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June 3rd, 2004

Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn

Yesterday I went out and bought more books. I'll probably be back at the second hand shop before I even finish these, but thats got more to do with my skip-around style of reading than anything else. I eat through books with never any idea of whats going on. ^^

Anyway, Tad Williams:

The book I picked up was The War of the Flowers, which I hope will be more fun than I found Otherland. I just had to give up on Otherland.

Otherland, if I remember correctly, starts when a soldier--I think WW1--dies on the battlefield, but doesn't. Instead, he ends up somewhere Else. I never could make heads or tails out of it, but whatever.

This entry to flog Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, which I read ages and ages ago.

If you liked LoTR at all, try reading these. They're very, very different, but have the same coming-of-age, epic struggle of good against evil, etc. There's too much in the three (or four) books to go over but, just quick:

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is the name of the trilogy. If you go out hunting for it, the individual books are called: (1) The Dragonbone Chair (2) The Stone of Farewell (3a) To Green Angel Tower part1 (3b) To Green Angel Tower part2. Yes, it's a trilogy with four books. Just another reason to love it. XD

MS&T's protagonist is the scullion Simon, who lives at the old--and somewhat in decline--castle known as the Hayholt. As in Middle earth, Osten Ard has the feeling of things being on the way out. Magic seems to have once been about, but is now relegated to a folk tale. It's recent enough to spook people, but not so much that they fully believe in it.

This world's magical folk are known as the Sithi, and they are somewhat reminiscent of elves. Iron poisons them, and they have been driven nearly to the brink of extinction by the late king John the Prebyter, who had also set up giant "nails" to keep them at bay.

So Simon lives a rather dull, sculldrudgery kind of life in the dusty castle until the high king dies and releases an evil known as the Storm King. As the story progresses, all the history of the world we learn becomes entwined with what is happening--the history of the sithi and of man, and of three swords: memory, sorrow, and thorn, all having something to do with Ineluki the Storm King, and how to vanquish him.

At first, though, no one but the scholarly League of the Scroll have any idea of what is coming and Simon, apprenticed to a member of the League, is forced to flee the castle. Later, stumbling about in the forest, he almost accidentally rescues a Sithi prince and befreinds the Quanuc, Binabik, who is somewhere between a hobbit and a dwarf. Binabik rides a wolf when the rest of his people--who you get to meet later--ride rams. I wish I remembered what her name was.

Theres knights, priests, princes, kings, a witch (with an awesome bird-footed house), a girl, or course, and all manner or ucky evil things like bukken--who I imagine as zombies that dig through dirt like Digger bad guys but creepier--and trolls, and sick water dwelling things, all of whom you get to know quite well. This series was the first--and so far the only--to give me the feeling of a truly populated world without becoming overly intricate like Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. In MS&T, you got lost in the world, not in the book. Everything has something to do with somehting else, but somehow, it's not difficult to keep track of it.

And it comes off beautifully, from the Quanuc homelanf of Yiquanuc, to the fabric sithi city (heh) of Jao e-Tinukai'i, and damn I wish I had never read this series so I could be reading it for the first time again. T.T

It's really late. I don't know why I feel the need to tell you folk about books I read when I'm dying of sleepyness, but blame incoherence on that. I think I'm doing better than I did in the Cyteen "review" ^^; Maybe it's also the fault of the late hour that I'm deeply disturbed by the fact that I can't remember the names of my favorite charachters from a series I read in middle school/first year high school.

Because, in keeping with the Cyteen garbled ranting, I was going to tell you about my favorite chrachters, other than Binabik, and his wolf. The sithi Simon rescues plays a large part later, and while I'm fodn fo him, my favorite two charachters were the Prince Joshua's knight, whose name I belive started with a D, and the duke of some dukedom whose mane starten with O or had O in it. It says something about the scale of the story that these charachters, although they are central and play a large part, never meet each other. A lot of important people never meet, but their actions have huge effects as Ineluki's influnce spreads and spreads until the sithi have to decide whether to join forces with the humans who'd massacred them or not. Taking into consideration, of course, the part their history played in setting up the situation, their kinship to Ineluki, and the shared threat.

Find it. Read it. 'tis awesome. I miss Osten Ard, talking about it. The world is huge, HUGE, I say.

You see, once, even after being the last dumb kid in my 1st grade class to actually learn to read, I wanted to be a writer. I still sort of so, even if my love of anime-physics probably won't translate well into words. But when I see stories like this and background work like CJ Cherryh's ship-by-ship, cargo-by-cargo, leaving, arriving, docking, refueling, station building, fixing, revamping, project funding, birth&death, azi tape desgining record I get kind of discouraged.

Well, more than kind of, because I sort of suck at keeping track of things. For an example of what I mean, check out the mis-links on my fiction page and how I can't remember why I started writing that WK fic steel in the first place. I know there was a reason and that the reason had something to do with Aya-chan, but damn if I can recall what it was.

And thats a relatively simple fic--fan fic, based on a lot of pre-work someone else has already done--with a small number of charachters, who move about in a relatively small world. Tokyo, beign on Earth, and better, on present day Earth, already has the rest of creation sort of implied. I don't need to bother with it.

And still I forget plot and story and they whole damn point of it, even if I had an outline.

More Books That Discourage Bart the enxt time I'm up too late.

ephi You know, it occured to me too, that I have a double of Cyteen1. I'll see if I can find find Cyteen3 before I ship it off alone, though. Theres a baby on the front of C1 that I like to think is Grant, even if its probably Ari2. Maybe its even Justin, though it seems to be getting tape. Which would almost have to make it Grant, the other two beign CITs . . .

Geez, I'm going to bed. I am so not going to sit here till five am comtemplating 80s cover art.

It is, btw, 4:30 am.

Damn it.

rurounibug ; 01:30 AM|2 replies

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