Book of Athyra / 500 Years / Dragon
Sep. 13th, 2017 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishThe Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 3
The Ace books have decidedly Aged Well, which is always a pleasant surprise. The treatement of Easterners feels remarkably relevant and contemporary (at least, so saith this white dude), and the sense of having wandered into someone's high-powered D&D game doesn't persist past Jhereg, or maybe Yendi. I'd definitely recommend them.
Athyra
A peasant boy accidentally gets involved with a wiseass ex-assassin who's wandered back to the scene of a much earlier crime. This ends poorly for everyone, except maybe the ex-assassin.
Surprised to find myself actively enjoying Athyra this time through. I used to plow through it for completion's sake. I miss Vlad's point of view and Loiosh's banter, and I miss Morrolan and Aliera and Kragar... but the story itself is excellent, and pleasantly complex. It's a fine continuation of themes begun in Teckla and developed in Phoenix. I think I was just upset because it doesn't feel much like a Vlad book.
Also, the Rocza-narrated bits are neat. Definitely a perspective I appreciate having.
Orca
Wiseass ex-assassin and master thief investigate an old woman who's being foreclosed on, and uncover way more than they'd expected. Features two of the so far three (four, if you count Devera's parentage in Tiassa) biggest spoilers in the series.
This is about half from Vlad's viewpoint (yay!) and half from that of Kiera the Thief (unexpected and yay!). Very neat to see Vlad from outside, from the point of view of someone who knows him.
Now I want to read Orca and watch The Big Short back-to-back. Orca's clearly more inspired by things like the S&L swindle of the eighties, or the dotcom bubble of the nineties, than the real estate shenanigans of the 2000s, but I expect I'd find some really interesting parallels.
Five Hundred Years After
(Foreword by Pamela Dean)
More Dumas-inspired fantasy. Dragaeran analogues of the four Musketeers reunite and get swept up in history, culminating in the destruction of the Empire.
Perhaps surprisingly for as much as I loved Phoenix Guards, I'm pretty meh on FHYA. Paarfi's voice is beginning to grate on me in places. Worse, with the exception of one scene, Tazendra has been Gimli-ized into comic relief: from "maybe not exceptionally bright but with a keen grasp of human relations" to a one-note "lack of comprehension" sidekick. Bah, as Aerich would say.
I enjoyed getting to know Pel a bit better, and I felt like the overall plot hung together really well. The Khaavren/Daro romance, while not groundbreaking, was enjoyably sweet. "Uneven," is maybe the best adjective? I suspect that the book's strengths actually outweigh its weaknesses but the weaknesses are more personal. I'm curious to see how I feel about Viscount.
Dragon
Wiseass assassin enlists in the army to take down a Dragonlord who's insulted him. Yep. That's the whole plot. There's stuff that happens around the edges of it involving Aliera's sword Pathfinder (and her previous sword, which used to be Kieron the Conqueror's), but the throughline is as above. Brust tries to make it more interesting with a structural trick a la Taltos, and only partly succeeds.
I suspect I've reread Dragon less often than I think I have. Very little of it stuck in my memory: the structure, the beginning and the ending, Napper. I had no sense of the feel of it, of the meat of the book where Vlad's actually in Morrolan's army. I think I assumed I liked it a lot based on how it's both structurally and temporally like Taltos.
I liked it alright. Vlad-in-the-army makes for good character development, or at least an interesting character sketch. Other than that, the book felt ... detached, somehow. I think that's the lightness of the plot. There's nothing earthshattering, or even Vlad-shattering, going on. It's not personal. Sure, the army scenes are deeply personal, but they're unmoored from any larger context. Vlad's enlistment was a stupid and out-of-character decision, and he knows it, and he goes along with it anyway. Once he's there his actions all make sense but it's the getting there that's the hard part.
I'm also having trouble getting a handle on the status and significance of the Great Weapons, but then Vlad probably is as well, and his perspective is hopelessly skewed.
