2003 gaslamp fantasy. Ile-Rien is under attack by the mysterious
Gardier and their black airships. Tremaine Valiarde doesn't really
care about that; she's just looking for a way to die, on her own
terms. In another world, Ilias wants to make sure the wizard he killed
is still dead.
Definitely a book of two settings, then: on one side, not-London
under the Zeppelin Blitz, with blackouts and evacuations and a luxury
liner hastily converted as a troop ship. On the other, a culture of
fishers and weavers, with strict societal roles and taboos.
And for the series reader, Tremaine is the daughter of Nicholas, the
protagonist of The Death of the Necromancer – but he and Madeleine
are dead and gone. Or so everyone assumes.
There are three distinct cultures happening here, though we don't
learn much about the Gardier other than "nasty"; and also three
distinct approaches to exerting control over the world, the islanders'
gods, the wizards and artificers of Vienne, and the industrial
mechanics and magics of the Gardier. But while that alone could be a
fascinating story, this is a Martha Wells book, so we get all this
through the characters and their attitudes. That's mostly Tremaine and
Ilias, but we also have the fop turned serious soldier who still has
trouble taking Tremaine seriously, the Chosen Vessel of the God coming
to terms with people who are wizards but somehow not cruel and
murderous the way the wizards he's known always are, the female
apprentice wizard who's clearly only been allowed to get as far as she
has because of national desperation…
"It's like you're two people. One of them is a flighty artist, and I
like her. The other one is bloody-minded and ruthless and finds
scary things funny, and I'm not sure I like her very much; but
whenever we're about to die, she's the one who gets all three of us
through it alive."
Oh, and the spheres that were a significant part of The Death of the
Necromancer are back too, and we start to learn something about them.
Really, the only thing wrong with this as an individual book is that
it cuts off very much in the middle of things; but I have the other
two books available. Some readers found it slow-going and unengaging;
Wells often does start slowly, I think to let the reader get the hang
of the setting, and this is not the genre fantasy it might initially
appear to be.
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