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So this thread is not going to be anywhere near as successful as the Blindsight thread, because Prince of Nothing is huge, and I don't have a link to read it for free online, but whatever I want to talk about it anyway.
Let me start out by admitting that I hate epic fantasy.
The Prince of Nothing is epic fantasy written by a philosopher who tasted the fruit of neuroscience, found that it had demolished the very underpinnings of philosophy, and decided he had to tell the world. Scott Bakker has done a lot of drugs. He is a nice guy, but his books are not. Do not go in expecting something friendly. The PoN world is a base, fallen place - some might say vile.
Do expect to be challenged and, maybe, amazed. Prince of Nothing contains some truly epic battle scenes, and I don't mean epic in the modern sense of 'awesome': they're written like (more readable) passages from the Iliad. The sorcery is kickass and the ultimate bad guys (the Consult) are horrifying in a way that evokes Giger's xenomorph at its original and most horrible.
It's a divisive thing, full of difficult characters who make destructive decisions, set in a world that pulls no punches about the treatment of women or the powerless. It's arguably misogynistic, inarguably disgusting, and it's got a lot of heavy philosophical dialogue. All that said, I think it may be the most important work of fantasy since Tolkien. It took me three tries to get into, but once I did I couldn't get out.
So what is it, precisely? Well, part of the joy is in discovering the rules of the world. In short, it is the story of a world divided by ethnicity, gender, and most of all religion - the nations of the West are preparing a Holy War against the East. Behind these worldly concerns lies the shadow of the Consult, the shadowy remnants of an ancient threat that, thousands of years ago, brought the world to the edge of apocalypse. They are led by the surviving Inchoroi, who are probably aliens, and whose (hinted) objective is pretty genuinely terrifying.
Against them stands the Mandate, a school of sorcerers who dream of the First Apocalypse every night. But no one listens to the Mandate; even the Mandate itself is unsure if the Consult still exists. The Holy War is the priority: a chance for the faithful Inrithi to crush the heathen Fanim, and for the Anagogic schools of Western sorcery to wipe out the mysterious eastern Cishaurim.
Pretty standard fantasy setting so far, right? It's not - the execution is wonderful - but the key is still missing.
Down from the north, wounded and confused, comes Anasurimbor Kellhus, one of the Dunyain monks: an order of cloistered savants who've bred themselves for pure rationality and perfect perception. Half Mentat, half Kwisatz Haderach, Kellhus is armed with the Probability Trance and perfect physical conditioning. He has been sent on a task by the Dunyain.
He finds that the people of the world, guided by their unexamined upbringings and blind loyalties, are like children to him. So he begins - gradually, inevitably - to subvert the Holy War to his own end.
Which you will not learn unless you read the books, which you will probably bounce right off of, but I still want to talk about them anyway.
EDIT: So here's a random preview passage from one of his upcoming books in the setting (5 of a planned 9, tl;dr to the max amirite). His prose is okay but some of the imagery is cool and gives a taste of the weird metaphysics. I feel kind of guilty posting this because it wouldn't convince me to read the book, but whatever.
Dreams are only possessed upon waking, which is why men are so keen to heap words upon them after the fact. They engulf your horizons, pin your very frame to turbulent unreality. They are the hand that reaches behind the mountains, beyond the sky, beneath the deepest sockets of the earth. They are the ignorance that tyrannizes our every choice. Dreams are the darkness that only sleep can illuminate.
The old Wizard walked slots beneath mighty foundations. The stones, he knew, were among the oldest in the complex, part of the original structure raised by Carû-Ongonean, the third and perhaps the greatest of the Umeri God-Kings. Here... This was the place where the Nonmen of the famed Tutelage, the Siqû, had come to live among the Kûniüri. This was the place where the first Qûyan texts had been translated and stored, and where the first sorcerous School, the Sohonc, had been born.
Here... The famed Library of Sauglish.
Temple. Fortress. Granary of many things, wisdom and power foremost among them.
The walls seemed to close about him, so narrow was the way. Candles squatted in sconces along the walls. Whenever he neared one, it sparked to white life, while the one previous vanished into strings of smoke. Over and over, until it seemed there was but one flame leaping from wick to wick.
