Review: Age of Myth

"Slop" is such a versatile word. It’s a great way of describing anything that just gets churned out en masse, with little thought for quality or anything other than consumption. AI slop. Fast food slop. Movie slop. It just fits, and that’s why people who have a vested interest in increasing consumption hate it.

Slop applies to books, too. Most fiction out there now is just awful. Yes, you can say that about any period, but market forces and technology advances have allowed a proliferation of authors, and, following Sturgeon’s Law, most of what they produce isn’t worth reading. (Do I include myself in that category? When I’m depressed enough, yes.) Add in the fact that most authors allowed to be bestselling are women, and women simply aren’t wired to write epic fantasy or deep, thought-provoking sci-fi, and I’ve reached a conundrum. I don’t want to read slop, and there’s not much else available in my preferred genres.

So I decided to take a chance on Michael J. Sullivan’s Age of Myth, the first book in the Legends of the First Empire series. The description looked interesting, I vaguely remembered seeing the name years ago, and I felt a flicker of kinship with a fellow Michael who uses his middle initial to stand out.

The Setting

Without going into spoilers—or anything past this book, because I haven’t read the rest of the series—Age of Myth is…curious. It definitely isn’t epic fantasy in the vein of A Song of Ice and Fire, Lord of the Rings, or anything like that. Appropriately enough, it feels closer to "mythic" fantasy, the sort that hearkens back to European folklore. The only other book I can think of like that is The Silmarillion, which also has an almost scriptural feel in parts. Age of Myth doesn’t go quite that far. There’s an author’s note that the story takes place a few thousand years before his other series, The Riyria Revelations.

Reading that was already enough to hook me. I love the idea of exploring the distant past. My own attempt, Seasons Change, remains one of my favorite experiments.

Sullivan nails a lot of the things I like about the concept. It’s prehistoric, in the very literal sense. What people we see are nomads or in the early stages of civilization. The Rhunes—humans—sit squarely in the Bronze Age. They’re astonished at the sight of a sword made of iron. More importantly, they’re still afraid of what lurks beyond the bounds of their limited world.

Contrast that with the Fhrey, who are fairly transparent elf analogues. They’re tall and slender. They live for three thousand years. (Curiously, that’s the same amount of time the author pointed out.) They have skill, technology, and magic that so surpass humans that they’re literally called gods. Their only fear is that humans will overrun them.

The worldbuilding is pretty good, then. There’s even a dwarf-like race, the Dherg, who seem to have been driven out, though whether they’re extinct or not is an open question in this book. Even they hit the most important dwarven tropes: metalworking and magic resistance.

In other words, Age of Myth is a nice little precursor to a standard high fantasy world, and I like that. It’s different, it’s intriguing, and it’s inspirational.

The Story

The story itself is just as mythic as the setting. After a prologue to lay out the stakes, it’s mostly typical fare. Raithe is the unexpected and somewhat unwilling hero who wouldn’t be out of place with Beowulf. Suri fits right in with the mystics of the Norse sagas. Malcolm and Persephone, despite their too-Earthlike names, fill the roles of companion and love interest quite well.

On the other side of the coin—well, river, in this book—we get into the heads of a couple of Fhrey characters. Arion is wise but haughty, reminding me a lot of Galadriel, but as she’s described in Tolkien’s scrapped stories. Gryndal’s name reinforces the legendary feel, and his character is brash, overconfident, and so powerful that I initially thought he would be a deus ex machina.

That’s really the crux of the story. Humans look at the Fhrey as if they’re gods. And why not? They’re effectively immortal—at least when compared with the sixty or so years a human in a harsh world is lucky to get. They wield swords of steel, and know how to use them. Their magic, simply called "the Art" and apparently a somewhat recent development, is on the level of a pagan god. How do you fight that? Why would you want to?

Of course, there’s only one answer for why anyone would defy a god: freedom. Sullivan understands this, and he knows how to make it work. All of the human characters are in pursuit of freedom. Raithe is searching for a way to free himself from his past. Malcolm was literally a slave. Suri’s whole purpose, at the start, is to show the dubious sort of freedom that the anarchist craves.

The Bad

So it’s a good story, with good characters. In a lot of ways, Age of Myth is a very wholesome folktale. That’s not to say it’s without its flaws, however.

In some ways, the Fhrey are depicted as too powerful. This is great for building tension and making a victory over them feel worthwhile, but the power disparity is so great that some interactions feel forced. Humans can defeat them, but only through happenstance. This is best illustrated by the climactic battle, which ends up reading as a bit disjointed. Cinematic rather than literary.

While the worldbuilding is great, the naming is another part that rankles me. As a linguist, even an amateur one as I am, some of Sullivan’s choices take me out of the story and remind me that I’m just reading a novel. "Persephone" itself, for example, is particularly grating. A few of the Fhrey names—including the name of their race, because how are you supposed to pronounce that?—seem like a mishmash of Earth cultures crossed with an attempt at sounding like Tolkien without copying him.

There’s an undercurrent of Celtic-sounding names for things, as well: "leigh mor", "dahl", "keenig". But there’s no rhyme or reason to them, and some of them aren’t really defined. I’m all for using fictional languages—I created ten of them for Otherworld, after all—but be consistent.

Also on the topic of languages in prose, Sullivan commits what I see as an almost-mortal sin. His characters talk like millennials. He even uses a couple of puns that only really work for a modern American. I’m not expecting Victorian or Early Modern English here, but please don’t use "okay" in a fantasy novel.

The Verdict

Age of Myth isn’t a flawed masterpiece. It has its flaws, but those aren’t enough to render it unreadable. It’s also no masterpiece. What it is, instead, is a good read. It’s a good world, one I’d like to come back to. Most of the reason is because it’s like I’m watching the world as it’s being built. Not too many series can say that.

