With The Wise Man’s Fear (Amazon), relative newcomer author Patrick Rothfuss has produced what his fans have been praying for ever since the 2007 release of the first book in his series The Kingkiller Chronicle: a sequel worthy in every way in which we might judge it.

The 2007 release of the first book in the series, The Name of the Wind (Amazon), was a triumph for Rothfuss. The lengthy novel, which had many years of genesis, instantly became a critically acclaimed hit upon release and vaulted the author from obscurity in a university teaching position onto the world literature stage, as well as achieving him financial success.

The release of The Wise Man’s Fear will only magnify that success.

Rothfuss’ follow-up effort is an intensely meaty book. It is packed full of both of those essential elements to any modern story – plot and character development. In addition, with its release Rothfuss proves himself a master at those arts specific to the fantasy genre – the slow-burning nature of long fantasy series, as well as the gradual revelation of the mysterious nature of magic and the half familiar, half alien world around the protagonist that fantasy worlds constitute.

The reader gets their hands on the details of so many of the story elements that were hinted at in the first book, in a way that is intensely satisfying. Its protagonist, Kvothe, starts to master some of the power which he manifested during The Name of the Wind, and there are some truly thrilling scenes in The Wise Man’s Fear when this happens. His life also starts to gain a degree of stability. This is exactly the sort of thing you want from the second book in a major trilogy.

However, new elements are introduced into the story, and while progress is made on its greater mysteries, there is clearly so much more to come – and likely much that Rothfuss plans never to completely explain to the reader, so that mystery will remain even after the third book in the series is published.

Then, too, there are twists in The Wise Man’s Fear. The development of plot and character takes place in ways which you both do and don’t expect; and at times I felt when reading it that Rothfuss was playing a gentle game of sleight with the reader – sleight because of the degree of deception which is involved – but gentle because it’s a game which both the author and the reader will relish.

As with The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear kicks off in the inn of Kvothe, its major character. Kvothe – his civilisation’s most notorious magic-worker and trouble-maker, is still telling the story of his life so that his would-be biographer, Chronicler, will be able to get it down on paper.

That story takes readers back to the University where Kvothe is studying magic, and once again we are plunged into his chaotic life – his financial struggles, his difficulties with other students and his growing understanding of various aspects of the mystic and mundane arts – including his developing musical talent.

Yet this time the game of life is played a little more powerfully by Kvothe, with his growing personal resources.

Traditionally the practitioner of any craft or art goes through three stages in learning it. Firstly they struggle as an apprentice, then find their feet as a journeyman, and finally – they become a master.

The Wise Man’s Fear is Kvothe’s journeyman story. He knows many basics. His life has evolved past the lowest levels of survival. And yet all this means is that the challenges, rivals and opportunities he faces are higher still.

Many of the same characters from The Name of the Wind are also present, but like Kvothe, they do not remain static picture postcards, nor are they around simply to be plot elements. Powerful personalities such as Ambrose, Elodin, Devi and more develop both independently and within Kvothe’s understanding of them, and in a way which is appropriate, given the book’s plot.

And of course Kvothe’s love interest Denna remains in the picture … and their relationship is just as fascinating and at times tortured as you would expect it to be.

Without wanting to wax too lyrical about it, all of this adds up to a book which anyone who describes themselves as a fantasy fan must pick up immediately – and, given the late timing of this review, likely already has. The Kingkiller Chronicle is every bit as amazing as its major rivals – A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wheel of Time and even The Lord of the Rings – but it is a tighter, more personal story, and a great deal more tortured. And those whose personalities lead them to enjoy the darker sides of human emotions and the striving of heroes plagued with them will likely enjoy Rothfuss’ efforts more than those of his progenitors.

I would most directly compare The Kingkiller Chronicle to Robin Hobb’s masterly Assassin’s series. A similar tortured hero awaits readers; a hero of limited means but great latent abilities. But Kvothe’s tale is made ever more potent by the reader’s awareness that he is not personally an innocent; sometimes his flawed personality leads him to make the wrong choices; unlike FitzChivalry Farseer, few would classify Kvothe as particularly noble.

There are, of course, flaws in the book.

Rothfuss’ unwillingness to tell certain large narrative threads such as Kvothe’s trial are simply skipped; with the reader being disconcertingly jumped ahead in the protagonists’ timeline to maintain the pace of the tale. Then too, once or twice too often Rothfuss lets minor story arcs drag out too long; at times the reader longs for the plot to return to a somewhat more normal setting so that certain mysterious elements of Kvothe’s world don’t lose their potency.

Many of the same themes from the first book, particularly during Kvothe’s time at the University, are re-hashed and could have been trimmed down.

And course, there is the problem of the wider story.

Clearly, Kvothe’s story has not yet ended, as he is still alive to tell it; in The Wise Man’s Fear the boundary between current and past events has started to fray. Frankly, I have no idea how Rothfuss plans to resolve the fact that by the end of the third and last book in the series, he will be up to date with current events in Kvothe’s world; current events which he will also need to address.

Given that The Kingkiller Chronicle is very much a coming of age tale, it seems clear that it will lose its potency if Rothfuss decides to create second series based around Kvothe’s life but focused on events following its conclusion. Yet one can feel Rothfuss in The Wise Man’s Fear already looking for the next story.

One way to get around this would be for the next series to also take place in Kvothe’s world and deal with current events – but from a different character’s perspective, with Kvothe being an active character in that world but not the protagonist. This will test Rothfuss’ writing skill. Unlike several of his contemporaries – Brandon Sanderson, for one – Rothfuss has not yet demonstrated an ability to steadfastly write the stories of other characters than Kvothe. It will be interesting to see what his plans after The Kingkiller Chronicle are.

And there will be plans. After all, Rothfuss is also a young man who has just come into his power ☺

All in all, if you read The Name of the Wind, I have no doubt you will read, if you haven’t already, The Wise Man’s Fear. The Kingkiller Chronicle is one of the best, if not the best, fantasy series of this decade. It’s a masterpiece – and I commend it to you.

Trying to find the most logical way into Iain M. Banks‘ sprawling Culture series, but been turned off by the abstracted Use of Weapons, the obfuscated Inversions, or even his somewhat flawed first Culture novel Consider Phlebas? Look no further. The Player of Games is probably the best book for you.

One of Banks’ tightest Culture novels, The Player of Games represents the British author writing science fiction at his most accessible. As with the other books in the series, one of the book’s main functions is to display the vivid complexity and richness of human ideas that The Culture itself represents. In many ways, Banks’ Culture novels are a guiding post to what humanity could become; an urbane future, galactic society with powerful ethics, powerful technology, and an even more powerful love for all things pleasurable.

But where many of Banks’ other Culture novels feature several complex post-human protagonists and jump between their vastly differing points of view, The Player of Games features just one. This structure — and the fact that that protagonist eschews much of The Culture’s more exotic mores, and is thus much closer in outlook to today’s reader — makes the book much more highly accessible and a tightly woven read.