But the illumination was never quite enough. For every ten steps, five took him through absolute shadow, allowing him to see the layering of ancient Wards without the confusion of worldly sight. Ugly, the way all sorcery is ugly, and yet beautiful all the same, like the rigging of great ships, only ethereal–and as deadly as gallows. In the millennium since its construction, the Library–and the Sohonc–had never been conquered. The Cond Yoke. The Skettic invasions. No matter what the conquering nation, civilized or barbaric, they all sheathed their swords and came to terms. Whether perfumed and erudite like Osseoratha or unwashed and illiterate like Aulyanau the Conqueror, they all came to Sauglish bearing gifts instead of threats... They all knew.
This was the Library.
The corridor ended in blind walls. Holding tight the ornate map-case Celmomas had given him, the Grandmaster spoke the sorcerous words. Meaning flashed through his eyes and mouth, and he trod through monolithic stone. The Cant of Sideways Stepping.
Blinking, he found himself in the Upper Pausal, a narrow rostrum overlooking the Pausal proper, a dark antechamber long and deep enough to hold a war galley. Batteries of candles set below sparked to spontaneous life. Seswatha descended the right stair, map-case firmly in hand. Of all the innumerable rooms of the Library, only the Pausal could boast Nonmen artisanship, because only it had been hewn out of living rock. Twining figures adorned the walls, frieze stacked upon frieze, representations of the Tutelage and the first great peace between the High Norsirai and the False Men–as the Tusk called the Cûnuroi. But like so many who entered this room, Seswatha scarcely noticed them. And how could he when the stigmatic blemish of sorcery so assaulted his gaze?
It was always the same whenever one of the Few, those who could see the mark that the sorcerous cut into the natural, walked the Pausal. One thing and one thing only commanded their gaze... the Great Gate of Wheels. The portal that was a lock, and the lock that was a portal.
The entrance to the Coffers.
To mundane eyes it was a wonder of scale and machination. To arcane eyes it was nothing less than a miracle of interlocking deformities: enormous incantation wheels carved from milk-white marble, turning through a frame of bronze set with constellations of faces carved of black diorite, instilled animata–or proxies as they called them–enslaved souls, whose only purpose was to complete the circuit between watcher and watched that was the foundation of all reality, sorcerous or not. So hideous was the Mark of the thing, so metaphysically disfigured, that bile bubbled to the back of his throat whenever he found himself before it.
Qûya magic. Deeper than deep.
Seswatha paused on the stair, warred with his stomach. He looked down, and for some reason felt no surprise, no alarm, to see that the golden map-case had become an infant’s inert form. Blue and grey. Mottled with black bruising, as if it had perished while lying on its face. Slicked with the sweat of the dead.
Such is the madness of dreams that we can neglect the continuity of even the most basic things. An infant corpse, it seemed, had always been what he carried.
Achamian followed the grooves of the Dream thoughtful only of what had been thought, oblivious to the discrepancies. Only when he came to a halt beneath the arcane machinery of the Gate, only when he commanded the proxies to roll back the Gate, did he find himself skidding across unlived life...
Squirming. The dead baby was twisting and straining against his hands.
The Great Gate of Wheels rumbled to cracking life. At last the Archmage gazed down in horror.
Black eyes shining up with newborn bleariness. Fat-webbed arms reaching out, tiny fingers clutching.
Revulsion. Flailing panic. He cast the thing the way a boy might throw off at a spider or a snake, but it simply hung in the air before him, made a cradle of empty space. Behind it, the wheels of the Gate continued their groaning tumble.
“This,” Seswatha gasped, “is not what hap–!”
The last of the great bronze cogs had ceased their clacking. The Gate of Wheels was drawing open...
The infant had dropped from the air. A golden tube clattered where it had fallen. Beyond it, the ponderous bronze machinery of the Gate folded into blackness. A gust swept out across the antechamber.
Achamian stood immobile.
Wind roiled and twisted. His gown tugged at his limbs. A rumble shivered through the walls and lintels, deep, as if a tempest lashed some world inside the world. The Gate, which stood within the Library’s deepest heart, now opened onto the sky–not the Coffers, the sky! And he could see the Library, as though the Pausal hung from a great height above it. Bastions collapsing. Walls flying outward in strings of sand. And he could see it... the horror of horrors within billowing skirts of dust and debris, a mountain of black-spinning wind that linked wrecked earth to flickering clouds. Existence itself howled.
TELL ME... the Whirlwind said.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
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Interest = Piqued.