Most of all, I’m giving a thumbs-up to this one because it inspired me. It struck a nerve, and now I’m wanting to get back to my own worlds. And that is quite possibly the highest praise I can give.

Summer Reading List 2025: Third

Under the wire once again. Today’s the last day, and I finished the last book last night. At last. I have reasons for my tardiness, and I hope to explain them in the near future. For now, let’s worry about reading.

Fantasy

Title: A Crucible of Souls
Author: Mitchell Hogan
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2013

I think I’m starting to experience fantasy burnout. I was very critical of Brandon Sanderson’s latest book a few months back, and he’s my favorite author. Mitchell Hogan might be a great writer, but this book ensures he’ll never get high up on my list.

A Crucible of Souls is a fantasy novel. Usually, I’ll be able to qualify "fantasy" with some other subgenre. Martin and Jordan wrote epic fantasy. Sanderson sometimes veers into science fantasy, if of a different bent than Star Wars. Brian McClellan? Riflepunk. Peter Brett? You could almost call his post-apocalyptic fantasy.

Here, I’m just calling a book a plain, vanilla fantasy novel without any further qualifiers. I feel comfortable doing that because it’s a very…generic story. There are few cases where I just never got interested in a book—The Waking Fire is one such—but I can’t remember the last time I was genuinely bored by fantasy.

And that’s because there’s just nothing here. A lot of words, almost no substance. A plot that barely goes anywhere. A cast of characters that sometimes seems like D&D pregens. (The orphan boy with hidden talents, the female fighter to show diversity, the necromancer anti-hero…) This really is the most generic novel I’ve read in probably 30 years. And the ones back then were Magic: the Gathering tie-ins!

Just so I don’t spend the whole post bashing the novel, let’s talk about the good points. First of all, the magic system Hogan describes is built around wards and runes inscribed into various materials. It’s similar to the wards of Brett’s Demon Cycle series, but they feel a lot more science-y. Although the descriptions were barebones, my imagination visualized them as something more akin to schematics than anything. And the narrative does reinforce that image in a few places. Very cool to my rational and geeky brain.

Another aspect of the magic of this created world is the perceived difference between destructive and creative sorcery. Many of the "craftings" (my ebook copy inexplicably had this word italicized in every occurrence) are made from wood or metal, and they have a constructive purpose. They’re lights or security systems, in effect, which only adds to the engineer-like flavor. On the other hand, "destructive" magics are banned, prohibited, verboten, and considered downright evil.

Here’s where the author had a chance to make a positive statement, but punted. The sorcerers of the major city that is the focus for the book’s action have a secret police dedicated to stamping out any embers of alleged destructive sorcery. Naturally, they have to use this same forbidden knowledge to fight against it, but what they consider destructive is…odd, to say the least. Elemental magic is prohibited, because someone could use magical fire to commit arson, for example.

It’s the typical progressive argument against gun ownership, merely transplanted into a fantasy world. At multiple points, in fact, Master Simmon, the teacher character who leads this covert ops team—that’s not even an exaggeration—states that destructive sorcery is banned despite its positive benefits, because some people might use it for ill. In other words, because a random thug decided to shoot someone, the rest of us can’t defend ourselves.

Indeed, the idea of disarming the populace extends beyond that, as denizens of the city of Anasoma, even including their cops, are barred from carrying a sword in public. Civilians can’t even carry a club. It’s a liberal paradise, really, but Hogan doesn’t do much to show why that’s a dystopia to anyone with any sense. Even those seeking to invade don’t care about the politics.

But that’s because he doesn’t do much to show anything. The city is depicted as a cesspool of crime and violence; the main protagonist, Caldan, is mugged in his first week there. It’s a place where everyone is out for himself, everything is bleak and depressing, and we’re somehow supposed to care about it. By the end of the book, I didn’t mind if it was razed to the ground, along with the rest of the empire.

If I sound harsh, it’s because I expected more. A Crucible of Souls got great reviews, and was recommended by people I usually trust. I figured it would be a titanic clash of sorcerers, an epic setting, and all those nice things. Instead, it’s a very generic story. The characters are cookie-cutter. There’s very little worldbuilding. The subplots don’t really go anywhere, yet somehow get bundled up at the end in a bit of deus ex machina.

There’s nothing bad about this book. (Well, maybe some of the prose, but I’ve become a terrible critic of that in recent years.) The problem is, there’s nothing really good about it, either. Except for the magic system, which is genuinely interesting and would give me enough material for an entire series of my own, very little actually stands out. At times, it feels like an RPG campaign that got carried away.

And that’s fine, if that’s what you’re after. I prefer distinctiveness. I prefer books, even fantasy novels, that make me think, that make me consider angles and aspects I may have dismissed before. Failing that, give me a story that’s a fun ride.

Maybe Mitchell Hogan can pull that off. From what I saw in A Crucible of Souls, however, I doubt it. This is a rare miss, and the only reason I finished it is because I didn’t have time to read a different book. So the Summer Reading List for 2025 ends on a down note, alas. Fortunately, the rest of my life makes up for it, as you’ll see soon enough.

Summer Reading List 2025: Second

I know I’m cutting it close. I have real-life things I’m dealing with right now that are just a little more important, so bear with me. And wait a week or so for the details on those.

History

Title: The Storm of Steel
Author: Ernst Jünger (tr. Basil Creighton)
Genre: Military History/Autobiography
Year: 1920 (tr. 1929, reprinted 2019)

War is one of the most pointless and wasteful endeavors humanity has ever invented. And World War I was quite possibly the most pointless and wasteful of them all. But the tens of millions of men fighting in the trenches of France, the mountains of Italy, or the dozen other fronts didn’t think so.

