Two ebooks read

I recently read two ebooks on my Kindle app for my phone.  This is convenient for me, because I 1) almost always have my phone with me, and 2) have pretty darn good battery life, and 3) can whip it out at odd moments when I have fifteen minutes here and there, or even an hour or two.  Although I love my actual Kindle quite a bit, I find that in general, having to synch on wifi doesn't work very well quite often, and of course, I don't carry my Kindle around in my pocket during the day all day either, so it's more convenient when I'm sitting down comfortably in the house or on the beach or wherever to read for a good half hour or more at a time.  My phone app works better for actually just whipping out a short chapter or two of a book.

Anyhoo, the two books I read are Drasmyr and Saga of Old City.  The first, by Matthew D. Ryan is a pretty cool sword & sorcery book that details a war between an ancient vampire and a wizards guild in what appears to be a fairly typical fantasy city (although the city itself isn't actually detailed all that much.)  Although there's a fairly wide cast of characters, the three obvious protagonists themselves are a bounty hunter with occasionally a bit of an attitude problem and his two "sidekicks"; a taciturn barbarian who hardly speaks and a sarcastic mostly-reformed former thief.  There is also one of the wizards who plays a nearly protagonist role, although point of view characters are over the place, and several other wizards, the vampire(s), and more all take a turn as the point of view character as the plot progresses.

Although it's not a D&D novel, in many ways it feels like a quintessential D&D novel, and the fantasy background is hard to separate from the post-D&D fantasy market in most respects.  Although it is strongly humanocentric, several additional races are mentioned obliquely.  They have unique names, but it's not hard to see through them to see that some are very similar to dwarfs, elfs, etc. of typical fantasy.  I actually quite like the humanocentric approach, though—other than the title character, who is a vampire, and his vampire-bride, every character is just a person.  This doesn't make the work feel any less fantastic; I've long ago come to the realization that just having exotic races in your fantasy for its own sake isn't nearly as cool as I thought it was when I was a teenager and the exotica was half the fun.  Non-human races need to have a place and tell something interesting about the story of the world; otherwise, why bother? (Note; this isn't necessarily true for roleplaying games, where non-human races offer some mechanical and roleplaying hook, which is the main reason for them, rather than necessarily because they serve a role in the setting.  Ideally, of course, they would do both, but that may be easier said than done. For this reason, I've deliberately made my "featured" areas of DH5, the Hill Country and Timischburg both strongly humano-centric, although all of the available races have a role to play in the setting, they also could easily be ignored and you could pretend like they don't exist, and that would work well too.)

Drasmyr is pretty well written; it's got a fairly tight and quickly moving plot, and the characters are reasonably engaging.  It's a little short, so development is deliberately light, but then again, that helps give it that sword & sorcery urgency; most stories in that vein during its real pulp heyday were short stories or novellas at best, not big fantasy novels like we have today.  There's maybe a few too many characters, but that's a very minor flaw, and most of them are sufficiently engaging that it doesn't really matter anyway, other than that you wish maybe that you'd been able to spend more time with the ones who will obviously carry on to subsequent works.

Which brings me to the next point; author Michael D. Ryan calls this a prequel, but that's a neologic false claim; it's a prelude to a supposed four book series (a prequel has to be a sequel that takes place chronologically before a previously published work; this is not a prequel because it's the first written and first published.)  It is obviously sufficiently good to encourage me to go into the next two books; but the last two books have all of the appearance of being vaporware; there hasn't been any activity in a few years on his Amazon account or his author webpage, either one, so I have no idea if the series will actually conclude or not.  Sigh.  A real shame if it doesn't, but like I said, I enjoyed this sufficiently that I'll go on.  In fact, I read this a couple of years ago and enjoyed it sufficiently that I wanted to read it again in preparation of reading the next two, which I'd had on my vaguely defined queue for some time.

I also read Saga of Old City, Gary Gygax's first novel, and the introduction (other than a brief short story which appeared in Dragon Magazine, apparently) of the character Gord the Rogue.  Although not published until 1985, and obviously attempting to build off of the relatively recent success of the Weis and Hickman Dragonlance novels, this is often seen as an old-school product in many ways, and supposedly indicative of what Gary Gygax himself thought D&D would be like.  I actually doubt that this is literally true, though—Gord is, near the end of the novel, a pretty quintessential D&D character, in a relatively quintessential D&D party, exploring a brief albeit quintessential D&D dungeon; but this doesn't really happen until the Kindle app tells me that I'm 85% or so through the novel.  Prior to that, Gord's career is described where he's clearly a solo character, going through multiple character levels of play, if that's what you can call it, without the benefit of any party or anything else that really feels like D&D the way Gygax would have played it.  This part also oddly feels more like a fix-up than a novel, as if the escapades of Gord the Rogue were unrelated stories that have been retroactively put together into a pseudo-novel format.  Either way, as I said, it feels very little like D&D as I believe Gygax, or anyone else, for that matter, would have played it, but it certainly feels like he's trying to imitate the format of some of the source material that he referenced, like Jack Vance's Dying Earth stuff, for example.

In fact, it also feels like just a jumble of all kinds of stuff Gygax liked; there's a battle fought at one point, and Gygax lovingly describes the detail of the soldiers and units and their armament and accouterments, including references to fauchard-forks and glaive-guisarmes and the specific colors of their pennons and tabards, etc; something that most reviewers can't resist mentioning and chuckling about.  But again; that doesn't feel like D&D either, even though everyone knows that Gygax really loved Medieval era war-games.

Other than that, a lot of reviewers on both Amazon and Goodreads make mention of the "mysogyny" in the book, which is absurd.  I actually thought the love story, such as it was, between Gord and Evaleigh was handled much better than I expected, and I found it the most emotionally moving portion of the book; when it was followed by the battle and the dungeoncrawl afterwards, the book actually went downhill from the so-called "mysogyny."  Of course, almost every single accusation of racism, mysogyny, or whatever is absurd and false; in fact, in general, I take the screeching of SJW reviewers as an indicator that the work is probably good in the exact dimension that they are claiming that it's bad.

However, in this case, the book is... at best, mediocre.  I hesitate to recommend it very much, but for fans of D&D specifically, who want to see where Gary Gygax's head was at at the time.  And frankly, I don't think Gygax's head had changed much from where it was ten years earlier at the dawn of the D&D era.  But Gord is not nearly as charismatic or interesting a character as, say, Conan or the Gray Mouser, or even, probably, Cugel the "Clever" although he's obviously a character made after that same mold.

Curiously, I don't know what to think of the title either.  It's not a Saga of the Old City, even if the Old City is a reference to Greyhawk City itself (probably what is meant, but that's dubious.)  Gord spends more than half of the novel wandering around the countryside, after all.  Ironically, one of the problems with the book is that some of the quick anecdotes that make the novel feel like a fix-up would be better served expanded and turned into a whole novel in their own right.  Gygax moved too quickly through plots that were novel worthy, and made them only a vignette within the novel.  Although, to be fair, he probably lacked the skill to execute them any other way other than how he did.