Although, I found the Black Company by Glen Cook to be the most defining moment of Fantasy since Tolkien, and it generally came with a whisper. I've introduced lots of people to it, but never found one who had heard of them before then (On this side of the pond, at least)
It doesn't tackle anything in a fashion such as the book you're recommending, but what it does do is take the fantasy tropes of sorcerers, beautiful queens, and rebellions, and reduce them to an utterly wonderful shades of grey approach from the eyes of a Mercenary company, the titular Black Company, the Last Free Company of Khatovar (Which becomes a plot point for the later books, so I will say no more.)
It has some wonderful characters, who are anything but good people, yet whom you can't help but admire, empathise with and generally respect.
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I have heard good things about the Black Company books. Have you read the Malazan Book of the Fallen? After meeting Steve Erikson I'd like to get into it.
Also, A Song of Ice and Fire?
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/ears pricked up.
You have my attention, sir. May just need to pick this up in the near future.
Couple 'a quick questions:
Sounds as though this takes place on Earth- is that correct?
What time period are we looking at- somewhat into the future?
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I don't think I've even seen a copy of this in the stores, which sort of surprises me.
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No, it's definitely another planet, in the sense of secondary world fantasy. The constellations aren't even the same. I can't see it as distant future, I think it's pure fantasy. The setting is very medieval, though with the addition of the sorcerous Schools as a geopolitical influence, and the existence of Nonmen who are kind of like less friendly elves.
The only science fiction element is the hint that the Inchoroi and their golden-horned ship came from another world. Oh, and the mythical weapon of the setting, the equivalent of the Sword of Isildur or whatever, is called the Heron Spear and sounds suspiciously like a terawatt laser. :nervous:
The flashback passages to the First Apocalypse are incredibly haunting. I don't think anything in fiction has unnerved me quite as thoroughly as the No-God.
I don't think I've even seen a copy of this in the stores, which sort of surprises me.
That is weird, it sells pretty good - not GRRM good but pretty well.
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Not in library. :(
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I have heard good things about the Black Company books. Have you read the Malazan Book of the Fallen? After meeting Steve Erikson I'd like to get into it.
Also, A Song of Ice and Fire?
I haven't read the Malazan Book of the Fallen, and I actually had never heard of it. Synopsis? (Maybe we should turn this into the 'Let's discuss fantasy' thread >.>)
And, A Song of Ice and Fire is on my 'to read' list - I can't find it in the Libraries here about (Seriously, British Libraries, or maybe just Scottish one, are awful in their selection of books), so it's one I'll have to take a chance on and spring for
In the mean time, on your recommendation, I've just ordered the first book of the Prince of Nothing trilogy
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Sweet! Hope you enjoy it.
I posted a passage from book 5 in the first post. Honestly, if I read that out of nowhere I'd be like 'man this dude is trying hard', but hopefully it hints at what's interesting about the setting. It's a sorcerous dream of the First Apocalypse so it's not at all a spoiler.
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Sweet! Hope you enjoy it.
I posted a passage from book 5 in the first post. Honestly, if I read that out of nowhere I'd be like 'man this dude is trying hard', but hopefully it hints at what's interesting about the setting. It's a sorcerous dream of the First Apocalypse so it's not at all a spoiler.
Yep, definitely piqued my interest.
And I doubt I'll bounce off, I'm a somewhat obsessive reader and can tolerate nearly anything (and I have a lot of bus journeys to fill in, when I'm not studying on them). The only things that I have actually bounced off of were the Twilight series and the Harry Potter series - something, I don't know whether it was the plots or the technical ability of the writers, whatever, something made me bounce off of both of those. (Okay, with Twilight it was the destruction of the vampire, the utterly unlikeable main character, and the thinly veiled Mormon propaganda. My dislike for HP is much more hazy, and I think more to do with the technical ability of the writer. Her style did not agree with me)
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Honestly, if I read that out of nowhere I'd be like 'man this dude is trying hard'.
That's pretty much what I thought of the book the first time I picked it up. Once I stopped worrying about it though, the amazingness came through, at least for the first two and 2/3 of the series. The end of the 3rd book and the 4th kind of fell flat for me, though that might have something to do with reading them all in a week. Might have to give them another go since the 5th is due out soonish.
I haven't read the Malazan Book of the Fallen, and I actually had never heard of it. Synopsis? (Maybe we should turn this into the 'Let's discuss fantasy' thread >.>)
Well, it starts with a little asian girl getting possessed by an old man for reasons that will be explained two or so thousand pages later. :lol:
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That's pretty much what I thought of the book the first time I picked it up. Once I stopped worrying about it though, the amazingness came through, at least for the first two and 2/3 of the series. The end of the 3rd book and the 4th kind of fell flat for me, though that might have something to do with reading them all in a week. Might have to give them another go since the 5th is due out soonish.
