![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Book catchup: Darksword Trilogy
My life has been fairly consumed lately with family-related travel - nothing bad, actually things are pretty good, it's just basic aging parent stuff, but I'm back home and looking forward to a couple of upcoming months of summer and quiet routine.
Anyway, I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to try to write about books I'd read earlier this year before I forget about them, and I decided to get started on that!
Earlier this spring I reread the Darksword Trilogy by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman for the first time since I was a teenager. These are high fantasy books from the mid-80s, and I went in with rock bottom expectations, because it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that would have aged very, very badly. (Although I still do genuinely enjoy their Death Gate books, which hit my id square on.) These were actually the first books of theirs that I read. I read Dragonlance later - the thing they're best known for - because of a compulsive need after reading Darksword to find everything else they'd written, because I LOVED these books (though even as a not very critical teenage reader, I absolutely hated the fourth book and therefore I skipped it on the reread, because I suspect the intervening 35 years would not have improved it at all).
So my genuinely surprising discovery is: I do still really like these books! (Except most of the third book, which is a sudden genre shift that does not work for me at all, but I also reread these books often enough, back in the day, to remember exactly where the good parts are, and so I read the third book in about half an hour consisting mostly of skimming for the hurt/comfort.) The parts that nailed my teenage id squarely to the wall do in fact still hit my id hard, the worldbuilding is neat, and also, I think I can pinpoint the main reason why I fell so hard and fast for these books, and specifically for the first book, which is definitely the best of the three.
These characters have All Of The Feelings, All Of The Time, and you just didn't really get this kind of intense, high-key, very personal emotions in a lot of 70s/80s fantasy. That is, the characters are mostly focused on each other, not on the quest object; in fact, there isn't even really that much of a quest object in the first book - the Darksword of the title shows up around 90% of the way through the book. It's mostly just people living their lives and having relationships and experiencing Lots Of Emotions about it. I loved it then, and it turns out I still love it now. Well, I loved it with decreasing amounts of enjoyment as the series goes on; book 2 has way too much focus on a teenage romance with an unfortunately bland love interest (absolutely killer climax, though), and book 3 is ... everything that book 3 is.
But I went into the first book halfway expecting to be thoroughly disillusioned, and instead I really had a great time. I mean, there's stuff that didn't age well, and I didn't remember even slightly how overwhelming the pseudo-Christian religious focus of the books is. (Death Gate had more religion than I remembered, but at least it's fairly background; in these books it's front and center.) But on the whole, I still loved most of what I used to love. I'm not sorry I reread it.
The other thing I didn't remember was how intensely pro-revolution, pro-proletariat these books are, by the standards of fantasy at the time, or even now. It's explicitly focused on the peasants in the magic world being oppressed by the nobility, and their attempts to revolt are a running thread throughout the first 2 books. This never really comes together in the end because of the sudden sideways book 3 plot swerve into a completely different plot entirely, but it's definitely not even background, it's very much there.
And the worldbuilding in these books is really neat. That part I did remember; it was especially striking to me in the context of the kind of samey nature of 1980s epic fantasy, but it's still pretty unusual. Weis & Hickman do really love to construct their magic worlds.
In the Darksword world, literally everyone has magic. Magic is called Life, because they believe it is necessary to live, that it animates everything and everyone, and they use it for absolutely every task from cooking to making necessary objects and art. Tools are not only unnecessary but believed to be evil. People fly everywhere.
But there's a catch, which is that most people don't naturally have enough magic to do all of this. They're dependent on a religious caste called Catalysts, who have very little magic of their own and can't take in more, but can channel magic to other people who can then use it to fly and produce wonders and live lives of luxury. Catalysts, being essentially non-magical, are blessed with the Power of Suck and are simultaneously respected and necessary (since basically no one can do anything without them) while also being looked down upon somewhat because they can't actually do magic themselves and have to walk everywhere. The nobility may call freely on catalysts to give them magic for any purpose at all, while peasants are allowed only enough to do their work and sometimes deliberately starved of it to keep them humble. This, as you can imagine, is working out well.
Catalysts are born, not chosen. Everyone is born to one of nine magical specialties called Mysteries. Six of them are elemental, the seventh is no longer found in the world but still respected (necromancy/communing with the spirit world), the eighth is the catalysts (the Mystery of Life), and the ninth is the Mystery of Technology and is banned.
