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Dec. 29th, 2015 10:10 amI finished The Magician's Land last week, third in Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy, though honestly in retrospect its shape does not seem very trilogy-like. Each book has a full arc of its own, and each arc depends on progress and ideas from previous books, but the third book, in a lot of ways, does not culminate the thematic development of the whole series.
As is always the case in these books, I enjoyed the parts on Earth and didn't much enjoy the Fillory stuff. I just don't care that much about Fillory. Its storyline in this book was about the end of Fillory, and while this was obviously concerning to the protagonists, who had invested so much of their hope for the future in Fillory, the story never gave a compelling reason why it should bother us as readers, especially as our heroes had, in the buttons, a built-in parachute out of Fillory. And aside from my normal disinterest in anything Narnia-related, Fillory always had this feeling of impermanence... it ejected the Chatwin kids periodically, replaced Kings and/or Queens at the ends of both of the prior books, had a geography whose magicalness was driven by a need to constantly generate a sense of wonder. If Fillory ends, isn't that the point of Fillory?
But what did work well, astonishingly so given how generally unlikeable Quentin is, was Quentin's narrative. Quentin at this point is a grownup, he's learned how to make personal sacrifices for the happiness of others, he's learned how to feel comfortable in his own shoes, so the story takes a really daring look at what happens after unhappily ever after, what do you do after you've made peace with yourself to actually leave your imprint on the world. The first book is about learning how to use magic, the second book is about learning how to exist in magical worlds, but the third book is about what to do with knowledge. That was very satisfying, although the actual land that Quentin built is implied to lead back to fucking Fillory, so @$#@$
What I have always loved about Grossman's books is the specific way in which magic is hard. It's not 'magic has costs, which are unpredictable and brutal.' It's 'magic has costs, which are complicated and messy but sometimes worth paying.' It is a world with many magicians living ordinary human lives in it, doing magic because magic is worth it, and achieving with the magic commensurate to what they are willing to sacrifice. This is a much better metaphor for science in contemporary society than 'magic has costs, which are unpredictable and brutal,' the neo-promethean take on magic.
I read M.C. Planck's Sword of the Bright Lady, though I feel it was under somewhat false pretenses that I was led to the book. Promise was "Portal fantasy where trained mechanical engineer goes to grimdark GRRM-ish fantasy setting." Reality was "Portal fantasy where trained mechanical engineer goes to grimdark GRRM-ish fantasy setting and instead of doing what any rational mechanical engineer would do, start upgrading the infrastructure, this mechanical engineer starts building guns." I liked the ending quite a lot, anyway, and though I wasn't really expecting to want to read the sequel as I was going, I suddenly do want to read the sequel. It turns out that suddenly and unexpectedly dropping a ton of interesting intrigue storylines in the last chapter will do that. It accomplished the end of Book 1 of Wheel of Time effect of suddenly making the reader realize the story universe is larger than the reader realized. I also appreciated throughout that Planck had reasons why 21st century industrialism was not superior to the fantasy world... moments where he'd show off us his guns and people would say "Oh, it's like a fireball spell but not as powerful." or moments where he'd talk about modern ways to treat infection and people would blink and say "But why wouldn't you just use magical healing?"
The magic system was also strange. It was a grimdark take on World of Warcraft-style magic, with fairly cheap magical healing and resurrection and combat spells, and with magical ability and 'rank' accruing by mathematical formula for killing enemies of greater and greater power. I liked how it revealed how awful the moral assumptions are behind such a system, and yet depicted characters struggling within the system, struggling with the consequences of the very laws of nature.
As is always the case in these books, I enjoyed the parts on Earth and didn't much enjoy the Fillory stuff. I just don't care that much about Fillory. Its storyline in this book was about the end of Fillory, and while this was obviously concerning to the protagonists, who had invested so much of their hope for the future in Fillory, the story never gave a compelling reason why it should bother us as readers, especially as our heroes had, in the buttons, a built-in parachute out of Fillory. And aside from my normal disinterest in anything Narnia-related, Fillory always had this feeling of impermanence... it ejected the Chatwin kids periodically, replaced Kings and/or Queens at the ends of both of the prior books, had a geography whose magicalness was driven by a need to constantly generate a sense of wonder. If Fillory ends, isn't that the point of Fillory?
But what did work well, astonishingly so given how generally unlikeable Quentin is, was Quentin's narrative. Quentin at this point is a grownup, he's learned how to make personal sacrifices for the happiness of others, he's learned how to feel comfortable in his own shoes, so the story takes a really daring look at what happens after unhappily ever after, what do you do after you've made peace with yourself to actually leave your imprint on the world. The first book is about learning how to use magic, the second book is about learning how to exist in magical worlds, but the third book is about what to do with knowledge. That was very satisfying, although the actual land that Quentin built is implied to lead back to fucking Fillory, so @$#@$
What I have always loved about Grossman's books is the specific way in which magic is hard. It's not 'magic has costs, which are unpredictable and brutal.' It's 'magic has costs, which are complicated and messy but sometimes worth paying.' It is a world with many magicians living ordinary human lives in it, doing magic because magic is worth it, and achieving with the magic commensurate to what they are willing to sacrifice. This is a much better metaphor for science in contemporary society than 'magic has costs, which are unpredictable and brutal,' the neo-promethean take on magic.
I read M.C. Planck's Sword of the Bright Lady, though I feel it was under somewhat false pretenses that I was led to the book. Promise was "Portal fantasy where trained mechanical engineer goes to grimdark GRRM-ish fantasy setting." Reality was "Portal fantasy where trained mechanical engineer goes to grimdark GRRM-ish fantasy setting and instead of doing what any rational mechanical engineer would do, start upgrading the infrastructure, this mechanical engineer starts building guns." I liked the ending quite a lot, anyway, and though I wasn't really expecting to want to read the sequel as I was going, I suddenly do want to read the sequel. It turns out that suddenly and unexpectedly dropping a ton of interesting intrigue storylines in the last chapter will do that. It accomplished the end of Book 1 of Wheel of Time effect of suddenly making the reader realize the story universe is larger than the reader realized. I also appreciated throughout that Planck had reasons why 21st century industrialism was not superior to the fantasy world... moments where he'd show off us his guns and people would say "Oh, it's like a fireball spell but not as powerful." or moments where he'd talk about modern ways to treat infection and people would blink and say "But why wouldn't you just use magical healing?"
The magic system was also strange. It was a grimdark take on World of Warcraft-style magic, with fairly cheap magical healing and resurrection and combat spells, and with magical ability and 'rank' accruing by mathematical formula for killing enemies of greater and greater power. I liked how it revealed how awful the moral assumptions are behind such a system, and yet depicted characters struggling within the system, struggling with the consequences of the very laws of nature.