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.
No comments:
Post a Comment