The end of the third didn't really click for me until my second time through, and it certainly did leave a lot of questions, but it never screamed 'bad!' (hard to say more without spoiling) and I'm a sucker for sorcery unleashed. The fourth was definitely underwhelming, and reading his blog I think it was a result of him trying to make it more accessible, but it still had a lot of cool stuff once it got going, like the topos under the mountain. I'm looking forward to checking out White-Luck Warrior - hopefully it's up to snuff.
Honestly it's going to be hard to ever trump the second one.
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These books, they are awesome.
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So for anyone who's read them:
Up until The Judging Eye I thought the gods and stuff were all superstition. But after the halos around Kellhus' hands back in Warrior-Prophet I guess I should've realized something more is going on here. Has Kellhus gone mad? It's pretty clear he's no longer pure Dunyain, so what is he becoming? And Jesus Christ did he really pull out his own heart and hold it up after the circumfixion?
I get the sense Earwa is a consensus reality and if enough people believe in something it can happen. Could Kellhus have been shaped by the very belief in his divinity that he enkindled?
Man, a better summary of this series would be 'what if Jesus were Spock, except instead of dying on the cross, he became a badass and learned magic and conquered the world'
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The heart is all I remember well enough to comment on, the rest makes me wish I had the time to re-read them.
The heart was his in his mind, because he just came to believe that all things were his, physically, the heart was from Serwe's body and it was just a little sleight of hand to secure the loyalty of the new faithful.
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:performs gnostic thread necromancy:
I've finished the first trilogy now and am still trying to figure out if Bakker is a true genius or just a misogynistic asshole using some Nietzsche to sell his worldview.
I wish someone could tell me... as if he is the former i really can't wait to see how the story develops... but if he turns out the later I'd rather not keep reading any more of him.
The irony is that "what comes after"... will in this case actually have an impact on "what came before" as Bakkers complex writing up to this point still leaves enough room for interpretation.
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I wish someone could tell me... as if he is the former i really can't wait to see how the story develops... but if he turns out the later I'd rather not keep reading any more of him.
Honestly, the latest book (White-Luck Warrior) has pushed me a bit away from the former and a bit more towards the latter. :blah:
So many things were great about it, but, while in the previous books you could argue that the women were trapped in social rules dictated by their society, in this one the women who've escaped those rules are...still really useless and frustrating.
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That's the bit where he lost me:
The Thousandfold Thought, page 307f.:
She clutched her cheeks, scratched welts across them.
"Always the whore! Why must i always be the whore?"
He looked through her, past her bewildered hurt, down
to the beatings and the abuse, to the betrayals, and beyond,
out to a world of rank lust, shaped by the hammers of custom,
girded with scripture, scaled by ancient legacies of
sentiment and belief. Her womb had cursed her, even as it
made her what she was. Immortality and bliss - this was the
promise all women bore between their tighs. Strong
sons and gasping climax. If what men called truth were ever
the hostage of their desires how could they fail to make
slaves of their women?
Aside from the utter objectification of women in general...
... this is the analysis of the one character who is the master of the "logos", a character who is always portrayed to see the truth exactly as it is.
... this is what he thinks as he looks at his woman who was just earlier seduced/raped and abused by a demon with the aid of magical means.
And this is the same guy who was at the same time pretty much in the same situation and would have succumbed just as the same if not for his ability to use magic and put up "wards" against the demons seductive spells... but of course the woman got seduced/raped because she's a "useless woman", got it...
There is a very slim hope that what he is showing us there is the beginning of a taint of his main character... a "rubbing off of customs"... but much more likely it is wishful thinking on my part and this garbage is exactly the idea the author wants to sell.
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Oh, I think that passage is brilliant and 'safe' from claims of misogyny - it's an argument that women aren't fundamentally inferior or anything, that that inferiority is socially constructed and imposed, and that the patriarchy arises from the male desire to control both female sexuality and the means of reproduction.
It's just later stuff that made me a bit skeeved out.
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Oh, I think that passage is brilliant and 'safe' from claims of misogyny - it's an argument that women aren't fundamentally inferior or anything, that that inferiority is socially constructed and imposed, and that the patriarchy arises from the male desire to control both female sexuality and the means of reproduction.