They believed they were fighting for a righteous cause, and that cause was, to put it simply, nationalism. The French fought for France, to throw back the invasion. The Germans fought for Germany, for the Kaiser’s honor and to right the wrongs of 1870. The Americans, latecomers as we were, fought to show that America belonged on the world stage.

Much has been written about the strategies of the war, of the machines and machinations it spawned. I could fill my room with accounts of the Central Powers and the Allies, of the 40 years of alliances and deals that led a simple assassination to set the whole world ablaze. (I even read one of these, The Guns of August, last summer.)

As well, reams of paper and gigabytes of now-digitized data can paint the tactical picture. Which divisions went where, which trenches were attacked when. What happened each time new technology entered the battlefield, whether tanks, airplanes, or gas attacks. There’s so much information out there that Indy Neidell could make a 10-minute video for each week of the war, and he almost never went into any more than the most cursory detail.

But so much media—and, therefore, so much public perception—focuses on these high-level accounts, these broad, sweeping depictions of trench warfare as a new variant of Risk, that we forget a very important truth. These were soldiers, not pawns. Men, not machines.

We know the Kaisar and the Tsar. We know Hindenburg and Ludendorf, Foch and Joffré. We know Winston Churchill before his later glory days. But we don’t know much about the millions upon millions who served under them, the unnumbered dead buried in unmarked graves throughout the French countryside, or the ones who made it home and got to see the world turn upside-down. Only a scant few heroes ever rise enough to make a dent in the public consciousness: Alvin York and the Red Baron are probably the only two the average American can even name.

Ernst Jünger tells the story of these forgotten masses through his own experiences of the war. He’s German, and that means two things. One, since he writes from his post-war home, his narrative is laced with the knowledge that his side lost. Two, his is a story not often heard in Allied countries. Some of that is through ignorance. Some comes from outright malevolence.

Jünger served through almost the whole war, showing up in early 1915 and taking his final action only a few weeks before the armistice. His tale winds through 18 chapters, but only a few actual battles. He was at the Somme, for instance, just as one of my favorite authors had been. He took part—indeed, showed heroism—at Cambrai and during the Germans’ last great offensive in 1918.

His is an account of the war from a small perspective. Never rising higher than lieutenant, he wasn’t invited to division-level strategic conferences. He didn’t know what the Kaiser was thinking. And that’s what makes The Storm of Steel so impactful. Here is the account of a soldier. This is a man who didn’t have the whole story. All he knew was that Germany was fighting, he was German, and he was honor-bound to defend his home. Even if they were the attackers.

It’s an almost too-simple belief system, we might think today. Our society has been conditioned over the past 80 years to reject nationalism. Indeed, national pride is outlawed in some of the same countries that were victorious over Jünger’s 73rd Fusiliers, and he would weep with the knowledge that his glorious Fatherland wants to ban the only political party that remembers what it used to be.

World War I marked a change in the way warfare itself was done. It marked the last true use of cavalry, and the first of a mechanized military. But it also illustrates how the culture of war changed in modern times. We know of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when hostilities paused for one night on the Western Front, and the soldiers of the respective sides greeted each other in No Man’s Land. Something similar happens to Jünger’s unit in 1915, and he recounts that he and the British commander finished the night by formally re-declaring war.

That might not make sense. They were already at war, weren’t they? And they didn’t have the power to stop it. But this is Ernst Jünger’s central theme: honor. The soldier, he believes, should have a sense of honor. As a good Prussian man, he felt he could best illustrate by doing, and his narrative accounts in the book are full of asides about which actions were honorable and which were the mark of a coward. He’s his own biggest critic, too, pointing out where he failed to live up to the standard he set for himself, even when it made no difference at worst, or saved his life at best.

Honor is dead, according to the Sanderson book I read last year. In the real world, we would probably consider it on life support. But World War I gives us our last good look at battlefield honor in action. Part of that is because of the parties involved. The English and German soldiers were cousins, in a sense, while the French were neighbors. Yes, they had names for each other (I actually didn’t know "Tommy" was the German nickname for British soldiers until I read this book!) and traded insults, but they did so in the knowledge that they were fighting…fellow men.

After WWI, that changed. Propaganda was able to reach the critical levels of today. Even by World War II, not even two full generations after Versailles changed the world, dehumanization through mass media had already begun its work, and the 80 years since have only made things worse. This has even altered perceptions of the Great War itself; The Storm of Steel is considered a dangerous book by leftists, precisely because it shows what a German patriot believes. And we all know that German patriots are evil, right?

In the end, this was not the book I wanted to read this summer. I was sick all week, I saw it on my tablet, and I dove into it during my convalescence. And I’m glad I did, because it really is a great book about what, I must admit, has always been my favorite war from a historical perspective. Ignore the people claiming that it’s fascist, or that it promotes Nazism. Ernst Jünger doesn’t do any of that. All he does is tell it like it is. Soldiers fought for four years, killing each other by the millions, because they believed they were part of something greater than themselves. The reason that sounds crazy to us is simple: we just don’t believe that anymore.

Summer Reading List 2025: First

And here we go. The first of the three this year was a total slog, and…well, you’ll see why. It’s not only because the last five weeks have been downright hectic.

Philosophy

Title: Republic
Author: Plato (tr. Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee)
Genre: Philosophy/Political Science
Year: c. 360 BC

Consider essentially the founding document of political thought in general, Plato’s Republic has been considered a classic for centuries, and it is now the oldest book I’ve read. (I never actually finished anything of Homer, and even the Old Testament technically wasn’t written down until around the 2nd century BC.) Although it’s not on the official "Great Books" list, most people would probably assume it was. I did.

