By the Numbers (of a d20)

I must apologise for the lack of content from me; June turned out to be a fantastically busy month. I'll be back next week with at least one new post, but for now here's a reprint SFX review, from a few months back, to be getting on with: Rides a Dread Legion (2009), by Raymond E. Feist. After a run of good review books, it all went a bit pear-shaped...

--

Reader, beware: this may be the first in a new series, but there is a serious weight of backstory here. No less than twenty-four books written or co-written by Feist are set in the same universe. At times, during this instalment, it feels like the characters are going to synopsize the plot of each and every one.

It is easy to see why Feist keeps returning to the same well: it is a rewardingly complex creation, made up of multiple fantastical planets (and planes of existence) reachable by magical portals. The story possibilities are enormous, and glimpses of the ‘deep’ past are fascinating, like the fact that a community of elves living in splendid Lothlorien-esque peace, the eledhel of Elvandar, once built their power upon enslavement of other races. Unlike so many fantasy worlds, Feist’s is no static, pseudo-medieval society that has endured unchanging for thousands of unlikely years.

In practice, though, past books have generally boiled the story possibilities down to magical invasion – usually of Midkemia, home of human, dwarves and eledhel. The new series looks to be no exception. But Dread Legion spends most of its length in explanation and set-up, as an elven people called the taredhel flee the demonic ravaging of their home planet for Midkemia, and the usual suspects line up to defend the world once again.

Some of the set-up is plot-necessary, if inelegantly done. A handful of taredhel spend several chapters explaining their history to each other, and to an audience in Elvandar. The omniscient narration gives us the new characters’ backgrounds, generally in large chunks of text when they first enter the story. Elsewhere, though, the exposition only serves to highlight how entangled this story is with the existing continuity, as a seemingly endless litany of references to past adventures – many of which sound more interesting than the present one – slows the pace to a crawl.

There is limited action, and it tends to read like turn-based combat straight out of a roleplaying game. [Aside: The world of Midkemia began life as a roleplaying setting dreamt up by Feist when he was in college. So the very D&D fights are probably no coincidence...] Overly-precise information about the mechanics of spells and demon defences – and tension-puncturing language like someone receiving only “a nasty bump” after being magically slammed into a cave wall – get in the way of any thrills or grit. Certain characters, like troubled knight Sandreena, are interesting, but many are distinguishable only by name and backstory. Returnees like Pug, so fully portrayed in novels like Magician, are poorly served here.

~~Nic

Comments

[Victoria]

'June turned out to be a fantastically busy month.'

Methinks someone is hiding their light under a bushel Dr. Nic. ;-)

[Max Cairnduff]

My problem with this sort of novel is that as you note it tends to read like someone else's roleplaying game, and as with many other things they're better to take part in than to observe.

Oddly enough, there's a problem that occurs in some rpgs, where a player comes to the table with a new character for which they've written a backstory. Sometimes that backstory is full of extraordinary incident, grand adventure, being after all a sort of literary outlet for the player. Trouble is, once play starts and dice are rolled, the odds are what actually happens won't be as dramatic as the backstory was.

Your review strongly reminded me of that, all this backstory and the forestory (to coin a word) struggling to live up to it all.

It sounds, well, bad. And I say that as someone who has read and enjoyed some of Feist's work (Magician for example). My impression is that this is an essay in novel form, setting the stage for the story that will be developed in the later volumes, does that sound right to you?

[Nic]

Max:

"My problem with this sort of novel is that as you note it tends to read like someone else's roleplaying game, and as with many other things they're better to take part in than to observe."

Yes, quite, as I've discovered when trying to explain to non-gamers exactly why what our party did last night was So Very Kick-Arse... you have to be there!

I, too, read and enjoyed _Magician_ back in the day (and the Empire trilogy he did with Janny Wurts); as you say, though, this particular instalment is all set-up, no pay-off, and frankly there are too many interesting books around clamouring for my attention already. :-)

[Max Cairnduff]

I think rpgs have, oddly enough, been a very bad influence on the fantasy genre. Too many fantasy novels are influenced by stuff taken from D&D, to their great disadvantage. I think that imitating rpgs has choked the genre a bit.

But I admit, my idea of great fantasy fiction is Viriconium, which I think is simply brilliant and as far from D&D style fiction as one can get.