And then a child is born with absolutely no magic at all, and the plot starts.
Since magic is Life, children without magic are considered Dead, and are forbidden food or comfort until their bodies realize that they are already dead. (Read: they are exposed to die.) All babies are tested for the presence of Life. Nearly all of them pass. In this particular case, the baby is the prince of the realm, and the catalyst in charge of holding the baby while he goes through the tests is a young just-past-acolyte named Saryon. The baby fails the tests, and Saryon has a crisis of conscience over whether the child who is clearly very alive is truly Dead, but allows the baby to be taken away to die.
Not too long after this, a young woman shows up in one of the peripheral farming villages carrying a baby. She is clearly of noble origin, but wearing rags. She will not talk about the baby's father. She begs a job in the village and raises the child into a life of abuse, keeping him apart from the other children and teaching him sleight of hand as a supposed game. The child, Joram, slowly begins to realize he doesn't have the magic everyone else has, and the game becomes deadly real as he figures out that if he doesn't manage to convince everyone else he has magic, they're going to kill him. His mother feeds him a steady diet of physical and emotional abuse, combined with stories of how much better he is than anyone else in the village and how she and he were thrown out of their noble home and forced to labor in the fields, and someday they will go back to claim their birthright. Denied actual love or contact with anyone who isn't a narcissistic abuser, Joram grows up bitter, furious, and cold.
Meanwhile, Saryon's role in the baby prince's failure to pass the tests, however involuntary, has caused him to be kicked down to the bottom of the catalyst hierarchy and given the job of continuing to test babies for Life and consigning the failures to death, so his life is going really great.
(All of this takes place in the first few chapters.)
Spoilers go on from here!
The actual main plot kicks off when Joram's Dead status is revealed accidentally once he is forced to begin working in the fields, his mother is killed defending him, and he kills the village overseer in revenge and flees into the forest. Saryon is tasked by his superiors in his order with finding Joram and bringing him back to face justice.
Then when they finally meet, he realizes Joram is the dead prince - the baby he held in his arms all those years ago.
The woman who raised him is not his mother, but another young mother whose baby died (actually died, not technically-died). She stole infant Joram from where he was exposed to die - so the noble destiny she told him about isn't actually his, and Joram has no idea he's truly the prince. Unfortunately for him, he's the absolute spitting image of his actual mother, the queen.
(In a genuinely chilling reveal in the second book, the queen died of grief but her husband has been using magic to animate her corpse and prevent her relatives - royal heritage is matrilineal in their kingdom - from moving in on the throne. She is clearly dead but no one is quite willing to gainsay the king and point it out, so people pretend to carry on conversations with her in extremely awkward court scenes.)
The core of all three books is Saryon and Joram's relationship, and the first book is my favorite by far because it focuses most heavily on them of the three books: Saryon's discovery of Joram and immediate recognition of who Joram really is, and Saryon trying semi-successfully to win Joram's friendship and trust while Joram is poisoned by his own resentment, rage, and misery; shades of Zuko and Iroh, really, except Iroh in this case is a non-relative who has simply showed up in his life one day and started trying to convince him that it's possible for him to have a life that doesn't revolve around plotting revenge on everyone who's wronged him.
By the time Saryon catches up with him, Joram has fled to a village in the wilderness that is populated by followers of the Ninth Mystery (technology), and has gotten caught up in a violent revolutionary group who have come to dominate the village. He learns to forge a kind of ore that can absorb magic. Because he is Dead, he can safely handle it, which almost no one else can. (Although the village is a haven for other rescued "Dead" babies, so he's not the only person who is like that; however, he is the only one who is really, truly, completely without magic, which is part of how Saryon recognizes who he really is, other than by his resemblance to his mother.)
Plot happens and eventually Joram makes a crude sword out of darkstone (he doesn't really know how to make a sword as most of the finer points of forging metal have been lost to purges and censorship, so it's basically an ugly but sharp slab of iron), and bullies and coerces Saryon into helping him "activate" the sword. Saryon, a catalyst, can feed magic into it as he does into people (but not into Joram, who is completely magically inert), and he ends up doing this to save Joram's life when the warlord who runs the village turns on him.
So now Saryon and Joram have a magic-absorbing sword and Joram is determined to set out to reclaim his birthright, as he thinks, of minor nobility, not yet realizing he's the heir to the throne. Saryon hasn't quite figured out a way to tell him this yet ...
