I’m very angry with David G. Hartwell.<\/p>\n
Hartwell, for those who don’t know his name, is a very distinguished editor of science fiction, with a long list of anthologies and scholarly essays to his credit, not to mention fabulous taste in clothes. He’s also an editor for Tor Books, where he appears to be the king of splitting long books in two. He’s responsible for splitting Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire<\/cite> and The Killing of Worlds<\/cite> and Charlie Stross’s The Family Trade<\/cite> and The Hidden Family<\/cite>, and also these two books, The Last Guardian of Everness<\/cite><\/strong> and Mists of Everness<\/cite><\/strong>. These are all long books chopped in two, and chopped very abruptly in two– The Risen Empire<\/cite> barely makes it to the end of a sentence before the “To Be Continued…” comes crashing in.<\/p>\n Given the vagaries of the publishing business, this has meant that I needed to wait for more than a year in order to get to read the second half of these stories. That’s pretty annoying when the second volume is a good one, as with the Westerfeld, but it’s downright maddening here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Last Guardian of Everness<\/cite> sets up an interesting syncretic mythology situation. There’s an ancient family, the Waylocks, who are charged with guarding the house that controls access to the Dreaming, where magic and mayhem abound. They have also been given various talismans to ward off the inevitable ancient evil that lurks in the depths and threatens to rise to take over the waking world. Galen Waylock is the last of his line, living in the house called Everness with his grandfather, and as the book opens, he dreams of the signs and portents that herald the end of the world.<\/p>\n The mythology here is kitchen-sink stuff, including bits and pieces stolen from all over the place. The shock troops of the evil forces are selkies, seal-men who can take human shape; the Titan Prometheus appears, chained to a rock in the Caucasus; the Waylocks’ charter comes from King Arthur; and the ultimate evil is referred to as the Morningstar. There’s also a bunch of American mythology mixed in– Ben Franklin is cited as a mighty wizard, and tracking down some of the crucial magical items involves a detailed understanding of American iconography.<\/p>\n It’s an interesting set-up, and the first volume ends on a cliff-hanger, with the only people standing in the way of the triumph of ultimate evil being Galen, his estranged Vietnam-vet father, a spacy young woman named Wendy, and her Russian husband who goes by the name Raven. They’ve got some of the magic talismans, but they’ve suffered severe setbacks, and things look fairly bleak for them, but good for the reader, who is set up for a killer sequel.<\/p>\n And then, a full year later, the sequel is screechingly awful. The interesting set-up gets completely drowned in horrible Ayn Rand speechifying and right-wing political grandstanding– on at least two occasions, evil characters remark that they had a really easy time taking over Washington and New York because of the tight gun control laws in those cities, but they’re stymied in the West because everybody is armed. And the conclusion becomes completely incoherent, with the goals and allegiances of the main characters shifting a half-dozen times, and one of the more literal deus ex machina<\/i> endings I’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering.<\/p>\n So I’m pissed at David Hartwell. If he hadn’t split this into two, it still wouldn’t’ve been a good book, but at least I wouldn’t have spent a whole year waiting to read the godawful second half of the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m very angry with David G. Hartwell. Hartwell, for those who don’t know his name, is a very distinguished editor of science fiction, with a long list of anthologies and scholarly essays to his credit, not to mention fabulous taste in clothes. He’s also an editor for Tor Books, where he appears to be the… Continue reading John C. Wright, The War of the Dreaming [Library of Babel]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booklog","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}