Chapter 4: In which we meet our "Heroes"

Chapter 4

Zelana starts us off by drifting westward over the sea on the wind. Fair enough, it’s an effective way to travel from A to B and it’s not like it’s laborious. She’s heading west because she knows that there was a continent over there before she got obsessed with the pink dolphins, once again bringing up the plot hole that they seem to live forever as apparently there’s a real risk that continental drift had already moved it away since she retreated to her grotto. I should also take this moment to apologize, as apparently pink dolphins are a real phenomenon in the form of albinism. Given that there’s an entire race of them I’m not sure if it counts, but whatever. This book could benefit from having less plot holes, so we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. The sea is always referred to as ‘Mother Sea’, which irks me… but that’s just my personal preference. Also, since the sea in this setting is actually sentient the term is not entirely without merit. How did the sea become sentient? Never explained, but apparently both the planet and its moon are also sentient, as are: lightning; a manicure sun; the winds (I think. Brief mention in a later book, and I could be misremembering). I want you to dwell on that for a moment. The air has thoughts and feelings in this world. You’re breathing in a sentient entity. That is all kinds of horrifying.

It also occurs to me that Zelana is arguably the worst goddess ever. She seems to be such a fifth wheel in the whole running the universe thing, what with the fact that she went into a cave and wrote poetry for a few millennia and everything seemed to go along fine without her. Likewise, her brother got sent to the moon for a similar amount of time with likewise no ill effects to his domain. I don’t know, it seems like their presence isn’t really necessary either within the context of the story world, or that of the narrative. In all honesty, I feel that the story would have benefited if, instead of a goddess floating over the ocean to go find outlanders to bring against her enemies, we were following a lone tribesman braving the terrors of the open oceans in a desperate bid to find someone, anyone, who could help save his tribe from the horrors of the Vlagh. I don’t know, maybe I don’t find immortal and all-powerful protagonists that interesting.

Anyway, Zelana demonstrates her hit-and-miss knowledge of the world by not knowing what a ship is (Despite her fellow gods knowing about how savage and warlike the outlanders are, or even knowing about metalworking. Maybe she just didn’t ask them for any information on the people she was going to try and meet… which considering the urgency of her mission and the fact that using her fellow gods’ experience could save her valuable time seems to me to be a bit stupid). She lands on the water and tiptoes towards the longboat. Screw you physics, I’m a goddess! On the bright side, we’ve got a ship full of Viking warriors about to be introduced to the story, and that has to be an improvement… right?

Ok, one quick thing. Zelana quote ‘adjusted her hearing’ unquote to understand the Vikings. Except that we established that the understanding of languages comes from telepathy and has nothing to do with hearing, and we established this about 2-3 pages ago. They weren’t even trying.

In a surprisingly well executed exposition dump we learn that the longboat is called the Seagull, the first mate is known as Ox, the Vikings are known as the ‘Maags’, and their favorite prey are a race known as the ‘Trogites’.  I wouldn’t say that the dialogue here is flowing, but I’ve seen a lot worse in my time and it gets the job done quickly, cleanly, and without feeling too forced.

Take another shot, the Maags are referred to as ‘Man-Creatures’. Seriously David, what have you got against the word ‘humans’? Zelana knows what humans are, why do we need the stupid hyphenated speech-on-paper-thing? Anyway, goddess-called-Zelana sits on big-water-thing-known-to-some-as-mother-sea-but-to-others-as-the-ocean-and-this-joke-is-going-on-too-long and thinks, somehow avoiding hurting herself while doing so. She concludes that the Maags are not in fact fishermen, what with their weapons and the fact that they were talking about hunting down other ships. She also deduces that they are in fact out to steal gold from the Trogites, for reasons that she cannot fathom. I can’t actually fault her on this, as throughout the books the concept of money is never broached or explained to any of the Dhrall characters, leaving them to wonder about this obsession with gold the outlanders have. More on that later.

