I thought I had checked rather carefully when buying it that it was not in a series, so I looked again. There was absolutely nothing on the cover or the outermost pages that indicated this book was anything but a standalone story. I looked online and found out that it was indeed the fourth in a series. I cursed the people who decided to not put the novel's status as part of a larger series in an easily accessibly place...
Yeah. And even when a book DOES make it clear that it's part of a series - for example, by throwing a blurb on the cover like "A Such-And-Such Novel" - it often fails to tell us which number of the series it is. And even when some page towards the beginning lists a bunch of novels in the series, that list is often incomplete and out of order. It strikes me as an odd way to try to sell books.
I've finished The Hero of Ages, and enjoyed it quite a bit. This book delves much more deeply into the metaphysics of the setting than the first two, finally explaining how many of the things that appear in earlier books actually came to be, and why each one is important. Much of that exposition occurs in the journal excerpts that begin each chapter, which tend to be much longer than the average from books 1 & 2 (or at least they feel that way). There's still a lot of teasing/foreshadowing going on in those bits, but where it felt like fluff in the earlier books, it's more critical to understanding the plot of book 3.
My co-worker who is a Sanderson fan had warned me that the trilogy is pretty heavy on exposition, as well as on internal monologues. He was right, and while all of that made it a slow, dense read in places, I feel like the final payoff of each book was worth it.
I know that Sanderson wrote some sequels set in the same world, which I'll probably look for someday, but it won't be right away. (My co-worker says the later books are better, as the author's ability to "show, don't tell" improved.)
I stayed up far too late last night to finish this book, so have yet to pick out my next book to read.
I have a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine, gifted to me by my mother for many years now. This past week, I received a special issue celebrating the US's 250th anniversary, so that's what I'm reading now.
I continue to enjoy this subscription, with its mix of articles on history, science, and culture. Some of the articles are on subjects I know a great deal about, but even more cover subjects I know very little about, if any, so my horizons keep getting expanded in small, digestible amounts.
Just finished 'An African History of Africa', by Zeinab Badawi, and 'Ten Luminous Emanations', by Rabbi Isaac Luria (a re-read, which went in a lot easier on the second run)
Now reading 'Hiawatha', and 'Transit to Scorpio', by Alan Burt Akers.
In my epic journey through the Pathfinder Tales line, I have started Stalking the Beast, by Howard Andrew Jones. It's part fantasy monster hunt, part political intrigue.
In my epic journey through the Pathfinder Tales line, I have started Stalking the Beast, by Howard Andrew Jones. It's part fantasy monster hunt, part political intrigue.
Howard Andrew Jones knew what he was about.
I'm reading 'Kandar', by Kenneth Bulmer, which has been non-stop fight scenes combined with Clark Ashton Smith-esque vocabulary so far, and that's very much OK with me. For "non-fiction", 'The Secret Doctrine', by H.P. Blavatsky. Hard work, which reads like somebody's attempt at world-building after running through the contents of a back-street 19th Century pharmacy.
I have finished Stalking the Beast. It was fine, but I still find Elyana and Drelm (the continuing main characters from Jones's previous Tale) a bit lackluster compared to other protagonists in this product line. The new POV character (the shady gunslinger Lisette) was far more interesting.
Today I started The Dagger of Trust, by Chris Willrich.
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In my epic journey through the Pathfinder Tales line, I have started Stalking the Beast, by Howard Andrew Jones. It's part fantasy monster hunt, part political intrigue.Howard Andrew Jones knew what he was about.
We're much poorer for Howard's absence.
He was one of the Pathfinder Tales colleagues with whom I most often conspired behind the scenes. We discussed opportunities to collaborate on Pathfinder stories, but between our other projects we never found the time. The closest we came was when I wrote him a story for Tales from the Magician's Skull.
I admired both his writing talent and his Harold Lamb scholarship. He was friendly and kind. We had several things outside of fantasy stories in common, and despite seeing each other only occasionally at conventions, I felt we were good pals.
Our last chat came shortly before he learned of his diagnosis. Our getting back in touch during the COVID years was a great joy, and the news of his passing was devastating. I think of him often.
Vale Howard.
"Relativity DeMYSTiFieD" by David McMahon
I bought a new hardcover collected copy of Dragonlance Legends. Since it’s been a few years, however, I decided to start with a reread of Chronicles.
If it's feasible, I would highly recommend reading Dragons of the Dwarven Depths between Autumn Twilight and Winter Night. It bridges the - MAJOR! - gap between those two books, and it clearly refers to one aspect of War of the Twins.
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'A Voyage To Arcturus', by David Lindsey. Very strange, and something I will need to re-read (again).
I finished The Dagger of Trust. It was a good tale, and the rage-inducing mists form one of the more genuinely terrifying psychological threats I've seen in a Pathfinder Tale.
The bardic college with the secret spy school within it will definitely appeal to some of my gaming buddies who are obsessed with bards, so I may need to loan it out sometime in the future (something I rarely do with books in my library).
After seeing the film, I'm reading 'The Odyssey' again, and enjoying the book quite a way more, to be honest. It might help that it's done in verse.
