November 29, 2012
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The Dragonsoul Saga: A Balance Broken
eJDN 2456261 EDT 17:59.
I bought this book as a souvenir from Gen Con, along with some art prints and a solar panel that only produces about 10% as much power as it would need to be the primary source for my phone. It’s published by a tiny independent press called Imagined Interprises, and no, “interprise” is not a word in any dictionary I could find.
The book was… pretty good, I guess. It has nothing really exceptional about it. It’s obviously heavily influenced by Tolkien (but who isn’t?), and its relatively sympathetic depiction of the orcs is along a similar vein to Warcraft III. It follows most of the standard fantasy tropes, and does so well but not exceptionally so. The young hero is but an innkeeper when his mysterious power is discovered, leading to a grand adventure; the rogue with a heart of gold redeems herself by becoming a healer; great battles are fought between men, elves, dwarves, and orcs.
One thing I found disappointing really has more to do with American society than the book itself: The book pans away from all of its sexual content to the point of having a kindergarten-like innocence toward sexuality; but then the violent content, oh boy, the blood and guts are everywhere and the battlefields are filled with the sour stench of spilled entrails. Men are cleaved in two and axes are covered with blood. But when contemplating his love interest, the hero never so much as gets an erection, because that, obviously, would be naughty.
A more direct concern with the book in particular is that it doesn’t really… go anywhere. Things happen, the stage is set for larger events… but nothing is really consummated by the end of the first book. I understand that it’s meant to be the start of a trilogy, so we wouldn’t expect all the loose ends to be tied up. But as it is, hardly any loose ends are tied up, and we go through 300 pages and then feel like… “so, uh, when does the story start?”
The closest thing to a climax is a battle near the end, in which humans, dwarves and elves in a great fortress defend against overwhelming numbers of orcs. (Sound familiar?) And certainly things do happen, progress is made. The world-building is very rich, the character development is fairly compelling. But the plot? It feels like the first act instead of a story within itself.
I haven’t decided whether I want to read the other two books. On the one hand, I do kinda want to see where it goes, how it all comes together. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to invest another 600 pages in this thing, and I don’t want to reward the practice of writing a trilogy as though it’s a single very long book. Each book should have a story of its own, which ultimately all ties together; no book should be simply introductory material for another book.
For the Terlaron series, I’ve gone radically the other direction; it can be argued that different books in the series aren’t even the same genre, aside from the basic framework of SF. First Contact is a romance, Deterrent is more like an alien invasion flick (probably not the way you think, and there’s another genre it fits pretty well that I’m not mentioning to avoid spoilers). On to Infinity is planned to be a coming-of-age story with a very scientific bent. One Good Reason is planned to be a war drama. There are two more planned novels I haven’t even titled yet, but one is a spy thriller and the other is part historical drama and part fantasy. There will be more, including at least one military space opera. Yes, they are all set in the same world. Yes, they all tie together in various ways. Almost all of them have some element of romance, and some kind of quest; several are about prejudice in various forms. But they are very much independent stories about independent individuals.
That, I’ll admit, is going a bit far. It’s maybe a little crazy, to be honest; it’s the sort of thing I thought no one else had ever done before, until I saw Cloud Atlas and said, hey, maybe I’m crazy like a fox after all. (The stuff about reincarnation was a bit much, but otherwise it’s very much the kind of story I’m trying to tell with Terlaron.)
You don’t have to go quite so far; it’s certainly possible to have a series of novels that are about the same characters as they grow and go through smaller quests on the way to a much larger objective–like Harry Potter. But The Dragonsoul Saga: A Balance Broken goes too far in the other direction. It’s not really a story, just the first act of a story. Along with the positive influence from Tolkien, it also shares some of Tolkien’s weaknesses, like his overwrought detail in world-building and disorganized plot structure. (By the end of Return of the King, I just wanted it to all to stop. The Peter Jackson movie trilogy ended much better actually.)
Is it worth reading? I suppose so. But probably only if you plan on reading the whole set.