It is now that we are introduced to one of our interchangeable outlander main cast, Sorgan Hook-Beak. His defining qualities are that he’s in charge and he’s greedy, with the generic persona of a lovable rogue of the pirate persuasion. We’re mixing and matching cultures at this point, just roll with it. We are also introduced to the other Maags, most of whom we never hear about again. However, there are two that we will see regularly introduced here: Kryda Ham-Hand and Rabbit. Ham-Hand and Ox never receive any real characterization beyond dumb muscle and that Ox has terrible hayfever, though this never gets forshadowed and is only mentioned when it becomes important to the plot in book 3. These two are basically interchangeable. Rabbit is one of the few members of this entire series with an IQ as high as room temperature, and as a result will be our ‘smart guy’ from now on. Be prepared to find yourself dazzled by his intellect. He is genuinely a skilled metalworker, which will prove consistently useful throughout the four books.

They attack a Trogite vessel, who’s inhabitants bail out rather than show resistance. I personally feel that this is a poor way to demonstrate how badass these guys are, as all it really shows is that their reputation is bad enough that a bunch of unarmed merchants will jump ship rather than get slaughtered. Ox suggests burning the vessel after they’ve finished looting it. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen! Oh, and remember that this is out in the middle of the ocean, so burning the ship would effectively condemn all those men to swimming until they were too tired and drowned. Sorgan vetoes the suggestion on the grounds that if they get their ship back they can be robbed again at a later date. Whatever you say about that, at least it’s better than his first mate’s ‘burn everything’ mentality.

Long story short, Zelana abducts them by asking the sea to create a strong current to the land of Dhrall, pulling their ship along for the ride. 

Chapter 3: The least dramatic council of the gods in recorded history.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 opens with Zelana swimming out of her grotto, once again showing that there’s no surface exit. We then get to find out how the gods get around in this world: they glide on the winds. Well, technically that’s not fair. The female gods glide silently on the winds, while the male gods ride around on tame ‘thunderbolts’ (which I assume is lightning). Come on, be honest: if you could tame lightning and ride it around as a form of transportation you totally would. One interesting factor is that apparently the gods can levitate up and down under their own power but are unable to fly at a reasonable velocity without assistance.

Our next scene takes place in the cave home of Zelana’s older but the same age brother (They’re gods, they don’t have to explain it) Dahlaine. Now Dahlaine has recently discovered that the civilizations beyond their little continent have found metal and learned to shape it, something that is a new concept around here. Now judging from the dialogue this is the first time the gods have even HEARD of metal (just metal. Not even ‘Iron’ or ‘Copper’ or anything like that. Just generic ‘metal’), which strikes me as odd. Maybe it’s my modern sensibilities shining through but I would expect that GODS who’ve had thousands of years to get bored and poke around have never so much as heard of metal before a bunch of apes got digging.

We also find out that his dreamer is called Ashad, and he was raised by bears in the same way as Eleria was effectively raised by dolphins. By the way, you can safely forget any dreamer apart from Eleria. They never do anything interesting that we see firsthand, and get SFA dialogue.

Anyhow, we get a quick recap of the events of last chapter. Look, I may only be an amateur author compared to David but it seems to me that recapping the last chapter for about a three pages, on the third chapter of the first book, might not be the best way to get the story rolling. I like a slow start, but seriously! We just read that a few pages ago! The dialogue tends to repeat itself a bit as well, which is irksome.  

Now we get another glimpse of Zelana’s wonderful personality: She’s what TvTropes would probably list as a deadpan snarker.  This character trait is normally very endearing to me, but in this instance the sarcasm is somewhat unjustified. Also, every member of the cast displays this trait, so the novelty will be wearing off very quickly.

Now we get our introduction to Zelana’s older sister, Aracia. Her primary character traits are vanity that verges on narcissism and a lack of general grounding in reality. She lives in a large temple/palace which is populated with lazy, sycophantic priests who spend all day telling her how awesome she is. Now according to the book the temple is made of carved stone blocks sheathed in pale marble, which is pretty… I’m just not sure how they managed that without any form of metal tools. I mean it’s obviously possible for the basic construction as the mayans managed to make their pyramids at a similar tech level, but I was always under the impression that marble required more advanced tools to work effectively. Ok, I admit that’s nitpicky.

Hmmm… Aracia is introduced as wearing a golden crown and sitting in a golden throne. Once again I could be wrong but I thought that kind of metalworking was beyond stone age technology. Oh well, she’s a god so I should probably let it slide.

