August
14,
2008
I see, looking back, that the third book of the Dresden series is when I really got sucked in to the point of no return, and it’s probably not a coincidence then that Jim Butcher’s Cursor’s Fury
sucked me into the Codex Alera series.
All the stuff I bitched about in my entry about the first book? Completely fixed, and then some. (I mean, okay, they’re still under-utilizing salt weapons, but at least they’re using them.) And all the virtues that I associate with the Dresden books are present to an increasingly high degree. I liked the second book in the series quite a bit, but this one made me do that “come home and read non-stop” thing for the first time — and when I finished it without having the next one to hand, I was vastly annoyed.
Interestingly enough, the criticism I made of the second book — that everything happens so quickly there’s no time for major character changes — is also addressed here. Not by the book taking place over a long period of time (it ostensibly happens over a month or so, but it feels like a week, tops), but by Butcher leaving big gaps of time between the books in the series. Like the Dresden books, this isn’t covering every moment of the characters’ lives, it’s just hitting the major points.
Anyway, this is now a legitimately great fantasy series, and you should slog your way through the meh first book to get at this good stuff if you like your epic fantasies.
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August
9,
2008
The good news is that Jim Butcher’s Academ’s Fury
actually feels like it was written by Jim Butcher. Like the Dresden novels — and unlike the first Codex Alera book — it has deep world-building, interesting characters, an engaging story, and most of all pacing. Though it’s still not as good as the Dresden books, it’s an objectively very good book in its own right, and a huge improvement over the first volume.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why it’s better. Maybe it’s the move in setting from the hinterlands to the capital city, which makes the world feel more vibrant and alive. Maybe it’s just that we have more of a connection to the characters, so don’t need to wait most of a book to really give a damn what happens to them. But I think most of the difference is that Butcher is giving us a bigger picture view of the world, and not restricting us to the teensy little tunnel vision part of it we got to see in the first book.
I start to wonder, in fact, if maybe Butcher just has a problem with the pace of initial incluing. Because it turns out his world actually is fairly subtle and interesting, and the stuff that looked embarrassingly stupid in the first book is (mostly) addressed more directly in the second, and it’s just that he didn’t bother to give us any relevant details. And when I think back to the Dresden books, it turns out that there was something similar going on there, too — a lot of the world-building behind the series was invisible in the first book and only became clear later on.
Or maybe it’s just that he’s making it up as he goes along, in which case he’s a highly skilled retconner.
But anyway, while this book is a very good novel, it’s not really an epic fantasy. Oh, it has swords and battles and political intrigues and all that, so go ahead and call it a “high fantasy” or a “fantasy adventure” or whatever. But epic fantasy is something else altogether, and requires time and change. Look at something like the Lord of the Rings, where it takes Sam and Frodo months from the beginning of their journey to the end, and they’re not the same people at all when they get there; or Feist’s Magician, which takes place over years and whose protagonists go from being kitchen boys to demigods.
That sense of scope, of slow organic change, is fundamental to epic fantasy, and Butcher doesn’t have it at all. As in the Dresden books, the action in this book takes place over what’s essentially a long weekend. That makes for some fast-paced action, as nobody ever slows down once events are set in motion, but it removes even the possibility of an epic feel. If you’re reading the books expecting to get that feel, you’re going to be disappointed; if you can accept them as fast, action-packed fantasy adventure novels, though, this second one is satisfying.
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August
3,
2008
According to the little author’s note/promo in the back of all the
Dresden books, Jim Butcher’s true aspiration is to write epic fantasy,
and the Dresden books are just kind of this side project that got
unexpectedly successful. Well, based on Jim Butcher’s Furies of
Calderon
, he should be grateful for his side project’s
success, because he’s an indifferent epic fantasist. In broad outline,
the book seems like it should be good, but each element of it is
marked by significant flaws.
For instance, there’s some interesting world-building reminiscent
of a Dave Duncan novel (magic is done by commanding furies, elemental
spirits, and every person has at least one fury and thus some
augmented ability), but then there are wild inconsistencies that make
it seem ill thought-out.
As an example, salt can harm a fury. So, okay, if you’re going to
do battle with fury-aided people, you’re going to have salt-tipped
arrows and saltapults, not to mention arming every soldier with bags
of salt and salted weapons, right? But no, nobody ever thinks of
doing this, except for one farmer. That’s just preposterous.
Arguably worse is that Butcher’s world has standard medieval sexism
at every level up to the institutional — only men join the army or
hold land. But women are often powerful “crafters”, so there’s no
reason at all for this. I mean, not that sexism bows to logic, but
you’d expect at least some variance from medieval norms.
Or take the pacing of the story, which is at turns compelling and maddening. At one point, a couple of characters need to cross a clearing, which is being observed by the enemy. They decide that they can’t just run across it, because they’ll be picked off before they get to the other side, so they come up with an alternate plan, one which will test the last vestiges of their depleted strength. Several pages are spent setting up this conflict. It’s a tense moment (even if secretly we know that of course they’ll make it, because that’s how books go), and then they start off across the plain... and make it uneventfully in a single sentence.
Now, yes, that’s how things work in real life, but that’s not how fiction works. If the narrator is going to spend that much time focusing on their concern and plans, then something — not necessarily what they expected, but something — has to be come out of it. You can’t just build things up and then drop them like that.
Add to that some dodgy characterization (there’s one character who is obviously not what he seems, and his motivation for continuing to seem what he seems is dubious at best), and you have a book that is just maddeningly flawed. It’s not terrible — Butcher isn’t an incompetent writer, after all — but it varies between pretty good and mediocre.
It’s hard to believe that the same Jim Butcher who wrote the brilliantly addictive Dresden books could have written this uninspired lump o’ fantasy. Where’s the whipcrack pacing, the interesting characters, the subtler than expected worldbuilding, the stylistic verve? It’s all gone. It’s just baffling.
Unless you’re hard up for epic fantasy, I wouldn’t recommend bothering with this. That said, I’m going to keep reading, to find out if maybe this is just Butcher’s nervous first novel and he gets better.
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