That protagonist is Jernau Morat Gurgeh. Gurgeh is typical of many Culture citizens; he lives on one of its massive, constructed ring-planets (dubbed Orbitals), he has its post-human genetics, with an ability to internally create and digest any known drug, and he also has the Culture’s penchant for enjoying every pleasure known to the galaxy, with gusto.

With one difference.

Gurgeh is one of the Culture’s most famous and skilled game players. That is, he excels at any game of diversion that involves intellectual stimulation. Modern examples might be chess or checkers — but in the Culture, games have evolved to somewhat of an art form, with some taking days to complete. And Gurgeh is an acknowledged master of them all.

As many artists at the pinnacle of their profession do, however, Gurgeh has gotten bored. He can easily beat all but the most skilled professional opponents. There are still challenges to accept, but few give him any sense of real competition. And it’s this dissatisfaction with his main occupation that appears to be poisoning everything else the master game player participates in.

Thus, when a set of unusual events occurs that leads him into contact with an unstable drone (the Culture’s extremely intelligent and quirky brand of robots) and eventually, into a jaunt to an alien space empire with the Culture’s Special Circumstances branch — its complex combination of espionage and early stage intervention forces — it doesn’t appear that Gurgeh’s too unhappy to sign on for a tour of duty.

Especially when the Culture needs him to participate in what may be the most complex game ever invented by a humanoid life form; a game which shapes its entire society and has life or death outcomes.

From here on out The Players of Games is vintage Culture. Banks uses the lens of an alien civilisation to display his primary vision of humanity to great effect; its decadence, its tolerance, its advanced systems of ethics and thought and its technology in action.

But the book is also much more than that.

It’s the story of an artist who has been protected for his entire life; allowed to pursue his passion without compromise; sheltered from all forms of violence and able to reach fulfilment, suddenly thrust into a world which is much more brutal, emotional, turbulent, and even vicious.

And it’s about how all of that impacts on him.

The striking thing about the subject matter of the book is how Gurgeh reacts to events. The Culture’s view on violence, even sexualised violence, and the less civilised galactic civilisations that allow it as an everyday event, is complex, and this shows in Gurgeh’s reaction to it. Many would turn away from it; deny its existence to themselves, reject it. The Culture’s approach is different, in that it understands and faces the darker sides of humanity.

This does not mean that it condones, or even in many cases, allows violence to take place. But it does mean that it doesn’t look away from violence. And it acknowledges that sometimes violence is necessary — as when an entire benign civilisation comes under unprovoked attack from without.

The Player of Games is the second Culture novel, and textually, it shows. In my review of the first book in the series, Consider Phlebas, I noted that the book “sprawls”. I wrote:

“In any other popular science fiction writer’s arsenal, the novel would no doubt be seen as their masterpiece; its engrossing narration, the consideration to which its author gave the world he built in it and the characters he portrays would combine to make the book one of the greats.

However, read in the context of Banks’ other Culture novels, it is clear that when the author published Consider Phlebas, he was struggling with both the form of the novel itself, as well as the need to tell a finite story in the world of infinite complexity and interest that he imagined in the Culture.”

When writing The Player of Games, Banks was clearly much less ambitious than when he was putting Consider Phlebas together; and it shows. Although the book covers much less ground, it does it so much more successfully; its more limited scope allows it to shine clearly. Banks learnt much from Consider Phlebas.

The Player of Games’ messages are clearer, its limited set of characters more defined and its plotline more tightly woven. Hints are strewn throughout the book as to the ultimate motives and actions behind the set of events at the forefront of the narrative, but they are not obvious, and Banks does a great job of gradually revealing his story, without going too fast or too slowly.

Ultimately, because of its diminished scope, The Player of Games is not a masterpiece of science fiction; not even a flawed masterpiece like Consider Phlebas. But what it is is an absolute classic of the genre that every sci-fi literature fan should pick up. It’s a triumph; it marks Banks’ coming of age as a science fiction master. It’s a solid gold nugget of enjoyable goodness which will remain in your memory for years to come.

And also — critically, given the complexity of the narrative of some of the other Culture books — it represents an ideal introduction into this ambitious vision of the future of humanity. Read this (or perhaps the later novel Look to Windward) first, before you experience the rest of the Culture series. It’s a fantastic set-up for the bigger Culture universe out there. And it’s a thought-provoking window into humanity’s future soul.

This review is by Suzanne Tindal/Wohlthat, an Australian journalist and writer who can be found on Twitter as @engochick.

Under Heaven is a fantasy using the Chinese Tang Dynasty as a framework. Author Guy Gavriel Kay does not, therefore, have to create a world as such, but conduct research into the one which had once existed.

He took his inspiration to write about this period of Chinese history from famed poets, so it’s not so strange that the mood he sets from the very beginning in this book is pensive and philosophic. The main character Tai is introspective, given to doing the opposite of what many of the other, stereotypically materialistic, inhabitants of his world are wont to do.

Tai, the second son of a celebrated general, decides to use a mourning period for his father to bury the dead at a battlefield which his father fought at forty years earlier. Because of the many angry and sorrowing ghosts inhabiting the field, which men can actually hear, he is thought of as crazy. But he spends two years digging graves, and is rewarded with a lavish gift from the princess of the people across the border – a careless gift which men would kill for and which will endanger his life.

The gift takes him away from the battlefield as he decides to deliver it to the imperial court before someone kills him over it. However, having been so long away from the court, he’s lost the subtlety necessary to survive in the political currents, resulting in games which Kay portrays in detail.

Unfortunately, the closed nature of these political games has not aided Kay in his characterisation. I did not become attached to Tai, who I felt was a walking stereotype of the “different” man who acts according to his heart. It was also difficult to get a glimpse into the other characters’ motives or emotions because we as the reader were only able to see the glimpses which their court poker faces allowed us. Only two characters gained my approval, one being a drunken poet, and another being an emperor’s concubine, who I think Kay drew well.

In general, I’m not sure where Kay was aiming this novel. I don’t feel that the story had enough intricacies to draw in those who love highly political Chinese-themed fantasy, and at the same time didn’t have enough sword fighting for those who love Chinese martial arts tales. For those who like romances, Kay has not tread the traditional route with his protagonists, leaving me (as one who enjoys a good love story) not satisfied. He has some supernatural elements in the novel, however, they’re not a main feature, which left me wondering why they were there at all.

In conclusion, he tried to pack too many elements into a story without doing a good job on any of them. The book was, however, written in a poetic manner and those looking for a bit of diversion may enjoy it.