Some of you may have noticed that I’m repeatedly getting hung up on the technology inconsistencies. This is intentional, because one of the entire themes of the series is technology levels… which are then arbitrarily ignored, seemingly at random.

Anyway… we get a scene of Zelana rocking up to the middle of the church practically naked, solely to cause offense. In essence, to troll her sister and the priests. We then get the family hierarchy explained to us in some dialogue which is supposed to show Aracia as inflexible and stuck up but actually shows Zelana as rude and obnoxious. So Zelana drags Aracia away and off to the family meeting, and on the way we glean a couple of things from their conversation. Firstly, Aracia knows very little about the world she’s a god on, up to and including that the planet is round. Secondly, gods can breathe in space. Thirdly, the young brother Veltan was once banished to the moon. Fourthly, Veltan is obsessively trying to catalogue every possible shade of the colour blue. Well, if you’ve got eternity I suppose you’ve got to kill time somehow.

New scene! Our goddesses enter… an empty cave! It looks like Dahlaine hasn’t managed to round up Verltan yet. On the bright side we get to see Dahlaine’s pet sun, which is another pretty cool demonstration of the kind of thing you can do when physics are more guidelines than actual rules. Aracia demonstrates a lack of understanding of the world again, this time being ignorant of how stalactites form. You know, if I were on a world where one of the oldest and most powerful beings in existence was this ignorant of stuff that it’s pretty much her job to know… I think I’d be very worried.

And now the boys arrive, riding on their thunderbolts. Naturally Aracia comments on how childish the showing off is without even a hint of irony… the book doesn’t mention if she’s still wearing her crown at this point. This is followed by some condescension about their maturity by Zelana… you know, the lady who’s spent the last few thousand years shirking her duties to sit in a pink grotto and compose poetry.

Oh no, you’ve got to be kidding me… they’re recapping again! Fortunately it gets interrupted quickly by a reveal that was already spoiled by the back cover, and the last chapter, and earlier this chapter. I mean, there’s forshadowing and then there’s hammering the point home with an oversized mallet! The dreamers are… the other gods! *Du du du!*

Now apparently this is a very bad thing, on par with crossing the streams… though exactly why is never explained. Something to do with too much power being active at once or something is the best we get. Dahlaine reveals that he did this so they could help defend against the Vlagh’s invasion. Zelana summarizes the incredibly obvious plan and gets complemented on her intelligence by her brethren, and we get a recap of what was just discussed.

Now Dahlaine points out that their population of stone age hunter gatherer tribes aren’t really suited for resisting a bug invasion, and suggests they bring in the more advanced societies on other continents to fight the war for them. Aracia comments on how they’re barbarians who’re no better than the creatures of the wasteland, and the gods should not get them involved. Dahlaine says that they can manipulate them to their own ends… which ironically is the most classic god suggestion we’ve seen so far (most pre-christian pantheons were considered to play games with the fates of men).

It turns out that Verltan is the one god that takes any interest in the world around him and has actually looked into the world beyond his house. He tells his family how to make the language barrier redundant and simultaneously make the entire scene with Eleria learning to speak human COMPLETELY REDUNDANT: use a low-level telepathic field to translate.

Ok, we’re winding up the chapter now with one more mystery: Dahlaine somehow knows that the outlanders like gold, in spite of saying earlier that he doesn’t understand their language and implying that he doesn’t understand their cultures. Now this will come up again… repeatedly. However, that rant can wait.

Chapter 2: Padding? Already?!?

Chapter 2

I want to open this week with a discussion on padding. Padding is the practice of increasing your word count by adding portions of your book which don’t contribute to the story, and that exist solely for that purpose. It can be argued that no scene involving the main characters or recurring secondary characters qualifies as padding, as by their nature they increase the reader’s knowledge of said characters and thus fill the purpose of rounding them out. For instance, a scene of the main characters in a dungeon-crawl based novel crashing in a tavern, hanging out with each other and getting drunk is probably not going to progress the main plot or any of the side plots, with the possible exception of the romance sideplot. However, since it shows us how the characters act in a situation outside of the norm it helps make them more three-dimensional.

