Arctic Light

BTW, I'm still reading and posting about Death Gate; I'm just doing the posts on Tumblr right now because rachelmanija is currently reading the books and I don't want to spoil her! You can find them on tumblr under my death gate tag. I'll repost them over here when she's caught up!

I started reading Dragon Wing (the first book of the Death Gate Cycle) yesterday because I adore that series, but I don't think I've done a complete reread for 10 or 15 years, and also because I wanted something to read that wasn't going to completely seize hold of my brain for a damn change (... this may in retrospect have been a bad idea). I was braced for the suck fairy, but actually I'm vastly relieved to discover that I still really love it. I mean, it's very early-90s-fantasy, but allowing for that, it's still a lot of fun and I want to drag more people into reading it so I have more people to talk to about it!

Death Gate Cycle, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, is a 7-volume high fantasy series from the early 90s. I don't want to oversell it, because it IS kind of a mess in places. And very 90s. But it's also got some really fun worldbuilding (it takes place across six different worlds - four of which are based on elements, e.g. "air" is a world of floating islands and flying magical ships), characters I still really love a lot, and A+ hurt/comfort. Parts of this series are such a total idfest for me that I've more or less got them memorized.

I didn't intend to read the entire first book this weekend, but it just kinda happened. I think I'm really going to enjoy this, again.

Unfortunately I can't really think of any way to talk about the first book without spoiling the whole series, so if you're one of the people I'm trying to talk into reading it ... I'm sorry? >__> I do think this series is better read unspoiled for the character stuff, because some of it is especially neat if you don't know it's coming - at least if you're a spoiler-avoidant person. But really, everything I want to say about the first book spoils the whole series. So, uh, yeah. FUTURE BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD! Probably don't read if you're currently reading the series/planning on reading it in the near future!

(Also, if you might be thinking about reading it and want to ask me questions about it to find out whether it's your cup of tea, go right ahead! I should do a proper rec post for this series, but it's actually kind of difficult to do that at the moment because I really don't remember it very well.)

( Spoilers for future books )