Book 2 is pretty much all set in the capital and features Joram faking his magical nature, discovering his true heritage, and slowly realizing that the capital he has admired as a lifelong dream is rotten to the core and exists on the backs of the peasants, who are starved of magic so they have just enough to live on, while the nobility float around in finery. Joram falls in love with a young noble woman and woos her away from her parents, who recognize the danger of a brooding mystery man to their innocent daughter but can't figure out how to do anything about it. Saryon, who is struggling with his duty (bring Joram in) vs. his heart (he really loves him, in a parental kind of way, and feels responsible for him), is suborned into betraying Joram by his superiors, who convince him that Joram won't be harmed if he's delivered into custody, and will be a continuing danger to himself and others if he's free.
(I mean, that part is definitely true.)
All of this is leading up to the book 2 climax scene that slammed into my id with the force of 10,000 bricks when I was a teenager.
It turns out after Saryon has betrayed Joram into his enemies' hands that, while it is true that Joram won't be killed, what they ACTUALLY intend to do is sentence him to a living undeath as one of the living statues who guard the border of their land, standing forever facing the perpetual storms that surround the kingdom and cut it off from everything else. Saryon, who by now has realized that he betrayed his friend into death, is forced to watch. Joram, who has spent the book having a sort of Zuko-like swing from bitterness and rage into warmer emotions, has now retreated into cold fury over his one actual friend betraying him.
Saryon is given custody of the Darksword as a punishment. It's not like he can actually do anything with it; nobody who isn't Dead can use it once it starts absorbing magic/Life, because it will suck the Life out of their body and kill them. So Saryon has to stand there holding the Darksword and watch Joram turned into a living statue. By now his superiors are convinced enough that Saryon has been emotionally beaten into submission that they don't consider him a threat.
They're wrong, of course.
Saryon throws himself in the way of the magic intended for Joram, throws the Darksword to him, and slowly and painfully turns to living stone. Joram at first intends to use the Darksword to kill every single person present, lay waste to the kingdom, and take over. Then he turns and sees Saryon, a living statue standing there as a monument to the fact that one person loves him truly and unconditionally - and loses the will to fight. Instead of turning on the kingdom, he turns his back on it and walks into the storm and whatever lies beyond them. His love interest, Gwendolyn, runs after him, which is just about the only proactive thing she does in the whole book.
(I am slightly boggled that while Weis & Hickman can write excellent female characters, Gwen is such a nonentity of a character that we never even find out what magical Mystery she tested into.)
So that was how book 2 ended, and teen!me was wildly curious to find out what happened next. Unfortunately book 3 is a goddawful disappointment (but not nearly as much as book 4; I'll get to my fragmentary memories of that in a minute).
I will give book 3 this, at least: the Joram and Saryon bits of it, which was almost entirely what I was reading for, are excellent! Unfortunately there's only about two chapters of that in the entire book, which otherwise focuses on other people. Basically the tl;dr of book 3 is that it turns into a war-of-the-worlds technology vs magic kind of thing. Joram comes back from (presumably) a slightly more advanced version of our world, where time runs a bit differently - he's been gone for 10 years of his time, and has matured considerably, while only about a year has passed in the magic world. Magic is starting to break down for Reasons, and Joram has been followed by a mechanized army from our world, who plan to invade and conquer the magic world. So the peasant revolution plot which was a main thread of the previous two books is completely sidelined, everyone bands together to resist the invading army, we spend most of our time on really boring characters, and Joram decides the way to fix all of this is to release magic from the magic world back into the universe in general, which is how things are supposed to be.
There is a genuinely fun climax involving Joram and Saryon working together to, basically, break magic, a death fakeout and some neat h/c, and at the end of it all, Joram broke magic, the magic world is now mundane, nobody has magic anymore, and everyone is forced to leave the magic world for our technological world because the magic world is now falling apart since magic is no longer holding it together.
... okay then!!
I didn't proceed to book 4 in this reread because I remember hating it even as a kid, but my fragmentary recollections are: a lot of it takes place in our world, it has a different protagonist, and while at least book 3 had some redeeming h/c with Joram and Saryon, book 4 doesn't even have that and they barely interact.