'The Night Land', by William Hope Hodgson, and 'Keep Sharp', by Dr Sanjay Gupta, a book about brain health.
After trying several stories that fell short, in my opinion, I finally found one that proved to be what I was looking for: Terminator Salvation: Cold War by Greg Cox.
For those of you not familiar with the 1984 movie The Terminator, here's the story in a nutshell: In the future, an Artificial Intelligence called Skynet decides to destroy the human race. It starts a nuclear war and goes on to manufacture machines to hunt and kill humans. Among those machines are cyborgs called Terminators. One great hero - John Connor - organizes a resistance instrumental to warring against Skynet, eventually defeating it. Skynet then sends a Terminator back in time, to 1984, apparently with the intent of killing John Connor's mother before John is born. The resistance finds out and sends an operative back to 1984 to try to stop that Terminator.
In the second movie of that series, Skynet sends another Terminator back in time to kill John Connor as a child, and the resistance sends its own agent to try to stop that Terminator. In the third movie, Skynet sends yet another Terminator to try to kill John Connor as an adult, and the resistance sends its own agent to try to stop THAT Terminator.
Now don't get me wrong. I loved those movies, enough to watch them 4 times each, and I wouldn't mind seeing them again. But those movies have flaws, and my description may have made one of those flaws obvious: they're repetitive. Each movie re-hashes the same old plot. Surely the premise of Skynet warring against humanity has great potential for more stories than that!
Enter the fourth movie, Terminator Salvation. I'll admit that movie has flaws also. The characters aren't one tenth as interesting as in the first three movies. The critical scene that's supposed to explain what's going on was a botch-up, making the whole movie's plot look like a complete mess. Undoubtedly, that movie's script needed some revision. Yet despite those problems, I loved the movie enough to watch THAT one four times as well. It was DIFFERENT. Except for the first scene, the entire movie is set in that post-apocalyptic age during the war against the machines. There's no time travel (except that John Connor acts on the knowledge of the future that he had acquired, thanks to those future time travelers we saw in the first three movies). Instead of giving us only brief glimpses of this AI apocalypse, as the first three movies had done, this movie shoves the audience into the thick of it. A short while into my first viewing of this movie, I realized: the "Terminator" franchise NEEDED a movie like this.
And... well, this is just me, but as it happens, I had never seen anything like it. I had seen (and read) stories about extraterrestrials conquering the world, and humanity resisting them. I had seen (and read) stories about a zombie apocalypse, about a mutant apocalypse, and the like. But what about an AI apocalypse? Oh, I had seen (and read) stories about an artificial intelligence making a START at taking over the world, before the heroes nip it in the bud, and stories about a future in which the AI has already conquered humanity so thoroughly that the resistance was over. But a WAR against an artificial intelligence that had already conquered the world? I had to do a Google search (ironically) to assure myself that such stories existed, and I wasn't familiar with any of those, outside of the Terminator series.
I heard that Terminator Salvation was supposed to be the first of a trilogy of movies, but it wasn't successful enough to warrant a sequel. Well, that's not exactly surprising. Like I said, that movie needed work. But I felt the need for more about the war against Skynet. And the next two movie sequels weren't what I wanted at all.
So, I searched through other media. I watched the first 3 episodes of Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series on YouTube. I didn't like it enough to finish that 6-episode series. I read a trade paperback that reprinted a 4-issue comic-book prequel of Terminator Salvation (sometimes called "Sand in the Gears"). I read the first two issues of another comic book series, Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle. I didn't find any of those comics to be especially interesting.
I turned to a novel prequel, Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes by Timothy Zahn. That book had some interesting scenes, but I found much of the book too slow, and I could only get halfway or so through it. (Mind you, I thought that Zahn's first Star Wars "Thrawn" novel series to be slow and boring as well; I barely managed to finish that trilogy. I know that many people loved that trilogy, so you might not want to put much stock in my opinion. On the other hand, Zahn also wrote the "Conquerors" trilogy, which I rank at #4 on the list of my favorite novel series' of all time. But I digress.)
Finally, I tried Terminator Salvation: Cold War by Greg Cox, which moved quickly enough to keep me interested. I read a lot of it during a trip I just got back from. I'm almost finished, with only the 2-page epilogue left to go. The book portrays war as a deadly hell. Victories come at a terrible price of human lives. People don't get plot armor because they have names and personalities, or even by getting scenes told from their point of view.
I probably just said too much. I'll stop now.
Dagger of Trust got me to the halfway point of the complete set of 38 Pathfinder Tales novels that I received from BenS almost a year ago. (Thanks again! It's been a wonderful windfall!)
I am now re-reading The Redemption Engine, by James L. Sutter. It's one of only five (?) PF Tales that I had read before acquiring the full set. One of the others was Sutter's first Salim novel, Death's Heretic, and I've enjoyed reading (and re-reading) both books. They fall on the high-fantasy side of Pathfinder adventures (particularly this one, with its jaunts to multiple planes and numerous extraplanar characters) but this time through, I'm noticing that the novel has some surprisingly strong noir themes to it. Salim is a cynical detective in a world full of corrupt authorities and moral gray areas. He has a strong, but flawed, personal code of honor that often causes as much trouble for him as the criminals he's chasing down.