In retrospect, the first warning sign for this book should have been that the author included a dramatis personae (an index of main characters) at the beginning of the book. And that dramatis personae detailed ninety-two different major characters for this book. In the first fifty pages of the book, there were dozens upon dozens of locations and historical events mentioned that the reader has no context for.

After a hundred some-odd pages of this endless, sprawling epic story that made no sense, I decided to take a break and do a little research on this title. Apparently the author and his friend initially developed this fantasy world as a setting for a tabletop roleplaying game (like Dungeons & Dragons). Then, they decided to turn it into a screenplay because they were unhappy with the quality of fantasy films at the time. They discovered that movies are a little harder to make than they appear and, after years of little to no interest in their script (largely citing it being "too risky" to produce), they converted it yet again into a new medium: a novel. The novel was apparently a success, with the publisher (in what may have been a competitive bidding situation) offering 675,000 British pounds for an additional nine books in the series, all based on the worldbuilding that Erikson and his friend had done during the previous incarnations of this project.

Suddenly it all made sense. This is a story that's being told for the third time by an author who fell in love with his own worldbuilding. And while that does appeal to a certain subset of fantasy readers who just want to disappear into fantastic new worlds of imagination, I've mentioned before that doesn't really work for me. Worldbuilding is not a substitute for good characters and good story, and it's really difficult to just drop a reader into a fully-realized fantasy world and just expect them to start figuring things out. While I'm sure the story made sense to the author with his intricate knowledge of the entire history of the world he created, for the outsider coming in (i.e., the reader), it was a mess. It was an attempt to be J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, but without the storytelling skill to draw the reader (or at least this reader) in with any interesting story or character development.

I got this book from a friend who said that the series "gets better after book one" and "benefits from a reader who takes notes and keeps track of things while they read." I'm not the kind of reader who is willing to invest 500 pages to see if it "gets better" later, and I'm definitely not the kind of reader who enjoys taking notes to make sense of my leisure reading. So I stopped after Part One of the book and don't see myself going back anytime soon.

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Created Feb 25, 2024 at 11:08pm • Submit your own review...