This is, in a way, the origin story of a lot of philosophy we simply see as background noise today. The allegory of the cave, which has become popularized in meme format the past few years, derives from Plato, and specifically Book VIII of this work. Many of the concepts of the Platonic ideal also find their genesis in Republic, or they are simply spelled out best here.

That’s really all there is to the work as a whole. It’s crafted as a conversation between Socrates and some of his pupils, patrons, and general audience members, with the idea that the master philosopher is, in effect, debating Thrasymachus, who serves as a kind of foil to get the action started. The subject of the debate? Who has the better life: a just man or an unjust one.

Simply looking at the world around us would lead us to assume that Thrasymachus has a point when he says that the unjust man is richer and more well-off. Name a billionaire whose money isn’t at least a little dirty.

Socrates, serving as the author’s insert—prose wasn’t as fully developed 2400 years ago—counters by saying that, while the unjust man may seem to have it all, he’s actually poorer in his spirit, and thus he will never truly be happy. From there commences a long and sometimes tedious dive into philosophy as Socrates converses with Adeimantus and Glaucon, two of his host’s sons; their purpose is sycophantic for the most part, offering little in the way of argument but much mumbled agreement with their illustrious guest.

You might be thinking, "Isn’t this book called the Republic? So where does the republic part come in?"

Well, I wondered the same thing. Part of the roundabout course Socrates takes to make his point is a digression into the forms of government, and a thought experiment of making a "perfect" state. His—rather, Plato’s—ideal is a monarchy run by a philosopher king. (You’ve probably heard that phrase bandied about lately, too.) In the Platonic ideal of State, everyone knows his place, no one is grasping or cheating, and it’s a very communal atmosphere.

It’s also joyless, as Plato explicitly ejects any worldly pleasures from his state, all the way down to the simple joy of familial love. In a way, Plato depicts a dystopia, then tries to sell it as a utopia.

That should be enough to disgust you, but bear with me. The part that people, including a lot of modern philosophers, don’t get is that it’s an allegory, the same as the cave. The ideal state represents the Platonic man. Not a system of government, but conceptualization of the perfect man. It’s at odds with the Aristotelian ideal of eudaemonia, and it’s very…call it proto-Stoic, because I see a lot of parallels from when I read Meditations a few years ago. There’s that same emphasis on eschewing the worldly for some nebulous "perfect" source of wisdom.

I can get behind that part a little bit, to be honest. But the language it’s couched in is opaque at best, and it shows how underdeveloped philosophy was in those early days. Plato has first-mover advantage, and that’s why his works are given a higher dose of respect than we would probably allow if they were more modern.

I’m not saying Republic isn’t worth reading. It is, if only because it’s a justifiable classic. You’ll learn from it, because you’ll see where so many concepts we almost take for granted originally came from. The Allegory of the Cave, after all, is the ultimate source work of everything from the Gospel of Thomas to The Matrix. The Myth of Er, which rounds out the book, served as inspiration for Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, among many others.

Republic is not, however, political science. It doesn’t describe how to achieve a perfect state, but a state of perfection. While that’s as unattainable as any Platonic ideal, it won’t stop us from trying.

Summer Reading List 2025

Sometimes I forget things. As I grow older, that’s becoming more and more common, much to my dismay. Fortunately for all of us, I didn’t forget that today’s Memorial Day, the start of the Summer Reading List challenge!

I was talking about it over the weekend, and I commented that I started doing it "maybe around 2019". That’s the forgetting part, because I didn’t start it in 2019. No, the original post is dated 5/30/16. 2016. That means this is the 10th Annual Summer Reading List! Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for a decade.

In that time, I’ve read a lot of interesting books, and a few that were…not very interesting. I’ve enjoyed the experience most of all, however, whether I’m reading Jules Verne, Marcus Aurelius, or some random book I spotted on Libgen. My self-imposed rules (which I’ll recap below, as always) are great for pushing me to try new things, and my changing tastes are evident in the "safe" picks I use each time around.

Looking back on the last ten years has also shown how I’ve changed. Early on, you can see the excitement of finding new things, of discovery and exploration. During the dark years of the fake pandemic, my bitterness and despair showed in both what I read and how I talked about it. And the most recent entries paint me as a curious mix of romantic and cynic, which isn’t far from the truth, I’ll admit.

Anyway, on to the rules. They’re a familiar sort by now, with only minor changes as I’ve tweaked them over the years.

The goal is to read 3 new (to you) books between Memorial Day (May 26) and Labor Day (September 1) in the US, the traditional "unofficial" bounds of summer. Southern Hemisphere readers get a winter challenge, probably a better idea because of the long nights.
A "book", for the purposes of the challenge, is anything non-periodical, so no comics, serialized graphic novels, or manga. Anything else works, including standalone graphic novels and light novels. If you’re not sure, just use common sense. Also, audiobooks are acceptable as long as they’re books, not something like a podcast.
One of the books should be of a genre you don’t normally read. For example, I’m big on fantasy and sci-fi, so I might read a romance, or a thriller, or something like that. Nonfiction, by the way, also works as a "new" genre, unless you do read it all the time.
You can’t count books you wrote, because they obviously wouldn’t be new to you. Even if they’re still being edited. Before you ask, this rule exists solely to keep me from just rereading my books.

That’s really all there is to it. I’ll post my thoughts on my selected books here, as usual, and on whatever fediverse account is actually working this summer. (Seriously, I’ve gone through 5 of the things since I started this challenge!) Feel free to post on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you like, too. Use the hashtag "#SummerReadingList2025" to spread the word. Most of all, have fun. This isn’t an assignment.

Enjoy your summer, enjoy your books, and keep reading!

A warning about Amazon

Amazon has very quietly made the unfortunate decision that those who purchase books through the Kindle Store are not entitled to basic customer rights under the doctrine of first sale, and will no longer be allowed to copy those books to anything other than another Kindle. Since this is a violation of the fundamental expectations of a storefront, I feel I must act as someone whose wares are available through that storefront.