It's just later stuff that made me a bit skeeved out.
You gotta keep in mind that this goes through his head as a direct response to his wife crying in his arms while she is wondering why she was raped by a demon and... liked it (and as Bakker explains, due to magic/seduction spells she really did like it too). That's why she asks "why must I always be the whore" in aboves passage. Society can only explain why she "had" to be the whore beforehand... , but in this instance? At the mercy of a demon? Which is the event that this whole passage is trying to work through? ... "betrayed by her womb"... maybe it's just me, but that phrase sort of leapt out at me... and if anything it is the excerpt about society that feels out of place in a chapter that deals with the immediacy of the effects of just committed rape...
Then there is the fact that in Bakkers world women pretty much have 2 occupations: wife or whore/concubine... with the exception of the child molesting empress who is sort of a mix of both. Even or especially as the constraints of society crumble... the one woman Bakker focuses on is used as some kind of token device, a potential "reward" for a satisfactory resolution Achamian's story that gets dangled in front of the readers nose... and ends up being a demonstration piece for all the flaws that women supposedly have.
In any case... if it gets even "worse" later on, then "blah".
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Oh, I think that passage is brilliant and 'safe' from claims of misogyny - it's an argument that women aren't fundamentally inferior or anything, that that inferiority is socially constructed and imposed, and that the patriarchy arises from the male desire to control both female sexuality and the means of reproduction.
It's just later stuff that made me a bit skeeved out.
You gotta keep in mind that this goes through his head as a response to his wife crying in his arms pondering why she was raped by a demond and... liked it (due to magic/seduction spells).
Yeah, but I think Kellhus being a heartless dick about people's suffering is sort of par for the course - he's being Dunyain. I think he knows that anyone, male or female, would have been vulnerable to the Inchoroi (and would have enjoyed that vulnerability - and yes, it is incredibly creepy and disturbing), but he's analyzing why Esmenet in particular is ashamed of what happened. Namely because of her own history as a whore. And from there he looks at the reason that history exists.
It's not like Cnaiur doesn't suffer similarly bizarre sexual...assault?
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Yeah, but I think Kellhus being a heartless dick about people's suffering is sort of par for the course - he's being Dunyain. I think he knows that anyone, male or female, would have been vulnerable to the Inchoroi (and would have enjoyed that vulnerability - and yes, it is incredibly creepy and disturbing), but he's analyzing why Esmenet in particular is ashamed of what happened. Namely because of her own history as a whore. And from there he looks at the reason that history exists.
It's not like Cnaiur doesn't suffer similarly bizarre sexual...assault?
It's a given that Kellhus regards everyone as a tool and little else - and while any character in the book suffers and a score of them get thwarted permanently, i.e. fatally... none of them are as outright pathetic as the women in these books, which is really a shame, considering how much promise Esmenet's character showed in the first book. - Let's better not mention Serwe, ugh.
Cnaiur on the other hand was specifically the only character who, for the majority of the books, could see through even the Dunyain's tricks and tried to follow his own agenda. Ultimately he was twarthed, as all of the Duneyain enemies - of course. Still, that's a huge difference to Esmenet who appears to sort of lose her own will permanently at some point and ends up being the playball of whoever is there at the moment, be it Achamian, Kellhus or some Demons (Sarcellus early on even foreshadowed this development, i guess.)
Aside from the misogyny I am also somewhat disgusted by how the trilogy starts out with immensely interesting multidimensianal characters that become less and less interesting the more contact with Kellhus they have. I understand that this is part of the point Bakker wants to make: Kellhus rewrites their souls, the old characters are de facto dead, the new guys get modelled after whatever Kellhus needs, which basically goes hand in hand with Nietsches view on Nihilism and the Übermensch... but what it means is that it quickly becomes an ordeal to work through page after page that is written from these "rewritten" (now by Bakker) characters point of views, which brings us back to Esmenet, where that issue is most pronounced. I wouldn't even be surprised anymore if Bakker turned her into a "Serwe" at some point. The transformation would then be complete.
Ironically i find that without the Duneyain and especially without Kellhus, we might have had the basis for a much more interesting story. I would have loved to see these intriguing characters from the first book evolve... instead of stagnate. Although, I have only read the first trilogy at this point, so I can't speak about further character development in the next books.
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The women don't go anywhere strong (and the new women introduced don't really get much of a chance either). Which is kind of a shame as Esmenet had a great opportunity.