Rating: 2.5/5

“Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”
-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (IV)

Like T. S. Eliot’s epic poem, Iain M. Banks‘ first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, is an incredibly complex book, in which the author packs a massive amount of ideas detailing his startling vision of the future of humanity and the universe itself; ideas that were fated to only grow to complete maturity over the next two decades as he fleshed that vision out into what has become his epic series of Culture novels.

Read 24 years after it was first published in 1987, it is apparent that Consider Phlebas is what might be termed a flawed gem of modern science fiction.

In any other popular science fiction writer’s arsenal, the novel would no doubt be seen as their masterpiece; its engrossing narration, the consideration to which its author gave the world he built in it and the characters he portrays would combine to make the book one of the greats.

However, read in the context of Banks’ other Culture novels, it is clear that when the author published Consider Phlebas, he was struggling with both the form of the novel itself, as well as the need to tell a finite story in the world of infinite complexity and interest that he imagined in the Culture.

As a novel, Consider Phlebas sprawls. It does not have the neat completeness of The Player of Games, nor does it have the contained pathos evident in Look to Windward. It does not go into the right level of detail as Excession does, and it does not contain the balanced level of nostalgic emotion that Use of Weapons does.

What it does have is all of these things; in places too much of one, in other places not enough of another.

None of this is to take anything away from the book. Its entrance into the science fiction genre in 1987 immediately established Banks as a master of that genre, and one of its most creative thinkers and best writers. But it does mean that in 2011, we can appreciate Consider Phlebas as what it is; Banks writing at what was — for him — at an adolescent level. For anyone else, that level itself would probably be out of reach.

The plot of Consider Phlebas represents nothing less than one of the greatest societal events Banks’ futuristic Culture society has ever known.

The Culture — an urbane, pleasure-seeking, genetically modified future version of a human galactic civilisation, which denies itself nothing except the harm of others — is at war with what might be termed its polar opposite; a race of inhuman aliens which believe in one single religion, one discipline, and is spreading itself across the galaxy with the aim of bringing all under its umbrella: The Idirans.

In the midst of this conflict, one of the Culture’s Minds — the supremely intelligent and benevolent artificial intelligences that run their artificially constructed planets and planet-sized spaceships — has become stranded on a distant planet quarantined by an evolved and all-powerful being as some kind of shrine to death.

Into this conflict comes a complex third party; a humanoid shapeshifter, able to change his appearance, identifying marks and much of his basic bodily structure at will.

The mission of this Bora Horza Gobuchul? To steal the mostly defenseless Mind from the planet and hand it over to the Idirans. His motivation? Horza believes The Culture’s dependence on artificial intelligences to run its society — utopian though that makes it — has in truth made the civilisation a society of machines, representing a departure from biological evolution.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that.

Ironically — as he’s not part of it — Horza’s journey to retrieve the Mind becomes a tour by Banks of The Culture itself.

Its complete mastery of technology. Its idiosyncratic artificial intelligences, which normally behave in a more human-like fashion than the humans themselves. Its incredible compassion and implacable desire to live and keep living; but not just living — soaking itself in every pleasure that anyone could believe could exist. Its fearlessness and tolerance of any idea, but conservative nature when it comes to true evolution onto a higher universal plane.

Its complete anarchy; but also its rigid organisation and centralised planning.

Along on the tour bus with Horza and the reader come the normal rogues gallery common to space operas; a violent, self-serving crew who will each gradually divulge their own reasons for living and existing in such a complex galaxy; before they ignomiously die. Of course; not all die ;)

If you were to say anything about Consider Phlebas, you’d say above all, that Banks attempted to pack too much into the book.

In The Player of Games, for example, The Culture is much more gradually and delicately introduced to the reader; Banks allows his characters and the plot itself to explain more about his multi-faceted world than he does through the book’s own exposition.

The vision that Banks has of The Culture is obviously too complex to be fit into one volume; and in fact it can only be told properly through glimpses of its many facets; the way that Banks has told it in many different novels through the 25 years since Consider Phlebas was published.

Then, too, Banks’ characterisation is not fantastic in the book.

Horza’s basic reasons for opposing The Culture with his life are never that convincing; nor does Banks ever really flesh out the rest of the motley crew he constructs for his wide-ranging space opera. Some of them do, but most of the characters never develop and grow much. They remain cardboard cut-outs throughout most of the novel.

Plot, too, suffers; the book is broken up into many segments, and it takes too long to get to its main event. Action scenes are drawn out, meaning suspense is not created as successfully as, say, in later Banks books such as Use of Weapons. Even worse, Banks feels the need to create multiple epilogues after the end of the book to wrap up the whole plot in a nicely tied package.

This is not something an accomplished author would do.

Yet, for all the flaws in Consider Phlebas, it remains a striking vision.

It’s hard to believe that Neuromancer, William Gibson’s vision of a future dystopia, was published just three years before Consider Phlebas, and that Dan Simmons’ epic Hyperion was published two years later. Because Banks’ book ranges much further than either of these two masterpieces do.

There are many similarities between Hyperion and Consider Phlebas, in fact; both feature futuristic galactic civilisations which have virtually mastered technology, including the use of phenomenally powerful artificial intelligences.

And yet Banks, in Consider Phlebas, has thought through the mechanics of his world in far greater detail than Simmons did. And his characters are more real, less cartoonish. Their sharp emotions cut the reader, while their flaws remind us of so much that is human about ourselves.

Consider Phlebas doesn’t have the polish of Hyperion; and it doesn’t have the raw intensity of Neuromancer. But in many ways it doesn’t have to. Because the scope of Banks’ vision is so much grander than those of his compatriots. And in later novels, he would refine his technique and his energy to a high art.

If you’ve read this far, I probably don’t need to tell you that the book is worth reading; and in fact you’re probably actually reading this review itself for nostalgia value only. But if you haven’t read Consider Phlebas, Banks’ first science fiction masterpiece, get out there and do so. It’s a flawed gem, but one that belongs in the hall of fame.

The Quantum Thief is that rarest of rare birds; a first novel by a debut author which is a joy to read and helps take the science fiction genre in which it sits forward. If, like me, you believe the ultimate aim of science fiction is to question and challenge what it means to be human — and ultimately, to reaffirm your belief in humanity in general — pick this book up immediately.

The speculative fiction scene has had a lot of ‘false starts’ over the past few years — debut novels proclaimed to be the next big thing, which turned out to be disappointed and immature efforts. The Quantum Thief is not one of those. Like Patrick Rothfuss‘ stellar 2007 effort, The Name of the Wind, Rajaniemi’s novel is the real thing.

If you read the synopsis of the Quantum Thief on its back cover, you would probably believe the book is something of a heist story, but set in a post-human Solar System. The book’s description ticks all of the right boxes for a novel which sits squarely in the emerging singularity sub-genre of science fiction.

Its protagonist, Jean Le Flambeur, is described as a “post-human criminal”, a mysterious thief who can steal into something called, with echoes of artificial intelligence, the “vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System”, and nicking rare Earth antiques from “the aristocrats of the Moving Cities of Mars”.

