#falcon throne

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God I love Red Sonja

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Karen Miller Interview

Our Writers of Fantasy series continues with an exclusive interview with Karen Miller, best known for her epic fantasy novels such as the Innocent Mage (Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series) as well as her new book, The Falcon Throne.

She has also written Star Wars and Stargate novels and under the pen-name K.E. Mills writes the Rogue Agent series, about a wizard with special skills who works for his…

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A Review of The Falcon Throne by Karen Miller

            In the tradition of George R. R. Martins’ Song of Ice and Fire series, The Falcon Throne is the beginning of a medieval fantasy series full of intrigue and bloodshed, in which two hostile kingdoms edge ever closer to the inevitable explosion of war.  Like Martin’s, Miller’s characters are starkly drawn, slashes of color on an otherwise bleak landscape of martial settings, stone keeps, and far-flung market towns. 

            It’s a male-dominated world, and Miller does her best to bring in strongly-written female characters, however the world that she’s created, much like Westeros, is no friend to women.  Some of the most poignant moments belong to her female characters, however, and she shows her strengths in writing captivating dialog that not only advances plot but gives depth to characters.  Some of my favorite moments in the book centered around the character Molly, who owns a tavern in one of the main settings in the book, who fights to keep her property and her sons alive.

            The novel superficially resembles Martin’s work—bloodshed, rough language, lots of men in armor—but construction of the story is closer to the work of K.J. Parker.  Whenever a character thinks they are in control, it is eventually revealed that they are just pawns in the larger machinations of someone else.  Characters are fallible, in a way that they aren’t in Westeros, or Middle Earth, or many of the fantasy epics we’ve come to know.  Miller allows them to die without being redeemed, allows them to know abject despair, allows them to be more real. 

            The Falcon Throne may take a while to get through—it’s a large novel and dense at times.  But readers who are looking for something less fantastical and more epic fantasy will enjoy her series debut.  She has set up the ending of the book well for the next in the series.  The fantasy notes are subtle, like K.J. Parker’s, but are the driving force of the story.  Readers who enjoy medieval (resembling Western Europe) settings, military fantasy, plot-driven stories, and complex plots will enjoy The Falcon Throne. 

[staffersbookreview]

Brian Ruckley's The Free and Karen Miller's The Falcon Throne

Brian Ruckley’s The Free and Karen Miller’s The Falcon Throne

I apologize for the lack of reviews lately. Life has caught up with me to some degree. My kids, in particular, are now old enough to demand an excessive amount of attention. Who the hell do they think they are anyway? Not to mention the day job has become increasingly demanding and for some reason all of my friends are getting married. Assholes. Also, I’ve picked up a lot of things with Tor.com,…

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The Falcon Throne, by Karen Miller

I recently finished reading Karen Miller's new (and lengthy, and bloody) fantasy novel, The Falcon Throne, which is meant to be the first in a series called The Tarnished Crown.  

I've said before that I really don't like writing reviews, per se, but I would like to talk a bit about what I liked, what I didn't, and why, and I do plan to make this book part of a more involved discussion about some aspects of SFF writing along with some other comparable (this may not mean what you expect) novels.

First, The Falcon Throne (FT) reminded me, of all the SFF novels and series I've read in the past five or six years, most of Game of Thrones and the rest of GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire series.  So, if you enjoy that type of fiction, you will probably enjoy the Tarnished Crown (TC).  But, spoiler alert, there are no dragons in this series.  But I don't think you'll really notice the loss.

The Falcon Throne, as the back of the book states, is bloody and generation-spanning and relies on intrigue as its main plot advancer.  And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.  But it also relies on some old tropes of epic fantasy, like a pseudo-medieval setting and world-view,--including its treatment of the estate of women--a Western-European cast to all the characters,--complete with exoticised, darker-skinned others--and a very patriarchal gender-binary that very clearly delineates gender roles and punishes any who transgress them.  

Now, let's talk about what I did like about the book.

The points at which I was most drawn into the story, were when things weren't really happening in the traditional sense of action.  Miller, has written at least three fantasy series before TC and is a consummate writer of dialog and character.  She creates compelling characters, and crafts the interactions between them with skill.  When reading, I did not doubt for a second the relationships between any of the characters, whether it was between father and son, brothers, or a duke and his lords.  Even when I didn't like the characters, I liked the way they were written.

The problems I had were in how the characters were treated in the narrative, and how the narrative was set up.  At times it felt as though a lot of narrative space was given to relatively short time periods, which required a lot of jumping forward over years, with only vague allusions by characters to what happened in the intervening time.  I also felt as though, each time a long stretch of dialog ended, that I had woken up from a long nap, had been having a dream, and the story which had been put on hold while this dream happened, was now allowed to continue.

Miller uses the strict gender lines created in her story to draw attention to how demeaned and restricted that can make the lives of women, which I could certainly appreciate.  She does not fall into the trap of simply reproducing the fictions of countless male authors who are completely unaware of the tropes they use.  But the problem I had, throughout the novel, with that was the fact that if she could see the issues inherent in the patriarchal pseudo-medieval narrative trope, why use it at all?  She is obviously a good writer.  I just wish she'd chosen to use her talents in a different way.