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The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England - Brandon Sanderson
A wild book post appears! I absolutely loved this book - far more than I expected to. For one thing, it wasn't what I was expecting at all.
This book does have exactly the vibe that I thought it would when I picked it up, which is a throwback to the 1980s-era comic fantasy of the Piers Anthony/Christopher Stasheff/Alan Dean Foster variety of "schmoe from our world ends up in fantasy world, muddles through with what little modern tech he has with him and can remember how to invent." But it goes off in a very different direction than what I was expecting, and it's a lot more emotionally serious, even though it's funny.
The protagonist wakes up in a field in a medieval fantasy world with no memories and nothing except the clothes he's wearing and some pages from a book which is the titular handbook to surviving medieval fantasy England. (The excerpts from it are scattered throughout the book as he finds more of them, and are hilarious. Especially the legal disclaimers.)
It's hard to talk about what makes the book good without further spoilers, so ...
As he starts to regain bits and pieces of his memory, it becomes very quickly apparent that he is not actually from our world, or rather, he's from a future version of it. He has healing nanites, various cyborg augmentations such as armor plating in his limbs, and he hasn't fantasy-portaled, he's dimensionally sideslipped into a variant medieval Earth. The scattered book pages are actually a guide to owning your own pocket dimension, which is simply a thing you can do in Future Earth.
Part of the book's actual serious underpinning is the ironic tension between the handbook's jokey treatment of alternate dimensions where you own everything and can do literally anything you want (run real-life Risk with actual armies! own your own kingdom! unleash a zombie plague and experience the zombie apocalypse! cure the actual plague and be a hero!) ... and the fact that this place, all these places, are very evidently populated by real people with real lives, who the hero (and the reader) starts to get to know and like.
Also, he begins to figure out that there are other people from his world here, some of them have nefarious intentions, and he's got to do something about it.
And now the big spoilers ...
After going through multiple iterations of trying to figure out who he is and why he's here, including thinking he's a cop for a while, he eventually figures out that he's actually a police academy washout who ended up in rigged underground fights - hence the fighting upgrades - and became a minor mob flunky. His mobster boss and some of the other mob enforcers are also here, part of a scam they're running between the fantasy dimension and the real world, as it turns out that this place is (possibly) the one dimension that has actual magic, or at least *extremely* unlikely probability, which makes it a goldmine for a mobster whose main thing is rigged fights and games of chance.
The hero has been a loser at everything he's ever tried. He's also a good fighter, an extremely good liar, and possesses augmentations that look like magic to the locals - and he's going to save this world from his own former associates or die trying.
I genuinely loved the protagonist's journey (from thinking he's actually a hero, to figuring out that he is in fact a failed mobster, to actually being a hero and realizing that the biggest part of his problems in the past was living down to everyone's low expectations of him) and the people he meets along the way. The love interest definitely has 'love interest' signposted on her forehead, but she's delightful - also the one person who is immediately suspicious of his magic act - and my other favorite is the local thegn (minor aristocrat/warrior) who he meets early on, who ends up helping him save their world and gets not just one but *two* really excellent death fakeouts. It turns out the protagonist can use his nanites to heal other people as well as himself, and he is completely taken aback to find out that everyone here thinks that healing is by far the most impressive thing he can do in their eyes, as opposed to his more dramatic "magic", in a world where life is far more violent and short than the world he's used to.
(His name is actually Johnny, but he spends part of the book unsure of his real name and the rest of it going ahead and living under the pseudonym that he uses early on, Runian, their generic term for a rune magician, and eventually adopts that as his actual name in this place as part of putting his past self behind and living the rest of his life as the person they think he has been all along.)
It was just a really fun book, briskly paced and delightfully funny in places and groundingly serious in others, about being your best self - once you figure out what that is - and learning to put other people ahead of yourself for once. I really enjoyed it.
This book does have exactly the vibe that I thought it would when I picked it up, which is a throwback to the 1980s-era comic fantasy of the Piers Anthony/Christopher Stasheff/Alan Dean Foster variety of "schmoe from our world ends up in fantasy world, muddles through with what little modern tech he has with him and can remember how to invent." But it goes off in a very different direction than what I was expecting, and it's a lot more emotionally serious, even though it's funny.