I think as a kid I found the sudden swerve into portal fantasy and SFF a lot less jarring; I minded it primarily because it took the focus off the characters I cared about. As an adult, I can't figure out if Weis and Hickman started out with no idea where the series was going and ended up staring down the barrel of a deadline, if they planned this all along and just didn't lay the groundwork very well, or if there's editorial meddling involved because SF suddenly got hot while the epic fantasy market imploded or god knows what.
But I still really enjoyed it; even book 3 had some good parts. The books lean into Joram and Saryon being Mystically Connected and their Shared Destiny extremely hard - they essentially have a soulmate recognition moment the first time they meet, and it goes on from there. I don't find myself with any ship feelings for them because of how hard the books push the parental angle, but I was definitely happy to be carried along on the emotional wave of where the books wanted to take me.
Anyway, I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to try to write about books I'd read earlier this year before I forget about them, and I decided to get started on that!
Earlier this spring I reread the Darksword Trilogy by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman for the first time since I was a teenager. These are high fantasy books from the mid-80s, and I went in with rock bottom expectations, because it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that would have aged very, very badly. (Although I still do genuinely enjoy their Death Gate books, which hit my id square on.) These were actually the first books of theirs that I read. I read Dragonlance later - the thing they're best known for - because of a compulsive need after reading Darksword to find everything else they'd written, because I LOVED these books (though even as a not very critical teenage reader, I absolutely hated the fourth book and therefore I skipped it on the reread, because I suspect the intervening 35 years would not have improved it at all).
So my genuinely surprising discovery is: I do still really like these books! (Except most of the third book, which is a sudden genre shift that does not work for me at all, but I also reread these books often enough, back in the day, to remember exactly where the good parts are, and so I read the third book in about half an hour consisting mostly of skimming for the hurt/comfort.) The parts that nailed my teenage id squarely to the wall do in fact still hit my id hard, the worldbuilding is neat, and also, I think I can pinpoint the main reason why I fell so hard and fast for these books, and specifically for the first book, which is definitely the best of the three.
These characters have All Of The Feelings, All Of The Time, and you just didn't really get this kind of intense, high-key, very personal emotions in a lot of 70s/80s fantasy. That is, the characters are mostly focused on each other, not on the quest object; in fact, there isn't even really that much of a quest object in the first book - the Darksword of the title shows up around 90% of the way through the book. It's mostly just people living their lives and having relationships and experiencing Lots Of Emotions about it. I loved it then, and it turns out I still love it now. Well, I loved it with decreasing amounts of enjoyment as the series goes on; book 2 has way too much focus on a teenage romance with an unfortunately bland love interest (absolutely killer climax, though), and book 3 is ... everything that book 3 is.
But I went into the first book halfway expecting to be thoroughly disillusioned, and instead I really had a great time. I mean, there's stuff that didn't age well, and I didn't remember even slightly how overwhelming the pseudo-Christian religious focus of the books is. (Death Gate had more religion than I remembered, but at least it's fairly background; in these books it's front and center.) But on the whole, I still loved most of what I used to love. I'm not sorry I reread it.
The other thing I didn't remember was how intensely pro-revolution, pro-proletariat these books are, by the standards of fantasy at the time, or even now. It's explicitly focused on the peasants in the magic world being oppressed by the nobility, and their attempts to revolt are a running thread throughout the first 2 books. This never really comes together in the end because of the sudden sideways book 3 plot swerve into a completely different plot entirely, but it's definitely not even background, it's very much there.
And the worldbuilding in these books is really neat. That part I did remember; it was especially striking to me in the context of the kind of samey nature of 1980s epic fantasy, but it's still pretty unusual. Weis & Hickman do really love to construct their magic worlds.
In the Darksword world, literally everyone has magic. Magic is called Life, because they believe it is necessary to live, that it animates everything and everyone, and they use it for absolutely every task from cooking to making necessary objects and art. Tools are not only unnecessary but believed to be evil. People fly everywhere.
But there's a catch, which is that most people don't naturally have enough magic to do all of this. They're dependent on a religious caste called Catalysts, who have very little magic of their own and can't take in more, but can channel magic to other people who can then use it to fly and produce wonders and live lives of luxury. Catalysts, being essentially non-magical, are blessed with the Power of Suck and are simultaneously respected and necessary (since basically no one can do anything without them) while also being looked down upon somewhat because they can't actually do magic themselves and have to walk everywhere. The nobility may call freely on catalysts to give them magic for any purpose at all, while peasants are allowed only enough to do their work and sometimes deliberately starved of it to keep them humble. This, as you can imagine, is working out well.