The Ace books have decidedly Aged Well, which is always a pleasant surprise. The treatement of Easterners feels remarkably relevant and contemporary (at least, so saith this white dude), and the sense of having wandered into someone's high-powered D&D game doesn't persist past Jhereg, or maybe Yendi. I'd definitely recommend them.
Athyra
A peasant boy accidentally gets involved with a wiseass ex-assassin who's wandered back to the scene of a much earlier crime. This ends poorly for everyone, except maybe the ex-assassin.
Surprised to find myself actively enjoying Athyra this time through. I used to plow through it for completion's sake. I miss Vlad's point of view and Loiosh's banter, and I miss Morrolan and Aliera and Kragar... but the story itself is excellent, and pleasantly complex. It's a fine continuation of themes begun in Teckla and developed in Phoenix. I think I was just upset because it doesn't feel much like a Vlad book.
Also, the Rocza-narrated bits are neat. Definitely a perspective I appreciate having.
Orca
Wiseass ex-assassin and master thief investigate an old woman who's being foreclosed on, and uncover way more than they'd expected. Features two of the so far three (four, if you count Devera's parentage in Tiassa) biggest spoilers in the series.
This is about half from Vlad's viewpoint (yay!) and half from that of Kiera the Thief (unexpected and yay!). Very neat to see Vlad from outside, from the point of view of someone who knows him.
Now I want to read Orca and watch The Big Short back-to-back. Orca's clearly more inspired by things like the S&L swindle of the eighties, or the dotcom bubble of the nineties, than the real estate shenanigans of the 2000s, but I expect I'd find some really interesting parallels.
Five Hundred Years After
(Foreword by Pamela Dean)
More Dumas-inspired fantasy. Dragaeran analogues of the four Musketeers reunite and get swept up in history, culminating in the destruction of the Empire.
Perhaps surprisingly for as much as I loved Phoenix Guards, I'm pretty meh on FHYA. Paarfi's voice is beginning to grate on me in places. Worse, with the exception of one scene, Tazendra has been Gimli-ized into comic relief: from "maybe not exceptionally bright but with a keen grasp of human relations" to a one-note "lack of comprehension" sidekick. Bah, as Aerich would say.
I enjoyed getting to know Pel a bit better, and I felt like the overall plot hung together really well. The Khaavren/Daro romance, while not groundbreaking, was enjoyably sweet. "Uneven," is maybe the best adjective? I suspect that the book's strengths actually outweigh its weaknesses but the weaknesses are more personal. I'm curious to see how I feel about Viscount.
Dragon
Wiseass assassin enlists in the army to take down a Dragonlord who's insulted him. Yep. That's the whole plot. There's stuff that happens around the edges of it involving Aliera's sword Pathfinder (and her previous sword, which used to be Kieron the Conqueror's), but the throughline is as above. Brust tries to make it more interesting with a structural trick a la Taltos, and only partly succeeds.
I suspect I've reread Dragon less often than I think I have. Very little of it stuck in my memory: the structure, the beginning and the ending, Napper. I had no sense of the feel of it, of the meat of the book where Vlad's actually in Morrolan's army. I think I assumed I liked it a lot based on how it's both structurally and temporally like Taltos.
I liked it alright. Vlad-in-the-army makes for good character development, or at least an interesting character sketch. Other than that, the book felt ... detached, somehow. I think that's the lightness of the plot. There's nothing earthshattering, or even Vlad-shattering, going on. It's not personal. Sure, the army scenes are deeply personal, but they're unmoored from any larger context. Vlad's enlistment was a stupid and out-of-character decision, and he knows it, and he goes along with it anyway. Once he's there his actions all make sense but it's the getting there that's the hard part.
I'm also having trouble getting a handle on the status and significance of the Great Weapons, but then Vlad probably is as well, and his perspective is hopelessly skewed.
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Date: 2017-09-14 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 02:11 am (UTC)In general I strongly prefer reading serieses in publication order, rather than internal-chronological. Ask me about the Chronicles of Narnia sometime, if you want to get your ear talked off.