The protagonist wakes up in a field in a medieval fantasy world with no memories and nothing except the clothes he's wearing and some pages from a book which is the titular handbook to surviving medieval fantasy England. (The excerpts from it are scattered throughout the book as he finds more of them, and are hilarious. Especially the legal disclaimers.)
It's hard to talk about what makes the book good without further spoilers, so ...
As he starts to regain bits and pieces of his memory, it becomes very quickly apparent that he is not actually from our world, or rather, he's from a future version of it. He has healing nanites, various cyborg augmentations such as armor plating in his limbs, and he hasn't fantasy-portaled, he's dimensionally sideslipped into a variant medieval Earth. The scattered book pages are actually a guide to owning your own pocket dimension, which is simply a thing you can do in Future Earth.
Part of the book's actual serious underpinning is the ironic tension between the handbook's jokey treatment of alternate dimensions where you own everything and can do literally anything you want (run real-life Risk with actual armies! own your own kingdom! unleash a zombie plague and experience the zombie apocalypse! cure the actual plague and be a hero!) ... and the fact that this place, all these places, are very evidently populated by real people with real lives, who the hero (and the reader) starts to get to know and like.
Also, he begins to figure out that there are other people from his world here, some of them have nefarious intentions, and he's got to do something about it.
And now the big spoilers ...
After going through multiple iterations of trying to figure out who he is and why he's here, including thinking he's a cop for a while, he eventually figures out that he's actually a police academy washout who ended up in rigged underground fights - hence the fighting upgrades - and became a minor mob flunky. His mobster boss and some of the other mob enforcers are also here, part of a scam they're running between the fantasy dimension and the real world, as it turns out that this place is (possibly) the one dimension that has actual magic, or at least *extremely* unlikely probability, which makes it a goldmine for a mobster whose main thing is rigged fights and games of chance.
The hero has been a loser at everything he's ever tried. He's also a good fighter, an extremely good liar, and possesses augmentations that look like magic to the locals - and he's going to save this world from his own former associates or die trying.
I genuinely loved the protagonist's journey (from thinking he's actually a hero, to figuring out that he is in fact a failed mobster, to actually being a hero and realizing that the biggest part of his problems in the past was living down to everyone's low expectations of him) and the people he meets along the way. The love interest definitely has 'love interest' signposted on her forehead, but she's delightful - also the one person who is immediately suspicious of his magic act - and my other favorite is the local thegn (minor aristocrat/warrior) who he meets early on, who ends up helping him save their world and gets not just one but *two* really excellent death fakeouts. It turns out the protagonist can use his nanites to heal other people as well as himself, and he is completely taken aback to find out that everyone here thinks that healing is by far the most impressive thing he can do in their eyes, as opposed to his more dramatic "magic", in a world where life is far more violent and short than the world he's used to.
(His name is actually Johnny, but he spends part of the book unsure of his real name and the rest of it going ahead and living under the pseudonym that he uses early on, Runian, their generic term for a rune magician, and eventually adopts that as his actual name in this place as part of putting his past self behind and living the rest of his life as the person they think he has been all along.)
It was just a really fun book, briskly paced and delightfully funny in places and groundingly serious in others, about being your best self - once you figure out what that is - and learning to put other people ahead of yourself for once. I really enjoyed it.
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That is a killer premise. Thank you for letting me know about it.
(It also has an extremely noir vibe, whether the book itself does or not. "In the process of amateur detecting to recover my memory/learn my former identity, I discovered I sucked" is a plot I have seen in more than one noir book/movie.)
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And then it'll do something like this:
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That's beautiful.
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*bookmarks*
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I could spend my life reading his books and forever be happy. But he writes so much I can’t keep up! I’m a huge Stormlight fan and I’m still only through 2.5 books! He writes ten times faster than I can read.
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And I've seen, I think, the first lecture in the series, but I need to catch up! He does have a lot of good things to say about writing, and I like that (based on the one I saw) he's very flexible in not being dictatorial about it.
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