Throw in a little philosophy to boot — the book’s jacket mentions the popular ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ problem much-debated in game theory over the past half-century — and the archetypal deadly femme fatalle — dubbed ‘Miele’ — and you have a book which could, going by its synopsis, be described as a stereotype of the singularity niche.

However, as soon as you start actually reading The Quantum Thief, you realise that it is not these superficial melting pot elements which makes book something special; it is the way that — like masters such as William Gibson and Iain M. Banks before him — Rajaniemi constantly displays and explains the phenomenal world he conjurs for the reader, even while his protagonists are moving through it and changing it as they go.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the author’s concept of how human privacy is safeguarded, and — when one desires it — breached — in the post-human society of the Oubliette in one of the moving cities of Mars where most of the plot of the book takes place.

Imagine if the granular privacy controls of the currently popular social networking site Facebook could be extended to our everyday existence. Imagine if you could choose who sees your face as you walk down the street — or even if you could control if your housemates knew when you were home. If you could hide every aspect of everything that you are and do — with a thought.

And imagine, simultaneously, if you could also selectively breach your cloud of total privacy protection to share whatever information you wanted to, with whoever you wanted. A memory, your name, your place of work, other selected personal details.

Such a world would be intensely personal — and yet meaningful. Information flows chaotically and dramatically around us in our year of 2010 — out of our control and with constantly damaging effects. But in Rajaniemi’s world, it can be controlled — by every individual.

The Quantum Thief is not truly a heist story. Instead, it is more or less a detective novel.

And Rajaniemi employs his striking Gevulot concept — as well as many other nimble futuristic human thought combinations and permutations to the greatest of effect within this structure. So many of the tropes that you might find in an Agatha Christie suspense mystery are here — but inverted, turned on themselves by the fact of human evolution and post-singularity technology that change them, while still maintaining much of their original shape.

The writing in The Quantum Thief is similarly skilled.

Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Rajaniemi displays somewhat of a light touch with his prose. The reader is never forced into any emotional situation or pushed around intellectually. Instead, the author invites his audience’s mind to gradually comprehend the world and characters he has created. He leads you through the book with one hand, walking backwards, coaxing you onwards.

Then, just when you have understood the implications of a plot event, Rajaniemi shows you that the track goes still deeper.

I don’t want to write too much more about this book; it’s a short one, with the copy I had sent to me by the book’s Australian publisher, Hachette, only clocking in at 330 pages of quite large type. But what I do want those who enjoy science fiction to do is put The Quantum Thief on their list immediately.

It is commonly said that the job of science fiction author is to take one technology or scientific concept present in modern day society forward into the future — extrapolating it to its eventual outcome and then positioning protagonists in that altered world.

Yet too few modern science fiction authors do that.

It’s not enough — in 2010 — to extrapolate what the future implications of the atomic bomb, the electricity network or the discovery of black holes might have on the future of humanity. That was the role of authors in the 1970′s, and they did that well.

Today’s readers want to see the future of concepts introduced by the Internet, by Facebook and Twitter, by the iPhone and the personal storage system embodied by Gmail. They want to see how the iPad will change the way humanity functions as a species in millennia to come. Over the past decade we’ve had authors like Charles Stross and Iain M. Banks to do this for us. Now, let us add the name of Hannu Rajaniemi to that list.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about this remarkable effort for a first novel is not that it is so good. It is that it sets high expectations for what else we can look forward to from the master to come.

Whenever I’ve thought a bit deeper about the prodigious talent that is American fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson over the past several years, one question has gradually risen to the surface of my mind.

That question is: Is Sanderson up to the incredibly ambitious task he has set himself, of satisfactorily finishing off one of the most complex and influential epic fantasy series of all time (The Wheel of Time), as well as starting another of similar magnitude (The Stormlight Archive) and keeping various assorted other writing endeavours on track?

With the publication of the thirteenth book in The Wheel of Time series this year, that question has finally been answered. And the answer is a resounding “no”.

Disappointingly, given the high standard of the previous Wheel of Time book Sanderson authored – The Gathering Storm – Towers of Midnight will go down in history as one of the poorest books in The Wheel of Time canon.

The tome is plagued by many faults; a lack of true feeling for how to write several characters, unsatisfactory conclusions to several of the Wheel of Time’s longest-held paradoxes and plot lines, and a lack of exciting action as Sanderson tries to tie off all of the threads that the series’ founding author Robert Jordan left hanging for so many years.

After finishing The Gathering Storm, I wanted to leap up and proclaim to the world that Jordan had found a true successor in Sanderson. I was jubilant that the series would find a satisfying end.

After finishing Towers of Midnight, I wanted to mail it back to Sanderson and his editor, Harriet McDougal, with about a thousand red lines to make sections that needed to be deleted or revised. It’s simply that bad. This should have been in the oven for another year or so, rather than rushed out; and as a veteran editor, that should have been apparent to McDougal.

Towers of Midnight begins the plot cycle which is The Wheel of Time’s long-awaited endgame; the end war that will determine the fate of its world. Tarmon Gai’Don, the Last Battle, is coming, and the whole book is overshadowed by that knowledge.

Accordingly, every major player and faction in the Wheel of Time universe has begun to head towards that ultimate destination. New Amyrlin Egwene Al’Vere is consolidating her power inside the White Tower. In Caemlyn, Elayne is doing the same with her monarchy. Perrin is slowly gathering a vast, disparate army to him.

Having survived the internal and external storms of his past, a new peaceful Rand Al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn (or, as he has been dubbed online, Randzen) is now also gathering his global resources – political, military, Power or otherwise – to him as he too prepared for the Last Battle, which has already started to touch the Borderlands as a massive nightmare of Shadowspawn boils out of the Blight.

And Mat?

Unusually for someone who has gotten himself almost continually in trouble for most of the Wheel of Time, Mat’s time these days seems to mostly constitute sitting on his fat ass in Caemlyn making eyes at various women and ruminating on the perils of being married.

No kidding, that’s most of what he does.

Now what I really hated in Towers of Midnight was the extremely trite way in which Sanderson ties off so many of the meaningful plot threads that have tortured Wheel of Time fans for the best part of two decades now.

Things like … what’s the endgame for Perrin’s Faile/Berelain paradox? How will Mat and Thom deal with the Snakes and Foxes and save Moiraine? What will happen to fated King of the Malkier, Lan Mandragoran? Who killed Asmodean? What’s really going on at the Black Tower? Who is Mesaana in the White Tower? When will Mat invent cannons? And so on and so on.

If you can think of the most obvious and boring ways to answer all of these questions, then you’ll be able to guess how Sanderson answers them in Towers of Midnight.

When I found out the answers (and not all of them have been completely filled out yet), the curiousity I had been holding in for more than a decade now was not sated.