Even scenes that simply take place in new locations help us get a feel for the world the author has created, arguably giving a scene value by world-building. In some instances the author gets carried away with this (LOTR is guilty of this), giving us a lot of scenes that can be cut without adversely affecting the story, but that doesn’t make them filler as they still have the purpose of expanding the fantasy world.

The Elder Gods second chapter opens with what could charitably be called a ‘get-to-know-you’ scene, Once again in the grotto where Zelana has made her home. We don’t get much of a description beyond ‘the ceiling is made of rose quartz and it can only be accessed by water’, but it’s a cave so you can’t expect anything too interesting. Sure Zelana has lived there for literally eons, but apparently she’s been happily composing poetry and music all that time and so has kept herself entertained. Yes, that’s how she has spent all that time she was hiding from her duties as the guardian of the west… I think. It’s never really explained if the gods and goddesses HAVE any duties or purpose, they just… are.

Anyway, next page we find out that apparently Eleria is apparently a very fast learner and has gotten the habit of kissing dolphins until they do what she wants. Pardon me for a moment, I need to go and pistol-whip myself into a coma.

Ouch… Anyway, we find out that Eleria has picked up godspeak in addition to the language of the dolphins, though unlike some cosmologies this language is just used to communicate and holds no special power. As a result, events in a few chapters will make this development, SPOILERS!!! COMPLETELY POINTLESS!!!

Oh, and we get my favorite line so far: “A wave of emotion swept over Zelana, and she felt her own eyes clouding over.” To be fair my eyes are clouding over as well, a cerebral hemorrhage will do that. WHAT EMOTION?!? CONTEXT, USE IT!!!

Sorry, I failed my sanity check. Give me a moment to get my meds.

I am perfectly fine now, and most definitely not a robot created to review in the Irate Reader’s place. We are introduced to an obvious plot device in the form of a large magic pearl. It is given to Eleria by the incarnation of mother sea in the form of a giant whale. We get a dream sequence that shows the start of the world, which does not progress the plot. However, the dream also does not provide character development. It also does not provide new setting information.

The dream has no purpose. Therefore my reading it had no purpose. Therefore I have no purpose.

Self destruct initiated.

Aaand that’ll teach me for buying a discount review bot. Sorry folks, I overdosed on the meds and slipped into a bit of a coma so the emergency review bot took over. Looks like I’m going to have to do some repairs, so I’ll quickly sum up: This chapter could have had the important parts placed compressed into a single paragraph at the start of the next chapter without hurting the story. Honestly, it could have been cut and the only real effect would have been to reduce the wordcount on the book. The character attributes it develops are never mentioned again, the dream’s little exposition is stuff that has already been told to us and is primarily to demonstrate that Eleria is a dreamer, which was outright told to us last chapter. The plot point of the magic pearl has an equivalent for each of the dreamers, but feels completely unnecessary in the context of the story. Oh, there’s a tiny bit of clumsy foreshadowing which anyone who can count up to eight has already worked out by this point. Untwist: The dreamers are the next shift of gods! Which of course makes the need for the magic pearl even more confusing. Oh well, let’s go out with the filler song, just to keep my word count up:

(To be sung off key, with no discernible tune. I have no illusions about my musical ability.)

Filler!

Wonderful filler!

Beautiful filler!

Makes writing a thriller

That much chiller!

Filler!

It’s a killer!

Filler!

Thank you very much.

Chapter 1: It begins

Chapter 1 opens with one of our ‘protagonists’, Zelana of the west, retreating to her grotto in order to avoid the ‘man-creatures’ of her domain. Don’t like the hyphenated description? Suck it up, there are about a million more coming. Seriously, it’s as if Blizzard decided when making starcraft that instead of zerglings, hydralisks and ultralisks we had ‘small-stabby-multilegged-rip-you-apart-creatures’, ‘larger-spine-shooting-slithering-creatures’ and ‘big-rip-you-apart-creatures’. Ok, I’m pre-empting it a bit here, but that seriously annoys me. Make up a damned name for the Vlagh’s various minions!

Anyway, away from that rant: Zelana complains about how the protohumans seem to think she lives only to serve them. Fair enough, I’d be annoyed too. However… think for a moment. How do they get this idea? And anyway, isn’t this sort of thing kind of the entire reason you’re here?!? Ok, final thing for this paragraph: The humans are apparently repulsive. Sorry to break it to you honey, you look human and nowhere in the books does it even hint that your form is mutable.