Catalysts are born, not chosen. Everyone is born to one of nine magical specialties called Mysteries. Six of them are elemental, the seventh is no longer found in the world but still respected (necromancy/communing with the spirit world), the eighth is the catalysts (the Mystery of Life), and the ninth is the Mystery of Technology and is banned.
And then a child is born with absolutely no magic at all, and the plot starts.
Since magic is Life, children without magic are considered Dead, and are forbidden food or comfort until their bodies realize that they are already dead. (Read: they are exposed to die.) All babies are tested for the presence of Life. Nearly all of them pass. In this particular case, the baby is the prince of the realm, and the catalyst in charge of holding the baby while he goes through the tests is a young just-past-acolyte named Saryon. The baby fails the tests, and Saryon has a crisis of conscience over whether the child who is clearly very alive is truly Dead, but allows the baby to be taken away to die.
Not too long after this, a young woman shows up in one of the peripheral farming villages carrying a baby. She is clearly of noble origin, but wearing rags. She will not talk about the baby's father. She begs a job in the village and raises the child into a life of abuse, keeping him apart from the other children and teaching him sleight of hand as a supposed game. The child, Joram, slowly begins to realize he doesn't have the magic everyone else has, and the game becomes deadly real as he figures out that if he doesn't manage to convince everyone else he has magic, they're going to kill him. His mother feeds him a steady diet of physical and emotional abuse, combined with stories of how much better he is than anyone else in the village and how she and he were thrown out of their noble home and forced to labor in the fields, and someday they will go back to claim their birthright. Denied actual love or contact with anyone who isn't a narcissistic abuser, Joram grows up bitter, furious, and cold.
Meanwhile, Saryon's role in the baby prince's failure to pass the tests, however involuntary, has caused him to be kicked down to the bottom of the catalyst hierarchy and given the job of continuing to test babies for Life and consigning the failures to death, so his life is going really great.
(All of this takes place in the first few chapters.)
Spoilers go on from here!
The actual main plot kicks off when Joram's Dead status is revealed accidentally once he is forced to begin working in the fields, his mother is killed defending him, and he kills the village overseer in revenge and flees into the forest. Saryon is tasked by his superiors in his order with finding Joram and bringing him back to face justice.
Then when they finally meet, he realizes Joram is the dead prince - the baby he held in his arms all those years ago.
The woman who raised him is not his mother, but another young mother whose baby died (actually died, not technically-died). She stole infant Joram from where he was exposed to die - so the noble destiny she told him about isn't actually his, and Joram has no idea he's truly the prince. Unfortunately for him, he's the absolute spitting image of his actual mother, the queen.
(In a genuinely chilling reveal in the second book, the queen died of grief but her husband has been using magic to animate her corpse and prevent her relatives - royal heritage is matrilineal in their kingdom - from moving in on the throne. She is clearly dead but no one is quite willing to gainsay the king and point it out, so people pretend to carry on conversations with her in extremely awkward court scenes.)
The core of all three books is Saryon and Joram's relationship, and the first book is my favorite by far because it focuses most heavily on them of the three books: Saryon's discovery of Joram and immediate recognition of who Joram really is, and Saryon trying semi-successfully to win Joram's friendship and trust while Joram is poisoned by his own resentment, rage, and misery; shades of Zuko and Iroh, really, except Iroh in this case is a non-relative who has simply showed up in his life one day and started trying to convince him that it's possible for him to have a life that doesn't revolve around plotting revenge on everyone who's wronged him.
By the time Saryon catches up with him, Joram has fled to a village in the wilderness that is populated by followers of the Ninth Mystery (technology), and has gotten caught up in a violent revolutionary group who have come to dominate the village. He learns to forge a kind of ore that can absorb magic. Because he is Dead, he can safely handle it, which almost no one else can. (Although the village is a haven for other rescued "Dead" babies, so he's not the only person who is like that; however, he is the only one who is really, truly, completely without magic, which is part of how Saryon recognizes who he really is, other than by his resemblance to his mother.)