I was outraged.

At some points I literally leapt up out of my seat and shook my fist at the sky, cursing Brandon Sanderson’s laziness in resolving thorny plot points which Wheel of Time fans have been obsessing about for so long. There were better ways to do this; and I cannot believe that Jordan would have approved of all of the answers that Sanderson gave us to these questions.

Another major problem with the book is how Sanderson treats Mat.

Mat – a fan favourite – has always been a dynamic character. But in Towers of Midnight he does very little throughout the whole book apart from sit on his fat ass in taverns, musing about dice, drinking, eyeing women and so on.

The way that Sanderson writes Mat is more or less spot on; his mental tone is pretty good. But, goddamnit, IT IS NOT THE JOB of the Band of the Red Hand to encamp itself outside a goddamn city and sit there for a whole book, even going on little excursions for Elayne like a pet army. His army reflects Mat’s own life, and both do very little in Towers of Midnight at all. No battles, no action, not even any good drinking or chasing women. Nothing.

The Band of the Red Hand is supposed to be KICKASS AND KICK SOME ASS like it used to. As it stands, Sanderson has reduced Mat’s KICKASS ARMY into a cohort of little girls who whimper when anything which even looks like a Gholam or even a goddamn Aes Sedai enters its heavily guarded perimeter.

This is not how you make legends of armies. This is how you make little girls.

So there’s that.

Ultimately, there are really only two things that I liked about Towers of Midnight. The first is how Sanderson treats Perrin.

For the first time in a long while, Perrin gets some limelight, and he features in some really inspirational moments which are well written (you’ll know them when you see them … has a lot to do with the hammer and its own endgame). Sure, Sanderson fails the whole Faile/Berelain thing, but he does a lot of really great stuff with Perrin, and you have to give him credit for that.

If Towers of Midnight is about anything, it is about Perrin. This book is the first to truly give the understudy third Ta’averen a decent go, and I applaud Sanderson for that – even though he had virtually promised fans Towers of Midnight would actually be about Mat. Which it is not.

The second thing that’s great about the book is that Sanderson gives some little cameos to Lan.

Without giving too much away, it’s obvious that Sanderson is building Lan up with an incredibly slow burning plotline which is going to pay off in a glorious way in the upcoming last Wheel of Time book, A Memory of Light. And we can’t wait for that to happen. I have a feeling that when Lan gets the justice that is coming to him, readers are going to want to be sitting next to something sturdy so they can pound their hand on it and yell “FUCK YES”.

What’s coming is that good. These sections had a pretty Bruce Willis feel about them.

Why did this happen?
At this stage of the review, I’d like to espouse a theory which I think explains why I think Sanderson was unable to reach the peak of his writing with Towers of Midnight, and why he had problems with some of the characters; not so much how to write them (mostly that works, although not always; there are many awkward, out of character moments), but how to make them interact with plot; how to get them to do things rather than think them.

It’s simple: His attention was divided.

Sanderson is currently working on two of the human race’s most epic fantasy series; The Wheel of Time and his own The Stormlight Archive, which is slated to be a ten book masterwork akin to Jordan’s own masterpiece.

To do artistic justice to both series is simply impossible; a fact Sanderson himself must suspect. They are too complex; the characterisations and plotlines are too deep; and I can’t think of any author in the history of fantasy writing who has been able to pull off delivering two masterworks at the same time.

It’s called a masterwork for a reason; you can only do one.

Furthermore, when you look at the strengths of Towers of Midnight, it’s seems apparent that Sanderson’s mindset when writing the book was very much influenced by The Way of Kings.

The two characters who are best written in Towers of Midnight — whose thoughts and actions seem most authentic and touch you — are Perrin and Lan; in both cases Sanderson nails who they are and delivers some fantastic moments where you start to believe in The Wheel of Time again.

In what is probably not a coincidence, these two characters are pretty close analogues of two of the three central characters in The Way of Kings; Kalak (a Perrin duty-type analogue reluctantly drawn into leadership and gifted with powers he does not understand) and Dalinar Kholin (a Lan-style inspirational but hard-beaten leader with shoulders heavy with duty and with the honour of a people and a way of life to uphold).

It is simply not surprising that Sanderson succeeded with these characters (but little else) in Towers of Midnight; artistically, and creatively, his head is in The Stormlight Archive right now, whereas it was in Jordan’s universe when he put together The Gathering Storm.

One further thing: There is no “Mat” character in The Way of Kings. Hence, it is unsurprising that Sanderson struggled with the chaotic fan favourite and his riotous Band of the Red Hand in Towers of Midnight. Mat does not believe in duty; whereas The Way of Kings is about nothing if it is not about duty.

To tell you the truth, I don’t blame Sanderson for any of this.

There is simply nobody else who could do a better job of finishing The Wheel of Time than Sanderson could, apart from Robert Jordan. And we don’t have that option. We should be amazingly happy that Sanderson is carving off some of his prodigious writing (and organizational) talent from his own epic series to devote it to The Wheel of Time. The Stormlight Archive itself is shaping up to be one of the best epic fantasy series of all time and a definite match for Jordan’s own masterpiece.

However, let’s not pretend it’s possible for one man to do justice to two incredible series like The Wheel of Time and The Stormlight Archive at the same time. Along the way, there will be compromises, poorly written bits and disappointments.

Towers of Midnight is one of those. Jordan might not be rolling in his grave right now. But he is definitely shifting around uncomfortably as his masterwork is slightly shortchanged.

Like so many hyped novels brought out by this millennium’s generation of first-time science fiction and fantasy authors, Peter V. Brett’s The Painted Man (also known as The Warded Man) is a mediocre novel with only skin-deep characterisation and an entirely predictable plot line that leaves the reader wanting.

I simply cannot understand why this book has made so many bestseller lists and why top-level reviewers such as Pat from Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist have labeled this “a quality” debut. Any seasoned reader of fantasy novels will find little to satiate their interest here.

Nor can I understand why publishers continue to send these kind of books blithely off to the printer’s to be produced, without so much as considering the negative effect they have upon the entire genre. Sometimes, it’s not enough to simply accept that if something is marketed well, that it will sell well. In 2010, after all the lessons that have come before, we must also have an expectation that our books are written well.

The Painted Man is set in a world which is notionally post-apocalyptic, and which is possibly Earth. A wave of demons, at some point in the past, arose from its center in the depths of night and tore the planet’s civilisation asunder, leaving behind what might best be described as a medieval world of isolated towns and small cities.

And the demon threat – Brett calls them ‘corelings’ – has not abated. Every evening as night falls, demons in varying shapes and sizes shimmer into existence and start to attack and devour whatever humans or other animals they find around them.

Human civilisation survives because of a sort of magic called ‘wards’. The human population paints and draws these wards on all their structures, to ensure that their energy will stop the demons from passing their boundaries every night. But the wards that once allowed humans to actually attack demons and drive them back have been tragically lost.