If you have purchased one of my books in digital form through Amazon at any point, and you are not able to copy or transfer it to your PC, tablet, or other device, please reach out, and I will send you a DRM-free copy of the book or books you have purchased.

In the meantime, I will be looking for other platforms and storefronts to make my works available as widely as possible, and as freely as possible. Innocence Reborn is already available as an ebook through Barnes & Noble, so that will be the first site I intend to focus my efforts on.

Review: Wind and Truth

It’s been four years since I wrote my review of Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythm of War. In that post, I did a fairly deep dive into the plot, worldbuilding, and character development of the fourth installment of the Stormlight Archive.

Now that series has a fifth entry, Wind and Truth. It came out a few months ago, I read it to kick off 2025, and I’m feeling just sick enough to offer up some thoughts on this particular novel. So let’s go.

Oh, and of course, reviewing the fifth book of a series is obviously going to spoil the first four. It has to be that way. I can’t talk circles around things that have been happening for…what? Almost 15 years now?

The plot

Wind and Truth picks up almost immediately after Rhythm of War left off, and the book is structured around the ending to its immediate predecessor. Dalinar, head of the Knights Radiant and effective leader of the free peoples of Middle—I mean, Roshar, has forced the dark god Odium into an agreement: ten days hence, there will be a clash of champions that will decide the fate of the world.

Thus, the novel is divided into ten parts, one for each day, with some interludes in between. Which is a pretty neat trick, I must admit. In the eighth entry of my Otherworld series, I did something similar, so it’s nice to see a "real" author using the same gimmick. It also helps with the flow, I think. And that’s something needed, because this is a very sprawling book.

Anyway, the plot. The way the deal works is that both sides get to keep the territory they’ve gained at the moment the duel begins. As there’s fighting on more fronts than World War I, that means a mad dash in every direction as armies scramble for territory. Add in the intrigue, politicking, and outright treachery that the bad guys are of course going to use, and it makes for a lot of action.

But that’s not all that’s going on. Kaladin, our hero since the beginning of the series, has been given his own mission. Events in Rhythm of War have left him mentally broken, but in a place where he feels not only that he’s coming out of it, but that he knows how to help other people do the same. In other words, he’s becoming his world’s first therapist. (Wit, a side character who has become much more important as the series has progressed, even states it that way. But I’ll get to that in a moment.)

Kaladin’s quest involves taking Szeth, the first character we ever met back in Way of Kings, to his homeland in the far east. That quickly becomes a major trial straight out of a JRPG, with Szeth needing to free his land from a foul influence one gym leader—er, honor-bearer—at a time. Seriously, it’s very reminiscent of Pokemon or a shounen anime. The Radiant powers only add to the feel.

Meanwhile, the other main characters are playing their parts in the final days of the war. The spren are now no longer simple manifestations of emotions, but important people in and of themselves. And the scope has crept up more than my work, which is a good time to talk about the worldbuilding at play here.

The world (and beyond)

The Stormlight Archive is set on Roshar, a very peculiar planet whose oddities I ran down in the old post. This book did go into more detail about it and its neighbors, Ashyn and Braize, enough that an astute reader can understand what Sanderson is going for here.

Ashyn seems to be the original home of humans in this solar system; they were brought there at some point in the distant past (at least 10,000 years before the books) by Adonalsium, who is finally personalized as some sort of ascended, possibly draconic, being. After he seeded the "Cosmere" with life, some of his cohorts managed to take him down. They split his power into sixteen shards, and Wind and Truth finally has the courage to actually explain this. Through the eyes of the bearer of the Honor shard, no less.

So we finally get some answers I’ve been waiting for since I read that one chapter intro of Hero of Ages that mentioned "this Shard of Adonalsium". It’s about time.

Anyway, Ashyn was where humans lived, until they blew it up and basically turned it into Venus. Braize is a kind of Early Mars analogue that has a curious spiritual power. Roshar, the middle child of the system, is habitable but was also inhabited by the beings who eventually became the Voidbringers, and are now the enemy army of the present day.

Roshar is described in this book as having a kind of mathematical perfection. That makes a lot of pieces click into place for me. That’s why the main—only?—landmass looks like a Julia fractal. That’s why the Shattered Plains have a waveform pattern. That’s why everything seems to be in such…balance.

But humans disturbed that balance by leaving their destroyed homeworld and coming here. I don’t particularly like that concept; it’s very anti-human and reeks of green eco-terrorism. Sanderson tries to deflect it, but he’s not very successful. I’ll return to my thoughts on that at the end of the post.

Beyond this world is an entire galaxy of inhabited planets, some of them with their own Shards whose bearers are quite literally playing God. Because of Roshar’s unique nature, and the fact that it’s home to three of the Shards (Honor, Odium, and the rarely-seen Cultivation), everybody gives it a wide berth.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t references, and here is where the "Cosmere" part comes into play. There are numerous references to the Mistborn series, including a cameo from Demoux, who may or may not be the same B-team captain from those books. And, although I won’t go into detail, the final part of the epilogue even takes place on Scadrial, the Mistborn planet.

It’s ambitious, especially when you add in the last scene of The Lost Metal, which seemed to be going in the opposite direction. But this is where things begin to break down.

The downfall

At times, the interconnected universe Sanderson is weaving starts to come undone. There’s just too much of it, to the point that I would almost say Stormlight Archive is not a self-contained series. Meaning that you have to read his other works to even be able to follow the story at this stage. You’re not going to know who some of the people are, how some of their magic works, or why they’re all here in the first place unless you do. This includes not only Mistborn and Elantris, but also the Stormlight novellas like Edgedancer. I’m not saying it’s a money grab. It’s just an author not knowing how to rein himself in.