Plot happens and eventually Joram makes a crude sword out of darkstone (he doesn't really know how to make a sword as most of the finer points of forging metal have been lost to purges and censorship, so it's basically an ugly but sharp slab of iron), and bullies and coerces Saryon into helping him "activate" the sword. Saryon, a catalyst, can feed magic into it as he does into people (but not into Joram, who is completely magically inert), and he ends up doing this to save Joram's life when the warlord who runs the village turns on him.
So now Saryon and Joram have a magic-absorbing sword and Joram is determined to set out to reclaim his birthright, as he thinks, of minor nobility, not yet realizing he's the heir to the throne. Saryon hasn't quite figured out a way to tell him this yet ...
Book 2 is pretty much all set in the capital and features Joram faking his magical nature, discovering his true heritage, and slowly realizing that the capital he has admired as a lifelong dream is rotten to the core and exists on the backs of the peasants, who are starved of magic so they have just enough to live on, while the nobility float around in finery. Joram falls in love with a young noble woman and woos her away from her parents, who recognize the danger of a brooding mystery man to their innocent daughter but can't figure out how to do anything about it. Saryon, who is struggling with his duty (bring Joram in) vs. his heart (he really loves him, in a parental kind of way, and feels responsible for him), is suborned into betraying Joram by his superiors, who convince him that Joram won't be harmed if he's delivered into custody, and will be a continuing danger to himself and others if he's free.
(I mean, that part is definitely true.)
All of this is leading up to the book 2 climax scene that slammed into my id with the force of 10,000 bricks when I was a teenager.
It turns out after Saryon has betrayed Joram into his enemies' hands that, while it is true that Joram won't be killed, what they ACTUALLY intend to do is sentence him to a living undeath as one of the living statues who guard the border of their land, standing forever facing the perpetual storms that surround the kingdom and cut it off from everything else. Saryon, who by now has realized that he betrayed his friend into death, is forced to watch. Joram, who has spent the book having a sort of Zuko-like swing from bitterness and rage into warmer emotions, has now retreated into cold fury over his one actual friend betraying him.
Saryon is given custody of the Darksword as a punishment. It's not like he can actually do anything with it; nobody who isn't Dead can use it once it starts absorbing magic/Life, because it will suck the Life out of their body and kill them. So Saryon has to stand there holding the Darksword and watch Joram turned into a living statue. By now his superiors are convinced enough that Saryon has been emotionally beaten into submission that they don't consider him a threat.
They're wrong, of course.
Saryon throws himself in the way of the magic intended for Joram, throws the Darksword to him, and slowly and painfully turns to living stone. Joram at first intends to use the Darksword to kill every single person present, lay waste to the kingdom, and take over. Then he turns and sees Saryon, a living statue standing there as a monument to the fact that one person loves him truly and unconditionally - and loses the will to fight. Instead of turning on the kingdom, he turns his back on it and walks into the storm and whatever lies beyond them. His love interest, Gwendolyn, runs after him, which is just about the only proactive thing she does in the whole book.
(I am slightly boggled that while Weis & Hickman can write excellent female characters, Gwen is such a nonentity of a character that we never even find out what magical Mystery she tested into.)
So that was how book 2 ended, and teen!me was wildly curious to find out what happened next. Unfortunately book 3 is a goddawful disappointment (but not nearly as much as book 4; I'll get to my fragmentary memories of that in a minute).
I will give book 3 this, at least: the Joram and Saryon bits of it, which was almost entirely what I was reading for, are excellent! Unfortunately there's only about two chapters of that in the entire book, which otherwise focuses on other people. Basically the tl;dr of book 3 is that it turns into a war-of-the-worlds technology vs magic kind of thing. Joram comes back from (presumably) a slightly more advanced version of our world, where time runs a bit differently - he's been gone for 10 years of his time, and has matured considerably, while only about a year has passed in the magic world. Magic is starting to break down for Reasons, and Joram has been followed by a mechanized army from our world, who plan to invade and conquer the magic world. So the peasant revolution plot which was a main thread of the previous two books is completely sidelined, everyone bands together to resist the invading army, we spend most of our time on really boring characters, and Joram decides the way to fix all of this is to release magic from the magic world back into the universe in general, which is how things are supposed to be.