Into this world, Brett injects several characters. The first and main character is a young man named Arlen, who has grown up in a small village and is accustomed to watching the demons from behind his houses’ flimsy wards every night. Other major characters include Leesha, a young woman from a different village, and Rojer, another young man whose family owns an inn in yet a third village.

As the book’s plot gradually progresses, each character is forced to face their own trials. Arlen loses his family and sets out to find a future in a big city; Leesha struggles with the sex-focused men of her village and her own calling as a healer, and Rojer takes to the road as a musician and entertainer.

As you might guess, by the end of the book the three major characters’ fates start to become entwined.

However, it’s likely that Brett will lose many readers – particularly those who prefer books with complex themes and characters – before that point.

The problem is two-fold. Firstly, the characters in The Painted Man are extremely simple stereotypes that don’t stand up to closer scrutiny. Arlen might as well be the avatar of veangeance and change, Rojer the downtrodden waif who suddenly discovers his musical talent in a blaze of glory.

And Leesha? Well, she has big breasts, but sex isn’t everything to her; she also wants intellectual validation as a person.

For most of the book, I could stand reading about Arlen’s driven quest to battle the demons. And there was a strange kind of pathos in Rojer’s sufferings that most writers and musicians – artists of any kind, actually — will be able to identify with. Although the way that both of these characters are created is stilted, at least you could say that Brett is more or less competent.

However, Brett’s characterisation of Leesha is nothing short of appalling.

One gets the feeling from the sections of the book that deal with Leesha that Brett isn’t just trying to portray a woman’s stereotypical struggle against a society that doesn’t quite understand that the female side of our species are human beings too. It’s as if he himself doesn’t quite understand that women are much more than just breeding animals.

In his book, Brett talks just a little too much about sex, about Leesha’s breasts, about the instincts of men who want to mate with her. Frankly, it’s a bit creepy, and at times it made me feel uncomfortable reading it.

In trying to portray a female character struggling against the stereotype of her gender, Brett might have just actually reinforced that stereotype in The Painted Man – and that’s a terrible thing. And that stereotype pulls both ways: By creating Leesha in this mould, Brett also creates stereotypes out of the men who are attracted to her.

So Brett starts off with frustratingly stereotypical characters. And then – to add insult to injury – they develop in predictable ways. Arlen starts to question the idea that people can’t fight back against demons. Rojer starts to stand up for himself and learn a little about he world.

And, of course Leesha gradually learns that women aren’t just made for breeding – that they’re humans with brains and abilities too. Wow, what an insight!

The second problem that Brett has in the Painted Man is the setting.

Although the demons emerge every night, and the major characters face them regularly, the author never fleshes them out – throughout the book they remain a mindless, shapeless nightmare horde, without feelings beyond the bestial, without intelligence beyond a desire to devour.

It’s incredibly obvious that nameless, faceless evil beings just don’t work well in fantasy novels. To be interesting to a reader, evil must have a personality, motivations and character development as all other characters do. To forget this is to shortchange readers and to assume they don’t have rational minds capable of understanding complexity.

Even video game creators understand this in 2010 — I cannot understand why Brett appears not to.

The world which The Painted Man is set in is similarly devoid of colour. For a post-apocalyptic civilization it seems pretty bland. We don’t see dramatic ruined cityscapes or even, really, roads – all we get is featureless wilderness and the stereotypical walled fortresses and occasional towns of a world at a similar level of technology as that found in The Lord of the Rings.

Most novelists will tell you that if you create a character, with a history and set of character traits and desires, and then situate that character in a world with enough detail and other players, the plot will gradually start to tell itself – it’s inevitable.

Brett’s problem would appear to be that he created bland characters in a bland world … and then – surprise, surprise – got a bland plot. Go figure. Who could have predicted that?

Now, I wouldn’t harp on about this topic so much if there hadn’t been so many novels like The Painted Man around recently – the book shelves are filled with them. Another recent example is Paul Hoffman’s The Left Hand of God.

The most offensive thing about these books is not that they have been written or that they are terrible – because they’re not. They’re just mediocre. And yet, they are being marketed on bookshelves alongside amazing modern titles such as Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings and Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind. And that’s a tragedy, because there are in a completely different class.

Do yourself a favour. Don’t buy Peter V. Brett’s The Painted Man. There are better things to do in life than read mediocre science fiction and fantasy – because there are great books out there that are infinitely more worth your time.

The Way of Kings is the first book in an ambitious new ten-book fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive, by established fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. And what an opener this is.

Anyone who has even a cursory interest in fantasy literature can’t have missed Sanderson’s entrance into the scene over the past half-decade. After breaking into the scene with the stand-alone novel Elantris in 2005, Sanderson went on to publish the three-book Mistborn series.

I wrote of that series after finishing it that it was one of modern fantasy’s best trilogies. And I felt at the time that it highlighted one of Sanderson’s strongest traits as a writer: His ability to plan. When you finish the final Mistborn book, you walk away stunned that Sanderson had referred to and explained events right in the first pages of the first book in the series in the closing chapter of the third.

It is also this ability to plan that Sanderson has brought to his other major fantasy initiative to date: Finishing Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, following the author’s untimely death prior to its conclusion.

It’s hard to imagine a more sprawling and complex fantasy series than the Wheel of Time – or a more accessible one. Fantasy fans commonly compare reading the series to being addicted to crack cocaine. But as I wrote in my review of Sanderson’s first step in completing the series, The Gathering Storm, Sanderson’s planning and writing skills are up to the task of giving fans a satisfactory closure to Jordan’s masterpiece.

I mention all of this to help a reader to understand what they are picking up when they buy The Way of Kings.

This book is nothing less than Sanderson’s first step in attempting to equal Jordan’s masterpiece The Wheel of Time. With The Stormlight Archive, Sanderson is taking his first, masterly step into a journey that will likely take him more than a decade to complete and will see his name listed alongside Jordan, Tolkien, George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb in the pantheon of fantasy greats.

Yes, this book is that good.

In The Way of Kings, Sanderson is taking the planning and writing skills he polished through the Mistborn and Wheel of Time series and applying them to a stunning new and massive canvas.

The Way of Kings primarily follows three characters.

The first is a mysterious young warrior named Kaladin, who gave up a promising career as a surgeon to join the military in search of honour and glory. But his vision does not come to pass, and he passes into slavery, fighting every day for the right to survive.

The second is a man on the opposite end of life’s scales. Dalinar Kholin is a ‘brightlord’ – one of the rulers of the kingdom of Alethkar, and the commander of a brother army to the one in which Kaladin finds himself enslaved.

The third main character is Shallan, a young woman with remarkable drawing skills who successfully apprentices herself to one of the most renowned scholars of the land. But although she does truly enjoy her studies, Shallan has another underlying motive in mind for getting close to this scholar – one on which the fate of her family rests.