That goes for the novel as a whole, though. Weighing in around 1400 pages in hardback, and those printed in a smaller font that gave my failing eyes no end of trouble even with my glasses, Wind and Truth has too much wind for too little truth. The ten-day structure is great for keeping the story moving, but even then it has long stretches where I felt like nothing was really happening.

Some of this comes from Sanderson’s prose, which has not improved to any appreciable extent. He has started including normal English profanity, even when it doesn’t really fit—but he kind of lampoons this at one point, which was nice to see—and still has the occasional Americanism. Some of the characters, especially Maya, talk like I’d expect from Twitter posts rather than a novel with such amazing production quality.

Yes, I was finding some great quotes to send to my girlfriend, like "As I fear not the child with a weapon he cannot lift, I will never fear the mind of a man who does not think." Or "So often, it began with just looking up. That was the first step in clawing free of the darkness." The therapeutic aspect of this book can’t be overstated. Considering I described the cast four years ago as "the DSM-5 in novel form", this is not only appropriate, but welcome.

Apart from such gems, however, the prose generally feels clunky. Too wordy when it needs to be direct, too blunt when it should be descriptive. I don’t know why this is Sanderson’s writing style. It’s the single most infuriating thing about his stories.

The disaster

Well, it was.

Much more in this book, Sanderson has begun inserting not only American figures of speech, but American political topics. Some parts are anti-human. Some are downright woke. At least three named characters came out as gay, which is three more than I can think of in the entirety of his works before this. There’s a general breaking-down of gender roles that permeates the book, an important character who’s a Reddit-tier atheist, and a feel that’s far leftward of anything I remember from the mostly apolitical Mormon I call my favorite author.

Quite possibly the worst bit of progressive ideology in Wind and Truth, however, is the race-blindness. First of all, that’s a very modern concept that doesn’t fit well in a fantasy world to begin with. Second, it’s handled poorly. Real people truly are cognizant of differences in race. Here, though, that recognition is ignored or mocked. Kaladin, for example, is practically berated by his spren companion for noticing and remarking on the much different appearance of those in Shinovar.

You might object by pointing out that the world is embroiled in a fight for survival. Wouldn’t racism be set aside? To a point, yes, but that argument falls flat when you look at the way the "singers" are treated. At every point, even when they aren’t present, humans speak of them with respect and even a hint of reverence. There are no curses, no slurs; they don’t even call them by the name "Parshendi" anymore. There isn’t much of a resistance in the lands they’ve conquered. You get the feeling that some humans like them more than their own species. Considering these are the beings their religion literally depicted as demons, that’s a little hard to swallow.

That’s not the only place where my suspension of disbelief got strained. In the first book of the series, Kaladin and his fellow slaves (as he was at the time) didn’t know anything about the spren, the Cognitive Realm, the healing powers of Stormlight, or any of that. And they were depicted as being average in that regard. Sure, a few people had some hidden knowledge, but even the learned, like Shallan, were largely unaware of their world’s place in the universe.

In Wind and Truth, things are completely different, and that can’t all be attributed to the tumult of the war. Take, for instance, the people of Iri, a backwater rarely mentioned and almost never visited. Somehow they not only know that other worlds exist and are populated by humans, but they have a way to travel into Shadesmar en masse, like a band of gypsies? You’d think that would’ve come out before now, surely.

And that brings me to the ending of both the book and this post. The ending was honestly the worst part of the entire novel. It felt like a letdown, in a way that Sanderson usually doesn’t provide. True, it hit some bittersweet notes, but even those weren’t handled well. Parts of it felt like Empire Strikes Back. Parts felt like I was watching Cartoon Network late on a Saturday night. And parts felt like he just didn’t know where he wanted to put all the major players, so he just kind of…left them stranded.

Maybe the "second arc" of the Stormlight Archive will make that make sense. I hope so. This thing still has five books left to go. In my opinion, Wind and Truth, despite being the biggest one so far, is also the weakest by a wide margin.

Welcome to 2025

Munder Nüjersdag 2025 fram Altidisk!

In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve gotten back on the conlang train over the past year, and I want to use 2025 to ride that train to its next destination. So that’s the big project for the new year, and I’m going to use this post to talk a bit about Altidisk: what it is, why it’s interesting, and why it’s the first time I’m constructing a language explicitly for other people to speak.

Communication and community

Languages are a part of culture. In a very real sense, those who speak a certain language have a shared bond that comes from it, a group distinction that separates them, gives them a way to communicate that recognizes their commonality.

English, being the major language of the world now, lacks that common bond. Because everyone is expected to speak English, or at least know someone who does, those of us who have it as our native language don’t see it as part of our heritage or community. English, alone among the living languages of the world, no longer has an established culture. In that, it’s like Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, or even Sumerian in ancient times. Long gone are the days where speaking English meant you had some connection to England.

Our native tongue’s closest living relatives don’t have that problem. The other Germanic languages are, by and large, spoken in their traditional homelands and by a small group of expats and colonists, most of whom still remember and respect their ancestry. Germans know they’re German, even in Argentina. Swedes know they’re Swedish, whether they’re in Stockholm or St. Paul. Only English, by virtue of the British Empire’s storied history, has lost what it means to be itself.

That was my first motivation behind Altidisk. Because every Germanic language, while different in many ways, has a lot in common. For that matter, every Germanic culture has a lot in common. We all share a deep instinct, almost like genetic memory, that recalls the way of life our ancestors had 2000 years ago. To be Germanic is to descend from a people who prized courage, family, and honor. Three things, coincidentally enough, that are considered disgraceful or even "toxic" in modern times.

