Back to my ongoing report of the original
Magic: the Gathering novels, the series published by HarperPrism. We're now at Book 7,
Ashes of the Sun, by Havovi Braddock. In order to make my inevitable wall of text more palatable if no less inevitable I shall Fraternally Anticipate Questions.
DOES THIS BOOK WARM THE COCKLES OF A FOLK ANTHROPOLOGIST'S HEART?
Why, yes, yes it does, O Suspiciously Particular Imaginary Questioner! -- even my little amateur heart, although I expect a more professional folkanthra of my acquaintance would like it even more if she hasn't read it already. It's about lore and languages and why myth and history are both important (but maybe myth more important in the end, at least in pre-industrial societies)...
PASS.
...and about minotaurs and goblins and cow-chopping axes and sadness and a beautiful but desperately lonely and grieving middle-aged female human martial-arts wrestler and... wait, that wasn't a question.
MINOTAURS, EH? ARE WE FINALLY BACK TO A STORY THAT IS ACTUALLY ABOUT
MAGIC: THE GATHERING IN SOME MEANINGFUL FASHION?
Eh, no. Everything verbally connected with the game, up to and including the "Hurloon Minotaurs" (who are the Minotaurs-Not-Appearing-In-This-Story), are decorative bling. Again. There's more of the decorative bling than in the previous story, and it technically happens back in "Dominaria" the first main world of the game, but --
-- BUT THIS SOUNDS LIKE ANOTHER FANTASY NOVEL REPURPOSED TO BE INCLUDED IN A SERIES ABOUT
MAGIC: THE GATHERING CARDS.
Not a question again, but yes I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if this was true.
DOES THE COVER ARTIST GOOF AS BADLY AS ON THE PREVIOUS BOOK ABOUT THE SNAKEY-LIZARDY-ALLIGATOR PEOPLE?
No, but what the minotaurs should be wearing is important in the story and this gets botched.
A STORY ABOUT WHAT MINOTAURS SHOULD BE WEARING. GREAT. WHAT ABOUT THE BACK COVER? ARE THE TWO MAGIC CARDS HILARIOUSLY AND/OR VAGUELY INAPPROPRIATE?
Less so. There are indeed minotaurs who live in a labyrinth, so "Labyrinth Minotaur" at least makes some kind of sense. Goblins are not lacking, but no "Goblin Sappers" per se.
HOW'S THE SEX AND VIOLENCE AND CURSING?
Less R-rated than several previous entries, though the violence is still bloody. But it isn't a chocked-full-of-action plot. It's a thinky moody thoughtful plot.
MUCH LIKE THE PREVIOUS TWO BOOKS WHICH WEREN'T REALLY ABOUT MTG EITHER?
A little more action than either of those, I'd say, but also even more thoughtful. Keep in mind that I have rather liked all the books in the series so far, including those prior two. For books clocking under 350 small pages (and no more than 292 in this case), they pack quite a bit of plot. I vaguely recall only one or two editing/composition glitches, too, and the book doesn't start in the middle of a fight while trying to explain what the hell either. It takes a little while to get to the main plot, but I wasn't bored. I was actually impressed at how the plot worked itself back along its track (both literally and figuratively) at the end. Also, I appreciated the nerve of the author in drawing out an extended set of epilogue chapters rather than ending with a thump of a few pages.
COULD YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC ABOUT THE PLOT WITHOUT UNDUE SPOILERAGE?
The aforementioned woman, Ayesh, is the last known survivor of a glorious human civilization overthrown, more than a little embarrassingly all things considered, by a goblin horde. Possibly because the seven cities of this Empire avoided training any military to bother talking about, and ended up relying on a few handfulls of wrestlers to defend them. (Not entirely joking, the author's unfortunately a bit vague about this.) Now the woman in her 40s travels the world as a minstrel trying to teach people the history of her land, but she's been doing it long enough (over 20 years now) that she's starting to hear her own stories come back in popular deformations which causes her to lose hope that her culture can ever rise again. On an ill-fated venture to find a northern human outpost where maybe she can tell her histories and keep them alive without other people coming along to legendarily accrete them, she decides screw it her whole mission in life is a worthless failure and she'd rather die literally kicking the asses of the local goblin infestation while drunk.
Then minotaurs happen.
SOUNDS PORTENTOUS.
It is.
SOUNDS PRETENTIOUS.
It... well, kind of is, I guess. But in a good way? I didn't mind.
SOUNDS PREDICTABLE.
If I say that it wasn't, then that might sound predictable in another way. The author likes to send out signals so you expect the story to zig, but then more often it zags instead. I can't say I was very happy that the Big Bad of the piece was an extremely fundamentalist religious leader (very often called "fundamentalist" vs the "liberals"), but she's the only blatantly obvious and unshaded villain of the piece and the relationship between conservative and liberal religion, ditto politics, is more nuanced than I was worried it would be when I saw this side of the plot starting up early.
I think I have another couple of books to go before Wizards of the Coast yanks the publishing contract back to itself in order to publish actual freaking MTG novels (again), and considering the dearth of more than cosmetic MTG in these past three books I can understand why they'd do that. But the stories themselves are good quality (even if the editing and composition gets sloppy sometimes -- not in this one.) I won't mind reading another book or two in this general vein, but I'll be glad to get to epic plottiness and lore-wallowing eventually, too.