The world in which the stories of these three – and many, many other characters – take place, is a complex one. It is a world in which magic abounds, but as in Mistborn, it is magic that has more than a hint of the technological about it. Magic that has rules and systems governing its operation.

Sanderson’s world is also one in which – as in Mistborn – the past is enshrouded in mystery. Nobody is quite sure what or who the mysterious Knights Radiant were, but their relics – magic swords and armour – continue to be used by modern day people. And rumours of a faceless evil banished in the past continue to haunt and inform the present.

Storms shake the land, and there are daily reminders in The Way of Kings that the world it describes is not Earth. There are tiny magical beings everywhere – dubbed ‘Spren’, arising whenever certain emotions or energies are felt. Gloryspren, for example, manifest as golden lines springing up around someone who has just won a great battle. And Windspren flow around with the wind and play tricks on people.

If it seems already as if there are more than a few shadows of the ideas that Sanderson explored in Mistborn present in The Way of Kings, that’s because there definitely are.

Sanderson’s new series shares much structurally with his old one. The author loves mysteries, and at the heart of his storytelling ability is his habit of gradually revealing the meaning behind tiny details in his world. The experienced fantasy reader can pick up the hints he leaves littered throughout his work as to the true nature of everything in his world – and look forward to the inevitable stunning revelations Sanderson doles out like clockwork.

The magic system in The Way of Kings is similar to that of Mistborn, as is the combat. The mysterious past shaped by clataclysmic events, the true nature of which is not yet apparent, is also similar.

And yet all of these ideas are enhanced and magnified for the bigger stage of The Stormlight Archive. They are grander, and fill the heart and the head more than they did in the limited world of Mistborn.

Sanderson’s greatest problem, it is already apparent, will be the same one that Jordan experienced in The Wheel of Time. Sanderson will need to set boundaries around his world-building power, so that when he gets to book five or six of his mammoth series, his plot doesn’t become bogged down with the need to resolve dozens – nay, hundreds, in the Wheel of Time – of complex plot threads.

But we won’t need to worry about this for a while yet.

If there are criticisms of Sanderson’s work, they may be that The Way of Kings could be tighter. The book does seem to repeat some scenes that do not add much in the way of plot or character development; this is a problem for all three of Sanderson’s major characters.

There is also a sense that The Way of Kings is definitely an introductory volume in The Stormlight Archive series. Sanderson kicks off the book with a fast-paced action scene that introduces the reader to the fantastic magic system in his new world; but then spends most of the rest of the book avoiding such awesome displays of action and power.

And yet, it’s hard to criticize the author for doing so. Sanderson rightly needed to leave much to the future so that he could let the sense of anticipation grow throughout this first book and also through his series – he had to hold things back so that he could reveal them later on.

The best way to describe Sanderson’s work for a fantasy reader is to say that it is tremendously satisfying to read. You know what you’re in for and you feel comfortable resting in the hands of an absolute master.

By the time The Way of Kings is complete, much has been revealed about the world in which it takes place, and about its key characters. And yet, it is apparent that the book has only begun to sketch the outlines of a very complex and beautiful picture which will only be complete more than a decade hence.

I read The Way of Kings in a week – staying up late to do so. At almost exactly 1,000 pages it’s a massive tome – and yet I had to devour it all. After that week, however, I am now terribly conscious that I must wait another year, 18 months, or even more (panic!) for the next book to come out.

With some reviews of fantasy books, it is clear that the author has certain strengths that will appeal to certain readers but not others, so a critic such as myself can offer only a partial recommendation – or, more rarely, no recommendation at all.

With The Way of Kings this is not so. The Stormlight Archive is a series that, like Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings epics, every fantasy fan worth their salt must read and be familiar with. This will be one of the giant series that will help shape the entire scene. Take a week off work now and go and buy The Way of Kings. You won’t regret it.

Disclosure: The Way of Kings was sent to this author as a review copy by Sanderson’s publisher

Paul Hoffman’s The Left Hand of God is a poorly written bundle of fantasy and religious stereotypes with nonexistent characterisation and a plot that never leaves the ground. We can’t recommend highly enough that you don’t go out and buy The Left Hand of God. And if you already have, leave it on the shelf.

After all of the pre-launch hype that the book received, we were expecting something more than this. We were expecting a book that would at least be an interesting and engaging read, if not the next Assassin’s Apprentice or A Game of Thrones. What we got instead was a book that was so painful to read that we didn’t finish it. A book that has characters which are never fleshed out and a plot that never made sense in a world that didn’t have any detail.

If you read the synopsis of The Left Hand of God on the back cover, you will probably believe that you are about to read a book along the same lines of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind.

Like Rothfuss’s epic tale and many other fantasy books, The Left Hand of God is about a young boy – and, true to the stereotype, he is an unusual boy in a land of hardship. Thomas Cale lives in The Sanctuary of the Redeemers – some form of religious sanctuary cum prison where boys are taken at a young age to be put through the brutal training that will enable them to live up to the sect’s particular vision of God.

But Cale is not like the others.

Where they cling to their illicit friendships as the only comforts they have in the face of the sheer mindless brutality of their redeemer masters, Cale is cold and friendless. Where the other boys seek merely to survive, Cale appears to be thinking below the surface of events, beyond the daily grind.

You can see where this is going.

As the book’s synopsis states, soon Cale “will open the wrong door at the wrong time and witness an act so terrible that he will have to leave this place, or die”.

In short, it is Cale’s fate to leave the Sanctuary of the Redeemers and make his escape to the world outside his walls, a world where he will grow and develop while simultaneously moving towards some unknowable destiny that will change the face of the world.

We gave The Left Hand of God quite a chance throughout its opening chapters. Because of the hype, we were prepared to overlook some of the glaring examples of poor writing in its pages. And if the book had been written with more skill, after all, the setting could have been a fruitful one. It is often through adversity that characters are best developed, and Hoffman certainly sets up a series of difficult situations for Cale in his book.

However it speedily became apparent as we moved through the book that it was just poorly written.

Cale’s role – as the mysterious child with unexplainable powers – think Paul Atreides from Dune – is to make his speedy advance throughout the world outside the Sanctuary, learning more about it at every turn while still being part of a wider plot that is slowly being unraveled. He will be pursued, he will make friends, he will gawk at young, attractive women and fall in love with them.

And yet the way that this journey takes place is so different from the mental and physical journeys of similar fantasy protagonists such as Pug in Magician and Fitzchivalry Farseer as to be a world apart. Hoffman doesn’t bother to explain why his protagonist is different from those around him (apart from, in one memorable occasion, to attribute Cale’s swordsmanship to a fall on his head). Cale is simply, somehow, different.