The people’s speech

There are other "auxiliary" languages out there. Indeed, the most well-known conlang of them all, Esperanto, is one such. Add in Ido, Interlingua, and a few less-notable cases, and the space is pretty crowded already. The difference is that Altidisk, unlike Esperanto, isn’t intended to be a world language. Its goal is not to replace English. Instead, I want it to augment the Germanic linguistic cultures, to help rebuild that shared bond.

To that end, the words are derived from Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and so on. Grammar is derived from the same source, though with a lot more variation due to the way the individual languages evolved. If you speak any of those languages, you’ll be able to get a good idea of what’s being said without even learning…or that’s one of the goals. I don’t know how well it’ll work in practice.

But the other goal, restoring the cohesion of the Germanic peoples, is just as important. That’s why the language is called "Altidisk" in the first place. Tidisk is its own word for "of the people"—cognate to Deutsch and Teutonic, as a matter of fact—and al is just "all". Thus, "language of all peoples", but specifically all the Germanic peoples. (It also self-identifies as the Viterens Folkspaka: "white folks’ speech", with "white" here used to refer specifically to the people around the shores of the North Sea.)

Resolution

As of today, Altidisk has a lexicon of over 4000 words, and over 5000 semantic meanings; there’s a great deal of homophony in the "core" vocabulary, owing to the way words were derived from Proto-Germanic. I also have translations of a few "classic" conlang texts: the Babel Text (Genesis 11:1-9), the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13), and the entirety of McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader, which has become a kind of exhibition for a budding language.

All told, the corpus is somewhere around 8000 words in total, and I hope to at least double that in the coming year. I also want to do a few more translations, mostly to pin down some of the more obscure corners of the grammar. And then I want to compile that grammar in a format others can use, along with vocabulary lists, lessons, and the like. In short, I’m starting 2025 with the goal that, by the end of it, people—specifically Germanic-descended people—can start communicating in Altidisk.

Then we speakers of English and its cousins can, I hope, find our culture again. And that is a good resolution for the new year.

Summer Reading List 2024: Third

Finished with about a week to spare. Good thing, too. I know next week is going to be awful for reading, and the weekend won’t be any different. Anyway…

Fantasy

Title: In the Shadow of Lightning
Author: Brian McClellan
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2022

I got this one for Christmas two years ago. Never actually read it, mostly because so much in my life was turning upside-down around that time. So I promptly forgot about it and, when Christmas of last year rolled around, put it on my wishlist again. My brother, always willing to try for a laugh, swiped it out of the pile in my room, wrapped it back up, and gave it to me again. And I’ll admit that I was fooled.

The book itself, now that I’ve actually read it, is great. Brian McClellan is one of my favorite current authors, because he really seems to care about his worldbuilding, while also being able to tell a good story without getting bogged down in minutiae. Plus, he specializes in a style of fantasy that’s post-medieval, more 17th than 12th century, which is refreshing and fun. If anything, that’s how I feel reading his books: like I’m having fun.

With In the Shadow of Lightning, that trend continues. The pace is lively throughout the book, and there’s almost never any real downtime. Things happen, and then something else happens on the next page, and so on. No long monologues, very few digressions. The book is long, but tight. I could easily imagine it being another 200 pages if written by most other authors.

The story itself starts out almost typical, with the fantasy cliche of an imperial hero putting down the wicked rebels seeking a measure of autonomy. Things go wrong quite quickly, however, and the main story begins a decade later, with that same hero now living in exile. He gets drawn back into the political game, and there’s not a minute where things let up from there.

Along the way, there’s a lot of fighting. McClellan is definitely a military fantasy writer, and it shows here far more than it did in the Powder Mage series, which was about a war! Essentially the whole book has as its main event a war between the empire and a neighboring country that has retained its independence through trade. Kind of like Venice or the Netherlands, is how I see it.

The lead-up to the war is part of the plot, so I won’t get too into spoilers here. I will say that I guessed "false flag" about five pages into the first post-prologue chapter. Not because it’s telegraphed, but the details simply aligned with what I know of how false flag operations are pushed. 9/11, 1/6, 10/7…anyone who really digs into terrorist attacks and assassination attempts will see that some patterns emerge, and a lot of those patterns point to the supposedly "random" shootings and "unprovoked" attacks actually being started by other agents. Agents of chaos.

Brian McClellan clearly also knows this, as he throws in every single one of the elements we now know to be signs of a false flag operation: a killer who just happens to be of a specific nationality, economic chaos at just the right time, conflicting or outright forged orders, media propaganda to hide the truth. If he isn’t making a statement, then I can’t wait to read the book in which he does.

And that brings me to what I feel is the worst part of In the Shadow of Lightning: the Ossan Empire itself. Rather than your typical fantasy autocracy, possibly with a secret cabal of ministers who are the real power behind the throne, McClellan just jumps straight to the cabal. Ossa is an oligarchical empire where the powerful families vie for dominance.

It’s more of a Renaissance Florence than a High Middle Ages England, in that sense. In the social sense, however, it’s closer to the Weimar Republic…or modern America. The nature of magic in the setting requires body piercings and tattoos, and that’s fine. It’s an interesting twist. But the empire seems to be a place that has given in wholly to decadence and hedonism. Religion has become just another form of commerce. Gender roles are completely absent.

So are sexual roles; essentially every character whose preferences are mentioned has no preferences. At one point, I joked to my girlfriend, "Everybody in this book is bi!" And it’s true. Combined with the guild family dynamic that is ever-present, and I got the same feeling as I did with The Expanse: this whole place is rotten, and there’s nothing even worth redeeming.

If that is another way of representing an empire in decline, then I’m okay with it. It’s a pattern that has recurred throughout history. The failure of the family unit, and the transfer of the nurturing role to government or society at large has happened before. It’s happening now. And the backlash from those who understand human nature has invariably been disastrous.