There is a genuinely fun climax involving Joram and Saryon working together to, basically, break magic, a death fakeout and some neat h/c, and at the end of it all, Joram broke magic, the magic world is now mundane, nobody has magic anymore, and everyone is forced to leave the magic world for our technological world because the magic world is now falling apart since magic is no longer holding it together.
... okay then!!
I didn't proceed to book 4 in this reread because I remember hating it even as a kid, but my fragmentary recollections are: a lot of it takes place in our world, it has a different protagonist, and while at least book 3 had some redeeming h/c with Joram and Saryon, book 4 doesn't even have that and they barely interact.
I think as a kid I found the sudden swerve into portal fantasy and SFF a lot less jarring; I minded it primarily because it took the focus off the characters I cared about. As an adult, I can't figure out if Weis and Hickman started out with no idea where the series was going and ended up staring down the barrel of a deadline, if they planned this all along and just didn't lay the groundwork very well, or if there's editorial meddling involved because SF suddenly got hot while the epic fantasy market imploded or god knows what.
But I still really enjoyed it; even book 3 had some good parts. The books lean into Joram and Saryon being Mystically Connected and their Shared Destiny extremely hard - they essentially have a soulmate recognition moment the first time they meet, and it goes on from there. I don't find myself with any ship feelings for them because of how hard the books push the parental angle, but I was definitely happy to be carried along on the emotional wave of where the books wanted to take me.
no subject
There was also a tabletop RPG based on the Darksword books, published as Darksword Adventures in a single paperback volume. I can’t vouch for how well it stands up as a game system (I did play it some in middle school with my best friend, but mostly as an easily-abandoned structure for making up stories; my main memory is that it calls for ten-sided dice, which we did not have, so we wrote the numbers 1-10 on slips of paper and drew then out of a bowl raffle style), but it includes a pretty lengthy novella that theoretically introduces the world but is actually an interesting story in its own right. Or was, when I was 12! Much better than book 4 anyway. (Book 4 came out a decade after the RPG, so is thankfully referenced nowhere within.)
no subject
I had absolutely no idea there was an RPG, and I'm now curious if it's possible to track it down on Ebay! That's a very clever solution to not having dice.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Apparently the 2-out-of-2 consensus is that book 4 is terrible. I sort of wish I still had the paperback of it around somewhere, because I definitely don't want to buy it to find out how terrible, I just want to glance through a few pages and see if I can figure out what I hated about it so much ...
no subject
I think I imprinted harder on Rose of the Prophet, but I think that one sticks the landing a little better if not perfectly (unsurprisingly the setup is better in The Worm Ouroboros from what I understand, but).
no subject
Me too. Actually, I forgot a whole bunch of the plot in book 2 and especially book 3. It was pretty clear that I was focused on certain aspects of the books (Joram, Saryon, and the worldbuilding) and not much else. There was also a whole other running subplot I didn't mention with Mosiah, the leader of the peasant rebels, a major character in all three books who I had forgotten even existed. And of course there was the standard Weis & Hickman magical fourth-wall-breaking character who may or may not be hundreds of years older than everyone else, but at the very least has access to pop culture knowledge that no one else does.
no subject
[1] In true Yoonish fashion, however, I remember almost nothing about the plot of the second? one? Elven Star?? :googles: Yeah, Elven Star. I don't remember the characters or plot. But I have the MUSIC at the back of Elven Star memorized, even though whoever the fuck set it for type had ZERO clue about correct musical engraving practice and set the whole thing PROPORTIONALLY (i.e. a whole note ends up taking up the same place as eight eighth notes no matter what NOOOOOO).
no subject
Elven Star is definitely the most forgettable book in that series, lolol. It makes more sense thematically in retrospect, because it does shed light on the elf-human-dwarf interactions and their differences between the various worlds, but it's really just a lot of soap opera with not very likable characters that doesn't do much to advance the series-arc plot.
In conclusion, HAPLO!!
no subject
I want to see the Jack L. Chalker Well World / Weis & Hickman Rose of the Prophet crossover now lol. Although I think multiple people did the math on Well World pointing out the numbers don't add up. For Well World it's a shame that, uh, the weirdo transformations and ALIEN SEX ALIEN SEX overshadow everything else because the inter-hex conquest/military sci-fantasy logistical struggles of trying to conquer hexes and secure LOCs with DIFFERENT TECH/MAGIC LEVELS was genuinely extremely engaging.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject