Exactly what it says on the tin: Discuss the Emberverse (the series written by S M Stirling).
SPOILERS!!!
So, having read the entire series (minus the 3 short stories that he's done for someone else's anthologies), up through the most recent sample chapters for Prince of The Outcasts, I'm still a bit miffed by certain trends in the series (albeit a lot less miffed than when Rudi was running about):
1) We still learned 99% of everything we know about the Bearkillers from the two short chapters set in Larsdalen....waaaaaayyy back in TPW (Book #2 of 13, so far). Compared to the narrative juggernaut that Stirling had allowed the McKenzies to become, that's a pretty brutal short-changing for the BKs.
Even the small bits of BK-centered narrative we get are all through the lens of members of the A-List. The ruling class (we'll come back to this, below).
I'm still not sold on the idea that the entire society got behind Mike Jr, despite Eric, Will, and several other (mostly unnamed) senior A-Listers (Josh Sanders, who was Mike's #3 in the first book, but who utterly vanishes after the end of DtF....along with many other fairly important characters) being around....and despite the fact that Mike Jr was a newborn at the time. Signe borrowed some of Juniper's mind control powers.
Then they had 15 years for more A-Listers to outshine adolescent Mike Jr, and eclipse him in popularity (or simply to be backed by people who were against Signe). Nope.
2) Stirling seems to hate the very idea of internal tension within the Good Guys group. Everyone gets along, and everyone gets behind their designated Leader. Even (especially!) when that doesn't seem very likely. Decisions are made (and, we can presume, arguments are had) offscreen, and the reader is informed of the fully agreed upon decision/course of action in some kind of briefing or "as you know, Bob". Even when Mathilda has good reason to suspect Rudi of sleeping with another woman.....the very next scene has her sheepishly apologizing, with no argument shown in-between.
This is especially aggravating when Stirling simply dodges good opportunities for drama and tension.
In the latest book, Orlaith is called on the carpet by Mathilda for her disobedience in kicking off the Second Quest (helping Reiko find the Grasscutter).....despite the fact that she not only managed to achieve the objective, but added significantly to the territory of the High Kingdom.
Mathilda gives essentially no shits about successes, and treats her like an idiot, then essentially banishes her from The Court.
At this point, it would have been easy to have a confrontation between the Legal Ruler/Mother (Mathilda is still High Queen for another few years, and is Lady Protector in her own right for life) and the De Facto Ruler/Daughter (Orlaith has the Sword, which is how Rudi became High King, and is a successful field commander).
Instead, Orlaith meekly goes into social "exile" (but not really, since it's basically a fiction because Mathilda is angry)....and Stirling throws in all these dark political mutterings about how people are all playing neutral because they don't want to offend either Mathilda or Orlaith......but we know it's just filler, because Stirling isn't going to have Orlaith rebel, or Mathilda disinherit her ('cause she can't, due to the Sword). The "exile" to the country is basically an excuse to move to another plotline.
Mathilda still comes off as a hypocritical cow, and Stirling clearly wants the reader to think that Orlaith is actually in some danger of actual real-real punishment in this scene (like being imprisoned or executed or disinherited)....when there's clearly no such danger.
3) The upcoming Pacific War (Montival and Japan against the Devil-worshipping North Koreans) is......unlikely. Stirling has his characters play this all wrong.
If it was sold inside the narrative as "The Evil Powers are back, and if we don't strangle them in their cradle in Asia, we'll be under siege at home before you know it!"...then, yes, the vast expenditures of wealth and lives inherent in a transoceanic war in the Emberverse would make some kind of likely sense. That's not how Stirling has them handle it.
As it is, tens of thousands of Montivallans are going to die, and huge treasure are going to be expended, for a single casualty in a single skirmish with a small band of Koreans. "They killed Rudi!" is supposed to justify all the orphans, widows, and neglected infrastructure/progress....and, even within the narrative, it doesn't. Stirling just, again, tells us that the casual murder of the High King overrides everything (there's even a shot at the critics, when a character thinks that any people who don't go to war/murder when their symbols are desecrated have something wrong with them).
There's no "Hey, I liked High King Rudi, too....but lets not plunge the entire nation into a world war over a single man's death in a skirmish that's been over with for months!" character. Literally no visible opposition to the drive to war (or people who have interests that go in the other direction).
4) I nearly cheered when a character vetoed going to spend time with the McKenzies during Orlaith's "exile". Even Juniper's appearance was mercifully brief. That culture has really overstayed its welcome on the center stage of the narrative.
5) The Magic. I don't have an issue, unlike some, with the overt presence of magic (since it was apparent from the end of the 2nd book that this was going to be a Fantasy series of some kind). However, the portrayal of the magic is so uneven and vague that we still (13 books in) don't have any kind of real idea of what magic can do, who can do it, and how people do it.
We know that bad guys possessed by the Evil Powers can do wire-fu Wuxia, parry swords with their hands, operate for a while after fatal wounds or drowning, infect people with their body fluids, and put hypnotic spells on people (possibly without line of sight).
The Good Guys don't seem to have any analogues to most of that. 90% of the Good Guy magic has been from the various McKenzie priestesses (clairvoyance, casting sleep spells, etc) and Asatru prophecy. Pretty much everything else is bound up in the two Swords (which are basically magic nukes, if used properly).
Stirling basically uses the magic to cut his way out of a literary corner, or to short-circuit a fight scene (or to make Rudi even more insufferable). The reader can't anticipate or critique an individual use of magic within a scene, because we've been given absolutely no metric for how/why/who/what magic is used. It does whatever will move the scene along. That's not great.
6) EXTREME SPOILERS.
The way Stirling chooses to move Prince John out across the Pacific so he (we assume) can link up with King Birmo and the neo-Australians.....is gigantic bullshit. He gets pushed All The Way Across The Pacific by the storm/waves the Grasscutter generates at the end of tDatB. Wow. It's not even pretending not to be a Deus Ex Machina.
7) There's still too much "X talks to Y and Y agrees to Z action, even though the entire narrative so far would seem to make that unlikely". Juniper was the worst offender, followed by Rudi...but now it just happens with random people. The Twins manage to talk Edain out of forcing Orlaith to go back home, despite him having travelled several hundred miles on behalf of, and on the direct command of, Mathilda (who has repeatedly been highlighted as having his undying loyalty and friendship) to do that very thing. The entire exchange takes about 4 paragraphs, and about 30 seconds of "book time". Whew! For a second there, I thought there'd be some inter-hero tension!
This was even more egregious than Rudi and Sandra variously cajoling and blackmailing people into joining Montival (Rudi even expresses willingness to conduct a campaign of lies against someone who is reluctant...which is basically a huge character derail for him). Or Juniper basically waving Mathilda's captivity in Sandra's face, despite being in front of the Corvallan Senate, then simply changing the subject when someone expresses discomfort with Corvallis being asked to abet kidnapping....
8) The Desert and the Blade was probably the strongest book since The Scourge of God. A lot of stuff actually happens, and there isn't too much handwaving or Mary Sueness from the heroes (Orlaith is a lot better than Rudi, and Reiko is much better in her characterization than anyone save Tiphaine, the Twins, or Havel). There are a couple of points where I think Stirling was trying to make a shoutout or pop culture reference, but I just didn't catch what he was getting at (such as the scenes inside the cursed "castle", where Reiko recovers the Grasscutter).
9) The Haida. Their continued survival, despite being pirates, raiders, and slavers preying chiefly on Montival (one of the 4 most powerful nations on the planet), and despite their close proximity to Montival.....is just not believable. Montival, under Rudi, would have wiped them off the face of the Earth years before. No sale.
10) Everyone is a noble. Stirling, in almost all his books, prefers to write about the doings and lives of the Upper Class. In a series as long as the Emberverse is....that's not so great a decision. I'd like a POV character who is a non-A-List Bearkiller, or a Corvallan citizen, or what-have-you. Ingolf was the closest we've come to that (despite a backstory as essentially an exiled noble), and he ended up marrying into the Royal Family and becoming a weird semi-noble, semi-landowner (it's unclear how the Dunedain actually work, internally).
I had hoped the Anthology would have stuff with low-ranking Dunedain, wandering mercenary knights/squires, adventuring Vikings, or BKs who didn't make the A-List......but all we got from Stirling was a phoned-in scene with Orlaith and Heuradys wherein they prove better at police work than the police, etc. Some of the other stories contributed to it were interesting, but nothing along the lines of a Lower Decks Episode. Birmingham even recycled characters from one of his own books (!lazy!).
A weakness to this series is that, once Rudi appears, there is no other person on the side of Good who can compete with him, or who can frustrate him. There's no Churchill to his Roosevelt (or DeGaulle to his Churchhill!). Everyone either loves Rudi (and then love Orlaith), or is comfortably outranked by those who do. Montival is a unipolar State with no similarly-powerful states nearby. The series went from the original trilogy, where multiple leaders had to team up and work together to frustrate the PPA, to a story where Hero* and his followers do whatever the Hero says.
Discuss.
*-There's one rather grating scene, early on in TSL, where Rudi simply asserts his leadership of the Quest, and nobody argues (after he threatens to do it without Ingolf) or ever revisits the question. "I'm in charge because I'm in charge!". This eventually ends in Rudi arriving back in proto-Montival and assuming complete military authority, despite at least 4 characters with vastly more experience in leading large troop maneuvers.
SPOILERS!!!
So, having read the entire series (minus the 3 short stories that he's done for someone else's anthologies), up through the most recent sample chapters for Prince of The Outcasts, I'm still a bit miffed by certain trends in the series (albeit a lot less miffed than when Rudi was running about):
1) We still learned 99% of everything we know about the Bearkillers from the two short chapters set in Larsdalen....waaaaaayyy back in TPW (Book #2 of 13, so far). Compared to the narrative juggernaut that Stirling had allowed the McKenzies to become, that's a pretty brutal short-changing for the BKs.
Even the small bits of BK-centered narrative we get are all through the lens of members of the A-List. The ruling class (we'll come back to this, below).
I'm still not sold on the idea that the entire society got behind Mike Jr, despite Eric, Will, and several other (mostly unnamed) senior A-Listers (Josh Sanders, who was Mike's #3 in the first book, but who utterly vanishes after the end of DtF....along with many other fairly important characters) being around....and despite the fact that Mike Jr was a newborn at the time. Signe borrowed some of Juniper's mind control powers.
Then they had 15 years for more A-Listers to outshine adolescent Mike Jr, and eclipse him in popularity (or simply to be backed by people who were against Signe). Nope.
2) Stirling seems to hate the very idea of internal tension within the Good Guys group. Everyone gets along, and everyone gets behind their designated Leader. Even (especially!) when that doesn't seem very likely. Decisions are made (and, we can presume, arguments are had) offscreen, and the reader is informed of the fully agreed upon decision/course of action in some kind of briefing or "as you know, Bob". Even when Mathilda has good reason to suspect Rudi of sleeping with another woman.....the very next scene has her sheepishly apologizing, with no argument shown in-between.
This is especially aggravating when Stirling simply dodges good opportunities for drama and tension.
In the latest book, Orlaith is called on the carpet by Mathilda for her disobedience in kicking off the Second Quest (helping Reiko find the Grasscutter).....despite the fact that she not only managed to achieve the objective, but added significantly to the territory of the High Kingdom.
Mathilda gives essentially no shits about successes, and treats her like an idiot, then essentially banishes her from The Court.
At this point, it would have been easy to have a confrontation between the Legal Ruler/Mother (Mathilda is still High Queen for another few years, and is Lady Protector in her own right for life) and the De Facto Ruler/Daughter (Orlaith has the Sword, which is how Rudi became High King, and is a successful field commander).
Instead, Orlaith meekly goes into social "exile" (but not really, since it's basically a fiction because Mathilda is angry)....and Stirling throws in all these dark political mutterings about how people are all playing neutral because they don't want to offend either Mathilda or Orlaith......but we know it's just filler, because Stirling isn't going to have Orlaith rebel, or Mathilda disinherit her ('cause she can't, due to the Sword). The "exile" to the country is basically an excuse to move to another plotline.
Mathilda still comes off as a hypocritical cow, and Stirling clearly wants the reader to think that Orlaith is actually in some danger of actual real-real punishment in this scene (like being imprisoned or executed or disinherited)....when there's clearly no such danger.
3) The upcoming Pacific War (Montival and Japan against the Devil-worshipping North Koreans) is......unlikely. Stirling has his characters play this all wrong.
If it was sold inside the narrative as "The Evil Powers are back, and if we don't strangle them in their cradle in Asia, we'll be under siege at home before you know it!"...then, yes, the vast expenditures of wealth and lives inherent in a transoceanic war in the Emberverse would make some kind of likely sense. That's not how Stirling has them handle it.
As it is, tens of thousands of Montivallans are going to die, and huge treasure are going to be expended, for a single casualty in a single skirmish with a small band of Koreans. "They killed Rudi!" is supposed to justify all the orphans, widows, and neglected infrastructure/progress....and, even within the narrative, it doesn't. Stirling just, again, tells us that the casual murder of the High King overrides everything (there's even a shot at the critics, when a character thinks that any people who don't go to war/murder when their symbols are desecrated have something wrong with them).
There's no "Hey, I liked High King Rudi, too....but lets not plunge the entire nation into a world war over a single man's death in a skirmish that's been over with for months!" character. Literally no visible opposition to the drive to war (or people who have interests that go in the other direction).
4) I nearly cheered when a character vetoed going to spend time with the McKenzies during Orlaith's "exile". Even Juniper's appearance was mercifully brief. That culture has really overstayed its welcome on the center stage of the narrative.
5) The Magic. I don't have an issue, unlike some, with the overt presence of magic (since it was apparent from the end of the 2nd book that this was going to be a Fantasy series of some kind). However, the portrayal of the magic is so uneven and vague that we still (13 books in) don't have any kind of real idea of what magic can do, who can do it, and how people do it.
We know that bad guys possessed by the Evil Powers can do wire-fu Wuxia, parry swords with their hands, operate for a while after fatal wounds or drowning, infect people with their body fluids, and put hypnotic spells on people (possibly without line of sight).
The Good Guys don't seem to have any analogues to most of that. 90% of the Good Guy magic has been from the various McKenzie priestesses (clairvoyance, casting sleep spells, etc) and Asatru prophecy. Pretty much everything else is bound up in the two Swords (which are basically magic nukes, if used properly).
Stirling basically uses the magic to cut his way out of a literary corner, or to short-circuit a fight scene (or to make Rudi even more insufferable). The reader can't anticipate or critique an individual use of magic within a scene, because we've been given absolutely no metric for how/why/who/what magic is used. It does whatever will move the scene along. That's not great.
6) EXTREME SPOILERS.
The way Stirling chooses to move Prince John out across the Pacific so he (we assume) can link up with King Birmo and the neo-Australians.....is gigantic bullshit. He gets pushed All The Way Across The Pacific by the storm/waves the Grasscutter generates at the end of tDatB. Wow. It's not even pretending not to be a Deus Ex Machina.
7) There's still too much "X talks to Y and Y agrees to Z action, even though the entire narrative so far would seem to make that unlikely". Juniper was the worst offender, followed by Rudi...but now it just happens with random people. The Twins manage to talk Edain out of forcing Orlaith to go back home, despite him having travelled several hundred miles on behalf of, and on the direct command of, Mathilda (who has repeatedly been highlighted as having his undying loyalty and friendship) to do that very thing. The entire exchange takes about 4 paragraphs, and about 30 seconds of "book time". Whew! For a second there, I thought there'd be some inter-hero tension!
This was even more egregious than Rudi and Sandra variously cajoling and blackmailing people into joining Montival (Rudi even expresses willingness to conduct a campaign of lies against someone who is reluctant...which is basically a huge character derail for him). Or Juniper basically waving Mathilda's captivity in Sandra's face, despite being in front of the Corvallan Senate, then simply changing the subject when someone expresses discomfort with Corvallis being asked to abet kidnapping....
8) The Desert and the Blade was probably the strongest book since The Scourge of God. A lot of stuff actually happens, and there isn't too much handwaving or Mary Sueness from the heroes (Orlaith is a lot better than Rudi, and Reiko is much better in her characterization than anyone save Tiphaine, the Twins, or Havel). There are a couple of points where I think Stirling was trying to make a shoutout or pop culture reference, but I just didn't catch what he was getting at (such as the scenes inside the cursed "castle", where Reiko recovers the Grasscutter).
9) The Haida. Their continued survival, despite being pirates, raiders, and slavers preying chiefly on Montival (one of the 4 most powerful nations on the planet), and despite their close proximity to Montival.....is just not believable. Montival, under Rudi, would have wiped them off the face of the Earth years before. No sale.
10) Everyone is a noble. Stirling, in almost all his books, prefers to write about the doings and lives of the Upper Class. In a series as long as the Emberverse is....that's not so great a decision. I'd like a POV character who is a non-A-List Bearkiller, or a Corvallan citizen, or what-have-you. Ingolf was the closest we've come to that (despite a backstory as essentially an exiled noble), and he ended up marrying into the Royal Family and becoming a weird semi-noble, semi-landowner (it's unclear how the Dunedain actually work, internally).
I had hoped the Anthology would have stuff with low-ranking Dunedain, wandering mercenary knights/squires, adventuring Vikings, or BKs who didn't make the A-List......but all we got from Stirling was a phoned-in scene with Orlaith and Heuradys wherein they prove better at police work than the police, etc. Some of the other stories contributed to it were interesting, but nothing along the lines of a Lower Decks Episode. Birmingham even recycled characters from one of his own books (!lazy!).
A weakness to this series is that, once Rudi appears, there is no other person on the side of Good who can compete with him, or who can frustrate him. There's no Churchill to his Roosevelt (or DeGaulle to his Churchhill!). Everyone either loves Rudi (and then love Orlaith), or is comfortably outranked by those who do. Montival is a unipolar State with no similarly-powerful states nearby. The series went from the original trilogy, where multiple leaders had to team up and work together to frustrate the PPA, to a story where Hero* and his followers do whatever the Hero says.
Discuss.
*-There's one rather grating scene, early on in TSL, where Rudi simply asserts his leadership of the Quest, and nobody argues (after he threatens to do it without Ingolf) or ever revisits the question. "I'm in charge because I'm in charge!". This eventually ends in Rudi arriving back in proto-Montival and assuming complete military authority, despite at least 4 characters with vastly more experience in leading large troop maneuvers.
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