Anyway, Zelana goes to her hidden grotto for a few eons hanging out with pink dolphins. Interestingly it makes note of her learning their language, even though in a few chapters we’ll find out that knowing the language is completely irrelevant to this character. We find out that she’s a musician… which to the best of my knowledge will not be used after about half way through book 1, but charitably we could call that fleshing out the character. That charity will be wasted, as this character will be a complete fifth wheel for every book other than this one, but oh well.

Now we get a basic introduction to the other gods, and the locations of each of their domains. She is in charge of the west. Dahlaine, her older brother (Even though all the gods are the same age. Just roll with it) holds dominion over the north. Forget about him, he’s a non-character for the most part. Her younger brother (See above) has the south. He’s one of the best rounded and most relatable characters in this series, with interesting eccentricities such as a love of the colour blue and an interesting history including being banished to the moon. Oh, and in charge of the east is Aracia. She’ll get some lines in the fourth book, we can look at her then. Oh, final thing: the gods in this world are solar powered.

Now we get a fairly pointless scene where she finds a cave roofed with pink quartz. She moves in, and we get introduced to the pet name that we will soon be sick of: Beloved. I hate that nickname, and no less than two characters end up with it… but that’s my personal preference.

Now Dahlaine rocks up for some pointless padding where we find out exactly how negligent and arrogant Zelana is, plus a bit on how humans are so smelly and messy compared to the wise dolphins. Oh, and if the wasteland critters chow down on the humans it’s no skin off her nose. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. Dahlaine points out that, you know, she has one point in existing and she’s kind of ignoring it. So she goes meh. Then Dahlaine says “I bring a gift” and she stops sulking and goes “yay! Gimmegimmegimme”! So it becomes a guessing game that throws up a continuity issue: apparently she hasn’t left her cave for a dozen eons, back before tools and fire, yet she knows what a puppy and kitten are in the context of a pet. Tools and fire predate domestic animals, David. Also, she hasn’t interacted with the world in millennia, how does she know that kittens purring is supposed to be relaxing?

Anyway, the gift turns out to be a baby. Now I want to be clear: the goddess has no maternal instinct. She has no need for any of the biological imperatives of humans. She has never raised a child. This is a disaster waiting to happen. Oh, and we find ourselves exposed to the first inkling of the ‘humour’ of this book. Basically, about half of the jokes in this series are someone saying something obvious, then someone else sarcastically telling them that they’re amazing. I’d suggest making it a drinking game, but killing off my readers with severe alcohol poisoning would be bad. Anyway, we get told that the child is in fact one of the dreamers, and find out that Zelana apparently hates men. This will never come up again or be a factor in any interaction for the rest of the series.

Now we get several pointless pages of Zelana trying to find out how to take care of a baby. Imagine every sitcom ever where a guy has had to take care of a baby and you’ve pretty much got it. One thing that does come up is that the dolphins are basically immortal, as the same dolphin matron that found the cave for Zelana is now giving her childrearing advice… several EONS later. I honestly believe that this was not intentional, but for all I know dolphins in this world are ageless. Who’da thunk it?

The kid gets raised by dolphins, and named Eleria. She is the only dreamer who’ll get more than a few sentences of dialogue for the rest of the series, and is going to be that annoying child goddess I told you about. She kisses dolphins and people into submission, and is generally a sickly sweet little brat who always gets her own way and NEEDS TO DIE IN AN ORBITAL BOMBARDMENT… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

And there we have chapter 1. Mainly pointless padding that characterizes a fifth wheel, a little bit of awkward exposition, and the introduction of my second least favorite character in the series. We’ll meet my least favorite in a few chapters. To be honest there’s nothing wrong with starting off slowly, but I feel that about three quarters of the chapter could easily be cut with no loss to the story. The humour wasn’t impressive, but since it’s the first time that joke has been used in the story I suppose it’s funny enough to lighten the mood.

