The Riyria Revelations is a fantasy series by Michael J. Sullivan; four of the projected six novels are now available:

• The Crown Conspiracy
• Avempartha
• Nyphron Rising
• Emerald Storm

I picked up the first book on a recommendation from Amazon.com, based on previous purchases, and have since read the other three, and have been puzzling over what to say about them for some time now. But more of that anon.

The series is set in a fairly convention post-Tolkien world, and concerns the doings of two thieves, Royce Melborn and Hadrian Blackwater. These are the high-class thieves who take on the hard jobs for the nobility, not your mingy backstreet cutpurses. In the first book they get set up to take the fall for a royal murder, escape, and end up saving the kingdom. It’s clear that by the end of the series they are going to end up saving the known world. (Goes with the territory, I suppose.) Along the way they befriend a princess, work with an ancient wizard, are imprisoned and nearly executed any number of times, have a variety of existential crises, fight fabulous monsters, break into ancient elven fortresses, face their past sins, show surprisingly tender hearts, threaten a dwarf, learn to sail, and prove remarkably trustworthy for a pair of thieves.

The author’s stated purpose is as follows:

Eschewing the recent trends in fantasy toward the lengthy, gritty, and dark, the Riyria Revelations brings the genre back to its roots. Avoiding unnecessarily complicated language and world building for its own sake; this series is a distillation of the best elements of traditional fantasy—great characters, a complex plot, humor, and drama all in appropriate measures.

While written for an adult audience the Riyria Revelations lacks sex, graphic violence, and profanity making it appropriate for readers thirteen and older.

Sullivan has achieved at least part of what he set out to do. This is, indeed, a light, entertaining series. He kept me turning pages through four books, and he’s surprised me on a number of occasions. The series is also full of trite, hackneyed situations, settings, and plot elements, and lots and lots of just plain bad writing.

Some of the problems are simply due to poor editing. There are lots of places where commas are missing; and the pseudo-world “alright” shows up occasionally. Sometimes the composition is clumsy; toward the beginning of the first book he spends four or five paragraphs telling us what a particular city and castle look like…and only then lets it drop that our heroes are looking it over. Sometimes he just betrays a tin ear, as when he refers to the inhabitants of the village of Tur as “Turists”. I suppose “Tureens” might be worse, but “Turists”? The word “villagers” would have worked quite as well. Sometimes he telegraphs his moves so strongly that I know just what’s going to happen next; and then, once in a while, he takes me completely by surprise.

The first book was particularly bad, and I nearly stopped reading after thirty or forty pages. But there was a small vein of gold—or, perhaps, silver—running through the mass of broken quartz, and in the event I kept following it through that book and the next three. To be fair, the writing improves somewhat as the first book progresses, and he gets a better handle on his characters.

In short, I’m rather conflicted. The Riyria Revelations is no diamond, and its setting is very, very rough, and yet I’m enjoying them enough to come back for more. It’s an odd feeling. I can think of much better written books that I’ve liked far less; but I can’t think of any books so poorly written that I’ve liked as well.

I guess it’s kind of like breakfast at a greasy spoon. You have to work around the black, crunchy bits, and it’s all rather greasy, but you knew what you were getting when you ordered it, and for what it is, it isn’t half bad.
Clearly, Your Mileage May Vary.

“Already” is a perfectly good word. “Alright” is an abomination. Enough already, all right?

The Warded Man, by Peter V. Brett, is the first book in a new fantasy series. My brother recommended it to me recently, and I read it over the last few days.

The tale takes place in a land plagued by demons who rise at dusk and kill anyone they can find until at dawn they sink back into “the Core”. A human being is no match for an average demon’s strength and ferocity, and anyone out at night is liable to be “cored”—torn to bits and eaten.

In order to survive, humans must live behind “wards,” painted or drawn or carven symbols that interact with the demons’ magic and prevent them from passing. There are a vast number of wards, each with its own specific effect; and they must be drawn in a particular and carefully calculated geometry to create an impassable net. All known wards are defensive, but it is common knowledge that once upon a time men knew offensive wards.

