Fade to Black.

Now, John Howard may have had a field day with this particular process. In fact, half of most of the Conan stories were telling you about what was going to happen in the second half. That didn’t detract from the cheesy, hack-and-slashesque appeal of his stories.

If that’s what you’re after – an enjoyable, literary romp for your readers, with no introspection, surprises, significant tension or deep character development, then stop reading now. The above list can act as an outline for the body of your work. Go get stuck in writing!

Prophecies sabotage your plot with lazy construction.
For the rest of us, we feel the need for a bit more depth to our stories. When you look at the example and strip your own prophetic writings down to their minimum, you might notice some similarities. Even without the sarcasm infused battery I’ve dished out above, you might find yourself feeling a bit foolish.

That’s OK. It happens to all of us at one time or another. It’s quite easy to fall into familiar patterns, especially when you’re caught up in the glee of creating stories. Let’s slow-motion analyse how these problems arise. Does the following sound familiar?

When you’re throwing around ideas on how to put your story together, you might start with a disjointed series of Really Cool Things you want to write about. A dragon. Some awesome weaponry. Hot, sexy Elves. Incompetent Kings.

Then you start to lay things together. Perhaps you get a rough outline of how you want all your narrative events to join up. But where’s the driving, motive force behind it all? Why will this band of pipe-smoking shorties team up with a totally kick-ass wizard and Orlando Bloom to set off across the world?

Frustrated in your sudden whirling-together of ideas, your brain scans its mental repositories for suggestions. Then it hits you…
“Ah-ha!”, you cry. “A Prophecy! A Fate Decreed By The Goddes! This cures all my plot-based ills!”

From there, it all falls into place. Someone’s dying, and there is a prediction that the heir will be found at N Remote Fishing Village, and will need to claim their rightful throne at O to overthrow the machinations of Evil Regent V. With the idea of prophecy as a framework, it’s often but a moment’s work to backfill all the motives for your major characters, and you can happily bundle yourself off to start writing.

Uh-oh. You’re headed into a dangerous place here. So let’s put this hastily-notioned adventure on hold for a moment.

Now, let’s have a think about what having prophecies and fate-related decrees is going to mean for your story. You’ll find out that it has serious, and potentially negative, connotations for both you and your readers.

Prophecies weaken your plot.
Invariably, the revealing of a prophecy takes place around the start of a story. Perhaps even as a prologue. By the time we’re getting used to our protagonist/s, we’ll often have a pretty strong idea of how the story’s going to turn out. Having a prophecy at the start of your story reduces the rest of the adventure to a binary equation: either the prophecy will be met, or it won’t.

Now our Hero/ines have been railroaded. They head out to start their journey. Along the way, they’re going to encounter some setbacks. Yet, somehow, they simply aren’t exciting, or fulfilling, to us as readers. Why not?

Because the antagonists of the story have been foreshadowed. We know their basic motive: they’re the ones who, for whatever reason, don’t want this particular prophecy to be fulfilled in some way. They don’t even need to be aware of it. Maybe the protagonist’s fate is to destroy them or overthrow their Tyrannic Empire or similar. In gaming parlance, we know at the start of the story who the End Boss is going to be, the monster lurking at the end of the dungeon.

Yawn. How predictable. How much more interesting would it be for the evildoers to actually evolve as we progress through the story? If we had characters making their own way in the world, with the reader not knowing what to expect next? Without any foreshadowing of epic events to come, battles as yet unfought, monsters unvanquished?

The use of prophecy spoils all these things, because the major happenings of the story need to be outlined. There’s no point in sending a Hero on a Quest for the Sword of a Thousand Truths unless the audience knows it’s going to be needed at some point.

This problem makes it harder for you to create interesting challenges for your characters. Anything that doesn’t fit within the realms of the prophecy can be ignored as a sideline, a filling-in of time until the next big Plot Device.

Let’s think some more about what having clearly defined end Bosses in terms of reader experience. You know there’s a bad guy waiting in the wings. There isn’t any suspense when you discover low-level goons and underlings, because you know that the protagonist’s going to off them with relative ease.

You know that their ultimate clashing is going to be the peaking point of the book, and once the major impediment to the Hero’s task has been removed, we’re setting ourselves up for a happy ending.

Compare this to an open-ended adventure. We don’t know whether our characters are going to get to overcome the antagonist. Well, OK, we’re pretty sure the story will turn out well for them, but we don’t know how that’s going to happen. Having an apocalyptic one-on-one spelt out as inevitable on page 3 is, to a reader, always going to be less exciting than watch it unfurl naturally.

Prophecies have to be spelled out in advance.
But can’t you have your prophecies revealed after the fact? This way you can show the subtle machinations of Fate and how your story has been woven together to meet this destiny. Now, you’re the writer. It’s your Bum On Seat, Fingers On Keyboard time. So you can do whatever you want.

I can’t think of a single good reason why you would want a retrospectively-revealed prophecy.

It seems suitable enough when you first think of it. Perhaps someone, after the crown has been planted, or in a dying breath, reveals that ‘all has been foretold’. Perhaps our protagonist is the child of a God or Goddess who has a penchant for forseeing their offspring’s futures.

Whatever.

Explain to me, please, how retrospective prophetical matters influence the development of a story for the better?

There. I thought so.

Until you can, don’t.

Having a prophecy spelled out retrospectively is a waste of time. We already knew what has happened. Things should have happened with believable, real causes, not mystical mumblings. So you’re either giving us an unnecessary flashback, awkwardly constructing motives for your antagonists, or lamely justifying bad storytelling. Not the most pleasant of polylemmas.

Prophecies railroad your character’s decisions.
Readers fall in love with characters who feel alive and real to them. They care less, no matter how well written, about characters who are stuck on rails by a few mystical words spouted somewhere around Chapter 3.

If a character is moving with the situations that develop, making their own judgements and responding to the crises that arise in front of them, then they’re going to garner the sympathy and empathy of your readers. Prophesying an end-game where The Sword Of Foo will be found and used to slay the Dragon Of Flaming Death reduces your story to a long series of MacGuffin-hunts. Is that tired, hackneyed writing what you want to be putting out into the world?

If you deliberately engineer your character’s responses towards a goal that will have them fulfil a prophecy, or their fate, then you weaken them. When you’re actually writing, you’ll force yourself to push protagonists towards a particular set of decisions, and then try and reverse-engineer their characters to make those arbitrary decisions more realistic.

Unless you’re a superlative creator of characters and moulder of personalities, you’ll find that your efforts will result in wooden, unbelievable and unsympathetic Hero/ines, and nobody’s going to enjoy that.

That’s it!
So there you are: some of the strongest problems that including prophecy and fate in fiction will present you with. I’m going to write a second article this week about some methods you can use to intelligently apply destiny and fate to your world.

In the meantime, feedback is always appreciated, the comment box is just below, the archives are waiting for your further browsing, and I’m only an email away!

Go Write!