Preface: A chapter-sized plothole

Preface:

Glancing at the initial pages we discover that the book is copyrighted to David and Leigh Eddings, who assert their right to be acknowledged as the authors. Fair enough. They also specify that no part of the publication may be reproduced on the interwebs, so unfortunately there will be no quotes or excerpts for the entire review L.

We also uncover that there is no listed editor. While this isn’t actually that unusual, I suspect that no-one actually went through and checked this book out. From a publisher’s point of view this does actually make some sense, as hiring someone to go through a book and check for plotholes is expensive, there were two people working on this already, and they had already produced a lot of books in this genre that had a solid fan base. There was no reason to expect this one to be any different.

Now we begin. The preface is framed as an in-universe work written after the events of the series. This would be entirely fine, but… well, the reason it doesn’t make sense is a spoiler but suffice to say that later events make this highly improbable. To be entirely fair, it’s probable that David and Leigh didn’t know exactly what was going to happen four books from now and thus didn’t realize their mistake. In fact, it’s a minor nitpick that’s only a plothole if you’ve already read the entire series… but it’s the fricking annotation to the word ‘Preface’, before the story has technically begun! It takes a special type of fail to have the (probably unnecessary) annotation to  the first word in your book open up a plothole which, at the end of all this, you will see is massive.

Anyway, now we get some exposition on the general background of the setting. Condensed, it’s that most of our story will be taking place on the continent of Dhrall, where we have eight gods who take 25 thousand year shifts to watch over the place in groups of four. Oh, and the land and sea are sentient beings. We also find out that in spite of no less than eight gods and two sentient forces hanging out we still get evolution, which is all well and good. The style of writing drags a bit… well, to the point that by the time you’ve learned this much we’re on page 3, but it does fit with the framing device so that’s forgivable.

Now we are introduced to the antagonist, which is known as That-Called-the-Vlagh. However, for this review I’m going to refer to it as Vlagh from now on. Basically, Vlagh is the hive-queen of an army of zerg-style minions, primarily derived from stinging insects and snakes. It has some form of genetic engineering ability that allows it to customize its offspring in a way that is never really explained. Its goal is to… yup, you guessed it, it wants to take over the world (Of Course!). To be fair, it actually has a decent reason for wanting to do this, namely to get more food and thus be able to have more children/servants, which in turn expands its hive mind. All well and good.

Finally, we get our plot device: the dreamers. Basically, these guys are kids that are walking Deus Ex Machina. I do not like them, primarily because only one ever gets any form of characterization at all and she basically becomes yet another of D.E.’s child goddesses, which are a pet peeve of mine. However, I can understand the appeal to an author of having a preexisting ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card for when a series of events have served their purpose and you just want to move on with the story. Lazy writing? Maybe, but if it gets the story moving instead of letting it get bogged down then it’s a forgivable flaw. Oh, and they can tell the future in inconsistent and illogical ways, and get new powers as the plot demands.

And it’s over. It dragged, but otherwise it set up the plot and introduced the setting well enough. Tune in next week for chapter 1.

It begins.

Hello. I am the Irate Reader.

You and I are about to go on a journey. A journey into literary hell. No, this is not another review of Twilight (which I honestly haven’t read), or of the Inheritance Cycle (which I actually don’t mind), or of anything else that every man and his dog has gone and ripped to shreds. No, this little abomination of a series managed to stay outside of the public eye for the most part, and was quite rightly forgotten.

So why am I bringing it up from its grave? Simple. This series is spectacularly awful, and as it hasn't been ripped to shreds by every reviewer ever I might be able to make a couple of comments that haven’t been heard everywhere before. In addition to that, this book lacks the excuse that the other two series I mentioned can get away with: they have new authors, this series was written by a fairly well known author.

David Eddings.

Yes, David sadly passed away in January of the year 2007. Yes, he did a lot of good work in his time. I am a fan of several of his earlier works. That is what makes this series even worse: we know that the author can do better. So here we are, going through this chapter by chapter to examine exactly why this series is so bad.

Now unlike the excellent web series ‘Mark Reads: Twilight’ I am not going in blind. I have read the series several times before, primarily to try and work out exactly what went wrong and why. I think I have found this elusive element and am going to share it with you, chapter by chapter. You will share my pain on this test of mental endurance. Buckle up, we’re in for a rough ride.