The war between the demons and the humans goes back into ancient history, but eventually, in the distant past, there arose a figure known as the Deliverer. The humans took the battle to the demons, and were winning…and one night the demons failed to rise. They did not return for 3,000 years. (It always amuses me the way fantasy authors throw around periods of time like 3,000 years or 10,000 years or 5,000 years. They seem to have no notion of how long 3,000 years really is.)

During that time, the humans, no longer united by the common enemy, fought among themselves, devising all manner of high technology. The wards were largely forgotten. And then the demons came back. High technology availed little, and much of human civilization was lost. The wards that were still known sufficed to keep a small, low-tech population alive…but as our story begins, some hundreds of years later, it is clear that human population is declining year by year.

The tale follows three characters as they grow into young adulthood: Arlen, a boy from a small village who longs to bring the battle to the demons; Leesha, a girl from a larger village who trains to be the village’s “Herb Gatherer”, and Rojer, a boy apprenticed to a drunken jongleur. Each has his or her encounters with human wickedness and frailty, and also with the demons; and in time their separate paths draw them together. Perhaps a new Deliverer has arisen.

On the whole, I enjoyed the book; the main characters are interesting, and adequately drawn, and they genuinely grow as the book proceeds. I’m curious about what happens to them next. On the other hand, there are a few scenes that I simply do not believe. One character, for example, is brutally raped by bandits…and after the fetal position, the crying, the cringing when anyone male comes near and the obligatory attempts to wash the stain from her body it’s as though nothing happened. Within two days she’s trying to jump another character’s bones. Huh?

I grow increasingly fascinated by the way the standards of our present-day world creep into books set in places that are entirely other. One of the things I liked about Ernest Bramah Smith’s “Kai Lung” books is that the values of the characters are Chinese values, not English values. Or, at least, they are an early 20th-century Englishman’s understanding of Chinese values. In modern fantasy, by contrast, one all too often finds the sympathetic characters hewing pretty closely to the Spirit of the Age in all of its politically correct glory, and I see some of this in Brett’s book.

The most egregious example is when we are told by Bruna, Leesha’s mentor in the art of Herb Gathering, that the Herb Gatherers (all women) are responsible for preserving and passing along what remains of the old technology…none of which they pass along to the men, because the men aren’t to be trusted with it. A world run by women would naturally be a world at peace. Nope, not buying it.

So, I enjoyed it with some caveats. I’ll most likely read the sequels. But Jim Butcher’s Calderon novels cover some of the same territory and are a lot more fun.

Whilst searching the free e-books at FeedBooks.com, I happened to run into two books written in the 1920’s by Ernest Bramah Smith: The Wallet of Kai Lung and Kai Lung’s Golden Hours. Kai Lung is a traveling story teller in a China of long ago. The books consist largely of the tales he tales; but also of the scrapes he gets into, and how he uses his stories to get out of them.

The tales are often funny, and remind me somewhat of Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, though they neither as fantastical nor as broad in their humor; but the real selling point is the language, which is both precise and beautiful. These are not books that you can skim; there are no wasted words, and if you miss any you’ll miss something important.

Here, Kai Lung describes a particularly pretty girl:

After secretly observing the unstudied grace of her movements, the most celebrated picture-maker of the province burned the implements of his craft, and began life anew as a trainer of performing elephants.

Here he examines the alternatives open to him:

“It has been said,” he began at length, withdrawing his eyes reluctantly from an usually large insect upon the ceiling and addressing himself to the maiden, “that there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without any loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night.”

And here, he is telling of a grandfather who is advising his grandson on finding a bride:

“What suitable maiden suggests herself to your doubtless better-informed mind? Is there one of the house of Tung?”

“There are eleven,” replied Chang Tao, with a gesture of despair, “all reputed to be untiring with their needle, skilled in the frugal manipulation of cold rice, devout, discreet in the lines of their attire, and so sombre of feature as to be collectively known to the available manhood of the city as the Terror that Lurks for the Unwary. Suffer not your discriminating footsteps to pause before that house, O father of my father!”

Good fun, and not at all the worse for wear after all these years. Check ’em out.