Fair enough, you might say. Hoffman might explain Cale’s difference later on. But trust me, it’s not like that. Cale’s difference is not the difference of a character in a Steven Erikson book, or a R. Scott Bakker book. It’s the difference of a character who an author has not created a complicated character for. It’s the difference of a stereotype of “the unusual boy, mature beyond his years”.

The same can be said for all of the book’s other characters. The Redeemers are utter stereotypes of religious zealots. They’re not human. They merely proselytize and commit casual acts of brutality on their charges, randomly, without meaning. Often-times Hoffman appears to use the blows of the Redeemers as some form of attempt to help build Cale’s character.

But without any meaning attached to the violence by either side, no character development takes place.

It’s a similar situation with other characters in The Left Hand of God. The young, nubile, innocent woman. The likably roguish wanderer who turns out to be of noble blood. The corpulent chancellor. The sidekicks who never quite understand Cale. The arrogant sons of noblemen who Cale cuts down to size. Every single character in the book is a stereotype of one form or another and it wears insufferably on the reader. There is no complexity to any of the characters.

There are two other aspects of the book which grate. Firstly, the plot is a nonsense. Characters commit certain acts for no discernible reason, or for reasons against their apparent character. The world itself seems to shift to make way for Cale’s progress through it, while he himself appears to be an immovable object.

It’s as if everyone who meets Cale decides that because he is the focus of the story, everything should shift around him. If there is a wider plot to the book that doesn’t involve Cale himself, we couldn’t discern it. And yet, this is the sort of world backdrop that makes fantasy novels so rich and makes the fans enjoy them.

The other thing which frustrated us about the book is the constant comments from the author’s point of view which are inserted into the text. The author will comment that somebody is “obviously” this, or obviously that, as if he is making a snide aside comment on them from the right of stage.

These “editorial” comments are incredibly amateurish and totally break up the flow of the book. They’ll make you feel as if you’re reading writing from a high school student. You just can’t do this sort of thing in an adult novel. Hoffman also uses them to avoid having to describe details of certain scenes. It’s like he’s taking the reader aside for a second and saying: “Hey, you know what a dungeon is like, right? So I don’t really have to describe it, right? OK then. Let’s skip that bit.”

There are one or two redeeming features about The Left Hand of God. Hoffman has an interesting concept in the Sanctuary, and of course everybody likes reading fantasy stories about cold, calculating youngsters – this sort of character has an intrinsic fascination because they’re so far outside the norm.

But The Left Hand of God does not represent a good effort at exploring that setting and that character. It is an amateurish, poorly written third-rate fantasy novel packed full of stereotypes and devoid of anything interesting for the experienced reader. Avoid it like the plague.

Spoiler warning: This review contains some mild background on Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series, although it does not contain spoilers for Dragon Haven. If you haven’t read Hobb’s previous works in this series, you probably shouldn’t be reading Dragon Haven or this review.

With Dragon Haven, fantasy master Robin Hobb has begun to rekindle some of the magic that had left her most recent works, particularly the Soldier Son trilogy. The book represents a satisfying conclusion to the two book series –The Rain Wild Chronicles — Hobb has penned as a follow-up to her extended nine book saga The Realm of the Elderlings, while still leaving room for future works in that world.

What a seasoned Hobb fan will most note about Dragon Haven is that it contains a great deal of the subtle plot and character creation and gradual world revelation that Hobb had perfected in her Elderlings saga. There is a wonderful undercurrent of ideas and emotions swirling through Hobb’s prose that constantly leaves the reader both guessing and angsty that her characters don’t know the full picture and haven’t worked through their internal turmoil.

But the book doesn’t have the same kind of drawn-out pacing that plagued the Soldier Son trilogy. Instead, I found it a pleasure to read.

I came down pretty hard on Hobb after I finished The Dragon Keeper, the first book in The Rain Wild Chronicles. And now I have to admit Hobb has taken any criticism from myself and others she read on board, and created a book in Dragon Haven that her fans will simply love.

Like The Dragon Keeper, the plot of Dragon Haven takes place in the Rain Wilds, the exotic area located upstream of Bingtown, the city where much of the action in The Liveship Traders is set, at a time shortly after the concluding events at the end of The Tawny Man trilogy.

In The Dragon Keeper, dragons had returned to the world, but in a stunted and degraded form — they could no fly, and some appeared witless and bestial. In short, they were far from the magical and all-powerful beings of legend.

With the dragons becoming a danger to the humans who tend them and live nearby, the logical next step was to move them upriver to a more appropriate setting; a glorious ancient city the dragons themselves dream of: the fabled Kelsingra. Half of this journey was completed in the first book.

Dragon Haven is in many ways a story of being on the road. Like many novelists, Hobb uses the plot device of her characters travelling through various hardships as a method to force them to grow and develop.

In both the dragons’ and the humans’ cases, the journey is both physical, in the sense that as the book wears on, they endure various hardships and traverse much terrain, and internal, in that these external trials serve as mirrors which force the characters to look into themselves and find who they really are.

For the dragons, this means both becoming physically larger and stronger, while also re-learning and remembering much of their power and their glory. For the humans, the struggle is often tied up in their sexuality. For Rain Wilder Thymara, it’s getting past the idea that her physical defects don’t mean she can’t have a relationship or potentially even bear children. For Bingtown wife and dragon scholar Alise, it means dealing with the reality of her marriage and potential future happiness.

And for poor Sedric, it means coming to a dreadful understanding of what his own relationship with Alise’s husband has truly been about.

Like other ‘road’ books, the eventual fate of Hobb’s individual characters, and indeed the entire expedition, is unclear. Kelsingra was abandoned long ago and may not even exist any more. When you add the constant grinding labour involved in even surviving the Rain Wilds, let alone travelling through them, to internal plots within the expedition and even the dangers of sharing the journey with a bunch of unpredictable dragons, it’s hard throughout Dragon Haven to know where the characters and the book will end up.

But I will say this — the eventual ending of the book is satisfying and worth reaching. Although it leaves room for a continuation of the story — particularly with relation to the potential future revelation of more details about Hobb’s world — it does not leave too much hanging.

All of Hobb’s strengths as a fantasy writer are found in Dragon Haven. Complex, realistic, multi-faceted characters who change and grow. A plot that deceives you into thinking you can foretell its changes in direction — and then twists things around on you. Subtle writing that leaves barely traceable hints of information that you really want to know.

And most of all, lurking beneath the surface of everything Hobb does in Dragon Haven, is the gradual, almost scientific revelation of the secrets of the dragons, their magic, and what it all could mean for the future of the whole world.

If you were disappointed by the Soldier Son trilogy and even by somewhat lacklustre first book in the Rain Wild Chronicles series, The Dragon Keeper, don’t lose your faith in their author just yet.

Robin Hobb is back in form. And with Dragon Haven she’s cutting up the fantasy scene once again. I can’t wait to see what she’s got in store for us next.