2013 fantasy novella. Goblins don't make very good soldiers, but there
are lots of them. After an incident with a wizard, nine of them find
themselves deep behind enemy lines. Fortunately, they run into a
veterinarian…
Everybody's been saying I should read Kingfisher, and now I start
to get the point.
Looking at the Bad Guy soldiers as poor bloody infantry has been done
before, of course, sometimes well and sometimes less so. But this is
the first time I've seen the "bad guy" part seriously questioned, not
just at the level of the goblins themselves not being particularly
horrible, but widening the view to look at the whole war of the
goblins versus everyone else and why that war started and what, maybe,
one day, might be done about it. And for that matter how members of
the despised enemy race can hope to be believed when they say it was
that human who killed everyone in the village and left them to rot,
not them at all…
"So…" said Murray. "Say you've got people getting tired of the war.
Then you get a bunch of goblins showing up and wiping out a whole
human village. Do you think those people are still going to be tired
of it?"
Nessilka scowled. "That's politics, Murray."
"Well, yeah. Lotta people die of politics."
And we get the idea of magic as a mental disorder: you wake up one
day and can go foom, but your personality probably isn't what it
was.
There are basically two kinds of sufferers of [Arcane Manifestation
Disorder]—the high-functioning, and the rather less so.
High-functioning wizards can live on their own, and while they tend
to be shy and awkward in social situations, meticulously neat, and
easily startled, they're not any worse off than the rest of us. The
more unfortunate wizards generally require someone to dress them and
can't be allowed near any sharp objects.
Meanwhile Sings-to-Trees just wants to be left alone to care for
animals, which really doesn't give him time or energy for anything
else, but something weird is clearly going on, even before the
goblins turn up.
Even to someone who didn't much care for unicorns, at another time,
this scene would be pure magic, a reaffirmation of everything good
and noble in the world. But there was gunk from the hind end of a
unicorn plastered clear up the side of his face, delicate hoof
prints turning purple across his ribcage, and he felt about a
thousand years old.
It is just a novella (all right, technically edging barely over the
40,000 word mark) and there really isn't room to expand on things as
I'd have liked, but my word this is good stuff. In particular almost
everyone we meet is trying to make things better rather than just
being out for themselves, and this is thoroughly refreshing.
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