But this book is anything but a disaster. Read it for what it is: a fun, fast-paced ride through a dying empire, in a world where magic is flashy and deadly. You get some great battles, a lot of political intrigue, and even some Lovecraftian horror near the end. Just remember that the secret cabal of people who masquerade as normal humans to sow dissent and chaos, using degeneracy to bring an empire to its knees while controlling its government and economy from the shadows, is the least fantastic element of the story.

Summer Reading List 2024: Second

The world’s a mess, my life’s a mess, but at least I’m reading. Right?

Military History

Title: The Guns of August
Author: Barbara Tuchman
Genre: Military History
Year: 1962

World War I has always fascinated me. Ever since I was in the 6th grade, when I had a to choose a topic for a social studies project (that year was world history, and I had reached the early 20th century), I was hooked by the stories and the sheer scope of the Great War. My grade on that project was terrible—I almost failed, simply because there was just so much to learn that I couldn’t narrow it down enough, and didn’t have time to rehearse—but the memory remained.

Over the past decade, the war that had languished in relative obscurity all my life finally started to get back into the public eye. Mostly, that’s because of the centennial, the 100th anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in June 1914. That milestone brought about the desire to make new media, whether movies (1917), video games (Verdun and its sequels, Tannenberg and Isonzo), web series (Indy Neidell’s The Great War), or music (Sabaton’s…er, The Great War). Many of these are excellent, and I’ve spent the past ten years basking in the knowledge that I finally got to be a history hipster.

But I haven’t read a book about WWI in decades. And I hadn’t planned on doing so this summer, either, until Elon Musk shared a list of his must-listen audiobooks. Since I don’t really care for audiobooks—I’m a visual learner—I downloaded them in written form, and I picked the first interesting one I saw that wasn’t 11 volumes. Sorry, Will Durant.

The Guns of August is a fairly detailed narrative, drawn from diaries, newspapers, the occasional eyewitness report, and other primary or good secondary sources. Its topic is, broadly speaking, the first month of the war. In practice, it starts somewhat before that, with the death of Edward VII, King of England. His death, and his succession by George V, created a power vacuum in a geopolitical landscape that was already growing increasingly tense. Europe had four years until war finally broke out (ignore the Balkan Wars for a moment), but the buildup had already begun. Edward’s death, as Tuchman argues in a roundabout way, set Europe on the path to war.

Most of us know the broad strokes of the summer of 1914. Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. Austria demanded reparations from Serbia; recall that this was before Yugoslavia existed, much less Bosnia. Favors were called in on both sides, drawing in first Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain, then seemingly every other country in the world. Four years and many millions of dead young men later, the original belligerents peaced out one by one, ending with Germany signing the Treaty of Versailles.

As not enough of us know, that treaty was designed to be so ruinous that the German Empire would cease to be a nation able to project power abroad. Indeed, it was the end of the empire as a whole. Instead, the Kaiser’s rule was replaced with the decadent debauchery of the Weimar Republic, which served to suck out the marrow of the German economy while leaving its society fractured, fragmented. Exactly as we’re seeing in modern America, but I digress.

Anyway, Tuchman’s book isn’t about that part of the war. In fact, it leaves off as the Battle of the Marne begins, ending with a series of what-ifs that are tantalizing to the worldbuilder in me. What if the German armies hadn’t tried to do a forced march just to stick to their predetermined schedule of battles? What if Britain’s Field Marshal French hadn’t been swayed by a rare emotional outpouring from the normally stoic General Joffre? (Now I really want to write that alt-history!)

No matter what might have happened if things had gone differently in August 1914, the author makes it clear that what occurred in the weeks immediately prior to the German advance to the outskirts of Paris were pretty much set in stone. Before Franz Ferdinand was so much as cold, Europe was going to war. It was only a matter of when.

As far as the book goes, it’s a good read. It’s nothing brilliant, and certainly not worth a Pulitzer, in my opinion. The writing can be almost too highbrow at times, as if Tuchman is trying to capture the last gasp of the Victorian Era in words. To be fair, that’s how most of the major players talked and wrote, but readers even in the 1960s wouldn’t have been exposed to it except in literature classes. Certainly not when discussing military history. There are also scores of untranslated sentences in French and German, an oddity in a book written for English speakers.

The pacing is also very uneven. The Russians get a couple of fairly long chapters, but are otherwise forgotten; Tannenberg is practically a footnote compared to Liege. Conditions on a forced march get page after page of narration, including diary excerpts from soldiers, while the battles themselves are mostly reduced to the traditional "date and body count" sort of exposition.

If there’s any real critique of The Guns of August, it has to come from its very obvious and very intentional Allied bias. While the happenings in Germany and among the Kaiser’s generals are well-represented, they’re often cast in a negative light. When the Germans demolish a village in retaliation for partisan attacks, it’s a war crime and an international outrage. When the French demolish a village because they think they might need to put up defenses, it’s a heroic effort to save their country.

This is, of course, the same kind of thinking that still permeates the discussion about the Great War’s sequel. The "bad guys" aren’t allowed to take pride in their country. Their nationalism is evil; ours is sacred. (This line of reasoning also leads otherwise sensible people to praise Communists.) The simple fact is, the Weimar Republic was far worse than it’s portrayed, and the governments to either side of it on the timeline, whether Empire or Reich, were not as bad as they’re portrayed. Barbara Tuchman, being a student of her generation, can’t get past that. Even if she tried, I imagine her publishers wouldn’t let her.

Otherwise, The Guns of August is a worthwhile read for its subject matter. It’s a good look at the backdrop to World War I, something that occasionally gets lost among the trenches. Personally, I find it a bit overrated, but I’m glad I read it.