#forge of darkness

[umblogsemnomeainda]

Forge of Darkness by Grant Griffin

[st-just]

In her youth, Hish Tulla had given her heart away with what others had seen as careless ease, as if it were a thing without much worth, but it had not been like that at all. She'd simply wanted it in someone else's hands.

-Forge of Darkness, by Steve Erickson

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 9 - Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson

Okay, after roughly a decade of nagging and peer pressure from a friend who adores the series (and has the terrible curse of often recommending stuff I end up loving in the least appealing-to-me ways possible), I finally broke and agreed to read some Malazan. But a ten-book series of thousand page tomes was still too much, so, the prequels trilogy! Or the first volume of it, anyway.

So, this was a, as they say, real fantasy chonker. Nine hundred pages, like literally over a dozen POVs, unexplained but extremely detailed magic systems and worldbuilding and so. Many. Proper. Nouns. Being a prequel, it’s also literally set before humans existed, as far as I can tell – the main caste is all what were described to me as the setting’s elves (well, the overwhelmingly majority of them, anyway). Also, 900 pages long. Which is just too long for a single book, I think.

Anyways, given all that, surprisingly readable? Not necessarily objectively – it was absolutely a slog at times – but compared to what you might expect from a story that expects you to pick up the meaning and significance of every bit of jargon by use and context and will loop back to any given POV every hundred pages or so, if you’re lucky. You could fit the number of names I remember on one hand, but the book does a good job of giving you enough context and providing enough little reminders that I could remember who any given POV/what any given plot thread was within a paragraph or two of being dumped back into it, anyway. (Except Ursander’s captains. Like, I know they got characterizations but relying on social rank and narrative role to tell people apart really failed on the five different ones running around doing genocide or atrocity to start a civil war).

Plot wise it’s an awkward but interesting halfway point between brutal gritty realpolitik and mythic epic fantasy? Like, the better part of the plot in concerned with aristocratic decadence and Machiavellian scheming and a seemingly inevitable slide toward civil war and all that, but also the only reason any of that could happen is because the guy who could probably fight every army involved singlehandedly was out of town that month trying to do some father-son bonding/accidentally sponsoring a demigod who invented blood magic and human sacrifice to complete his commission of a present for his girlfriend. Or the careful diplomacy around noble hostage-taking being almost derailed because there are three kids who are just actually immortal demons and decided to kill everyone in the castle and go on a trip. The two tones interact in interesting ways at points, and lead to some real tonal dissonance at others.

There is some thematic purpose to that, I think – there’s absolutely a recurring motif of people with power and influence refusing to use it, and ostensible subordinates acting in their name running around and making everything worse in ways they did not understand or approve of while they sat around. From one lens the whole book is one long warning about the horror of delegated authority. Or even broader than that – the distance between someone’s reputation or how they’re regarded, what they think their reputation is, and who they actually are comes up a lot. So much angst and miscommunication.

Beyond that, the best way to describe the plot is ‘three different standard epic fantasy pseudo-chosen one plots happening independently and possibly mutually exclusively, and also a bunch of different views of a pretty fucked society sliding into complete bloody anarchy and religious genocide.’

Character-wise – well, the downside of having so many POVs is that even when there is enough wordcount to actually give several of them real depth and development, it’s incredibly easy to miss it. So it’s utterly possible that there was tons of subtle and nuanced character work I totally failed to notice, but as far as my actual reading experience went most of the arcs were fairly broad and obvious, and focused on the really larger than life operatic characters. (Though as far as somewhat generic fantasy stories go, Korya and Haut are the best and I won’t be accepting disagreement on this.)

Like I’m fairly sure every big fantasy chonker in existence, the book’s ever so slightly Weird about sex. Also one rather extreme (and plot-critical) bit of on-screen sexual violence, though that’s thankfully not the bit the book’s weird about.

The setting was interesting, though buried under so much jargon and proper nouns that it took a fair bit of page count before you begin to understand absolutely any of it. Still, the sea of chaos and the savanna of razor-sharp grass were both really vividly described, even if there’s no chance in hell that I could tell you what their names were.

I really did enjoy the book, on the whole, but it was also kind of an exhausting read? The whole book’s got the whole pseudo-archaic tone and vocabulary you expect from map fantasy, which did help sell it but also do make reading it a bit more of a slog.

Overall, I mean, does ‘extra-worldbuilding heavy prequel set in the lost mythic age of an already famously and world-building heavy fantasy world’ appeal to you? Because if so this book absolutely lives up to expectations. But I’m not going to read anything over 500 pages for a solid bit now, I think.

[dark5light]

I choose to paint death, yes, and you ask why – in horror and revulsion, you ask why? I choose to paint death, my friend, because life is too hard to bear. But it’s just a face, dead paints on dead surface, and it tells nothing of how the neck snapped, or the wrongness of that angle with the body. It is, in truth, a failure. And each time I paint this boy, I fail. I fail when you turn away. I fail when you walk past. I fail when you shout at me about the beautiful things of the world, and why I didn’t paint those? I fail when you cease to care, and when you cease to care, we all fail. I fail, then, in order to welcome you to what we share. This face? This failure? It is recognition.

Kadaspala (Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson)

[st-just]

Such were the gifts of her new place in the world. Adopted by a guilt-ridden lord, she now finds herself in a tower, lifted higher than anything she had ever known before; lifted up past her dreams until they sat like forgotten toys at her feet.

-Forge of Darkness, by Steve Erikson

[literary-illuminati]

wait wait wait sorry not tryign to be rude why are you starting with forge of darkness I think you're supposed to start with the main series (malazan book of the fallen, starting with gardens of the moon). the kharkanas books are prequels but everyone I've seen said to read it after the main series lol

but yea malazan books are just Like That lol I'm on the third book and I tend to find that the first sections of the books are a bit slow going bc they're the. setup I guess? for a lot of POVs but you get used to it + iirc the beginning of gardens of the moon weren't that dense with POVs lol so

Oh, I just told the friend getting on my case to try Malazan outright that I wasn't reading a 10-book series, so this was the compromise. Also they're apparently better written than the early mainline books?

tbh 'court intrigue and feudal politicking as the civil war that will spel the of the totally-not-elves glorious mythic age' is a more compelling pitch to me than what's being explained of Gardens of the Moon anyway.

(and I like big sprawling multi-POV casts, even if this might be somewhat excessive :P )

[literary-illuminati]

650 pages into Forge of Darkness and it's honestly getting to the point of comedy how there's so many, like, off-hand mentions about the existence of queer people and no one is at any point explicitly bigoted about it, but also by sheer coincidence every one of the eight dozen different POV characters just happens to be totally straight.

This is especially funny when contrasted with how many different POVs are angsting over their forbidden love for their sibling/cousin (like, three, but still!)

[dark5light]

Varandas led the way to the edge of the vast hole in the yard. Haut joined him. They stared down into the pitch black and said nothing for a time.

Varandas: What do you think of this?

Haut: I have been thinking of it, I admit. How did you come by it?

Varandas: No idea.

They studied it some more.