Hûw Steer's Blog, page 15

Etherea Magazine #17 – I’m In It

I’ve been mentioning this quietly for the last few weeks, but there’s something to actually show you now: Etherea Magazine issue #17, featuring a quite long actually short story by yours truly!

With this, my reach officially expands across the world to Australia. (And soon America too…)

This one is Weft and Warp, a hefty number I wrote a while ago. To summarise it succinctly and sans spoilers: submarine warfare in space.

And I’ve even got my own bit of artwork, which is always fun!

I’m pretty proud of this one. Thanks to Aidan and the rest of the Etherea team for taking it on!

If you want to read it, grab a copy of Etherea #17 here.

Real People or Daft Joke?

Among other things, I work with history. Specifically I write documentaries and books, which means I spend a lot of time, even though I’m now a mere freelancer, digging into old books and newspapers looking for information. And it was while doing this one day that I came across something that, on the face of it, was very daft.

The London Gazette, March 17th 1901

Now your first thought may well be, ‘surely this is a joke’. And it was my first thought too. This is an extract from the London Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers in the UK. It’s not exactly a ‘normal’ newspaper, in that it’s a ‘government journal’ – basically it’s a place where official notices are published, from bits of legislation to royal proclamations. It’s particularly important for the armed forces, as, among other things, it’s where notices of promotion are published (hence the old phrase ‘being gazetted captain/whatever’). And, in times of war, it’s where dispatches end up.

Dispatches being letters (well, I guess not letters anymore) from senior officers on the front lines, where they chat about how things have been going – and, importantly for this post, where they would commend anyone under their command who’d done a particularly good job. Being mentioned in dispatches was and is pretty important – it was required for a soldier to be awarded certain medals, and you even get an extra bit to stick onto any medals you do get awarded as a result to commemorate it. It might just have been a single sentence in one of a dozen similar letters all crammed into the same issue of the Gazette, but for any low-ranked soldier who’d pulled off something impressive, it was a big deal.

Which is what made me suspicious. Because at first glance, talking about a pair of Royal Navy gunners named Mr Cannon and Mr Ball, in 1900, seems like a joke. Cannon and ball. Being commended as part of a detachment of artillery. Obviously a joke, right? The dry tone of the whole letter makes things very ambiguous too. But this is an official dispatch, from a proper officer – specifically William Lowther Grant, who was only a commander at this point but ended up a senior admiral. Dispatches are not a place for joking around, they’re serious business.

The question, therefore, is this: in the Boer War, were there genuinely a pair of Navy gunners named Cannon and Ball?

Off down the rabbit-hole I go.

The first, useful, note, is that while ‘ball’ is obviously a word that comes up fairly frequently in the London Gazette, ‘cannon’ is not, as by this point in history everyone is calling big guns… well, ‘guns’. So it’s not that hard to do a word-search for ‘cannon’ and filter out the right results. There is a Mr Cannon working as a solicitor in London in the 1850s, for instance, who I can discard fairly quickly. But I also find, in the same issue of the Gazette as above (hidden in some very dense blocks of text, I might add), Commander Grant’s account of the last few months of the war. It’s brief, dry stuff, listing events by day – ‘marched here’ and ‘camped there’, etc. But sometimes, there are names. Normally they’re other generals or senior officers. But occasionally…

12th August.—Marched at 3 a.m., arriving at Welverdiend, 14 miles, at 9.45… The wheels of No. 1 gun were now so bad, being retained on the bosses by the nuts only, most of which had sheared, that it could go no further, and it was accordingly left behind for repair with Mr. Cannon, 28 men, and 100 rounds of ammunition.

There he is! ‘Mr’, for context, would only have been used for an officer, albeit usually a junior one. As Mr Cannon is in the Navy, he’s probably a Warrant Officer – a low rank, but at least an officer’s one. Hence the responsibility of looking after this gun.

22nd August.— …With regard to No. 1 gun (left at Welverdiend), it being found impossible to repair it at that place, it was ordered to Pretoria…

And now Cannon and his… cannon have been sent off to Pretoria – one of the Boer capitals, at this point captured by the British and being used as a large staging-area, being a large settlement.

…On August 29th, the whole Brigade was at Krugersdorp, Mr. Cannon having returned with his party and No. 1 gun from Pretoria…

He’s back!

11th September.—House to house search for arms, prisoners, &c. Mr. Cannon, with detachment from Brigade taking part.

Another day and a new job for our favourite gunner. But enough about Mr Cannon – where’s Mr Ball during all this?

13th September.— About 6.30 parties of Boers were sighted ahead. Came into action and fired 11 rounds at 5)000 to 9,000 yards. Boers haying bolted out of range, force proceeded (sending cavalry in chase) and bivouacked at 9.15… Mr. Ball went to Welverdiend to obtain ammunition from Krugersdorp (50 rounds) and to arrange for a further supply being sent up from Bloemfontein.

An actual fight for this lot now, and Mr Ball makes his first appearance. Even though this is his first mention, he must have been doing good work, because the next mention of either man is the original commendation at the start of this post, congratulating both soldiers on their good efforts.

But it’s Mr Ball who has the last laugh, as he gets mentioned in dispatches by a second officer, one Captain (also later admiral) Bearcroft:

Mr. Ball, gunner.—A most excellent and hardworking warrant officer.

It’s nice to actually have Mr Ball’s rank confirmed – and a little digging reveals that there would have been a few warrant officer gunners on a ship at this time. They’re not just members of the gun crews, they’re in charge of them.

What more is there to find about these men? Well, Mr H. Ball and Mr J. Cannon both served on the HMS Doris under Captain R.C. Prothero, one of the ships that was under Grant’s overall command at the time. Prothero was apparently known as ‘Prothero the Bad’, and was a violent and bad-tempered man, so it was probably a good thing for Cannon and Ball that they got detached from the ship itself and assigned to the Naval Brigade on land under Grant. Doris was decommissioned in 1901, They both received the Queen’s Service Award, with bars for Paardeberg, Driefontein and Traansvaal, and, judging by the names on the HMS Doris memorial, both survived the Boer War.

Beyond that there’s very little to go on. Both their medals were “sent to Cambridge” in 1902, which implies they might have lived there, but I couldn’t find any dates of birth or even their full first names, which rather restricts what records are actually useful. But they were real. It wasn’t just a silly joke in an officer’s letter – it was genuine nominative determinism in action.

I do think that Commander Grant was having a bit of fun. Mr Cannon and Mr Ball were real officers, and they did (presumably) deserve their mentions in dispatches. But who could have resisted using that particular phrasing, given their professions?

Mr Cannon and Mr Ball, gunners.

Heh.

You really couldn’t make it up, could you? Which just goes to show, as it so often does, that real history has far weirder stories in it than fantasy can ever conjure up.

Short Stories – Check-In

Let’s check in on my short stories.

Last week, I said I was going to dabble in something short for a bit to give my brain a rest from Boiling Seas 3 before I get cracking on finishing the first draft. I started doing that. And then the next day I found out about a submission window for a medieval horror anthology. I learned about it on Monday. The deadline was on Saturday.

With such a short deadline, I would normally not even try – rushed writing makes for bad writing, after all. But it was history, and it was horror (something in which I like to dabble from time to time), and I happened to have an outline for a historical horror story just lying around. So I wrote 6000 words in less than a week. (And they were actually good ones – I made a lot more time than I’d normally have and knuckled down to tweak and improve things.) And, after that surprisingly productive week, I submitted it. Yay me.

This added another brick to the teetering pile on the Desktop Submission Tracker, which we should probably take a look at, as it’s been a while. (In fact I don’t think I’ve ever shown it on the site before, so here you go.)

Feat. Bootleg Green Iron Man, who is a) surprisingly good quality for a fake Lego figure from a Spanish market, and b) holds my laptop charger cable for me.

You will note that the yellow – ‘Submitted’ – column is now so tall that you can’t actually see the yellow brick on top anymore, because I’ve both written a few new things and dug out some older pieces, polished them and thrown them out into the wilderness. This does include a bit of micro-fiction, in fairness… but also two novellas, so it all balances out. One thing left in the red ‘Not Currently Doing Anything’ column: a story I really, really like but which hasn’t had much success, so I’m evaluating what to do with it. Which may include actually starting the full novel I’ve had bits of rattling around my head for many years now.

And then, excitingly, a couple of new things on the right. One I mentioned back in March as having been picked up, which was and continues to be exciting, but as of this Friday I’ve had another piece picked up for an anthology! Drinks all around, etcetera. I didn’t so much ‘write’ this story as ‘ruthlessly distil it from the first chunk of an unfinished novel manuscript’ – more cutting things away and then stitching the useful bits back together. But it’s a good story (I mean, it got accepted, at least), and I’m proud of it.

This little tracker was a good idea. I’d recommend something similar to anyone else with this sort of thing to keep track of. (Purely practically, Lego is a great building material for this sort of thing; I’ve got a little set of bookends too, which you can see on the left of the photo, which are very easy to expand when necessary.) Of course I’ve got digital lists all over the place – with more information as well, such as ‘where did I submit this one again’ and ‘how many months ago was it’ – but having a little physical widget just feels good. It’s very satisfying to literally stack the stories higher and watch the right-hand column slowly get taller. And even when I’m levering bricks out of ‘Submitted’ and back into ‘Doing Nothing’, it doesn’t feel so bad. I just have to grit my teeth, maybe make some edits, and find a reason to move them back again.

And it’s Lego. Can’t stay sad at Lego.

Palate Cleansing

I need to cleanse my creative palate.

I’m well into Boiling Seas 3 at this point – with a bit of luck I’ll have the first draft done by the summer, which should keep me on track to actually Do Editing and have it out in the autumn. (As long as it’s not December by the time it comes out, I’ll be happy.) But after 50,000+ words of this adventure, I find myself in danger of waffling. I have a decent outline for the whole plot, and I’m sticking to it – but, as I always do, I’m thinking of cool new things along the way to slide in… which leads to things starting to feel a bit bloated. And I really don’t want that. Apart from anything else, it makes Doing Editing that much harder.

So I’m taking a brief break and throwing together a shorter piece or two. Different world, different plots, different characters; something different to channel my jungle-hacking, find-the-plot-as-I-go-along tendencies into that’s not the third book of a trilogy that needs a tightly planned ending to resolve all the dangling threads. I can (within theoretical word limits, anyway) just go for it and come up with something fresh to give my brain a break. And if it’s good, maybe I’ll submit it somewhere.

I think it’s important to do this every so often – it is for me, anyway. I try to only have one Big Project (i.e. a novel) on the go at a time. At least in terms of writing it; I have lots of Big Projects stuck in the editing stage. Some of them might even escape it, one day. But it’s one book at a time for me, otherwise my tiny brain gets confused as to who’s meant to be where and what they’re doing (a risky business when I switch readily between sci-fi space and lasers and fantasy swords and sorcery). So I’m creatively focused on just one story at a time for quite a long time. It takes a while to write these things, y’know. Thus, the inevitable period, about halfway through, when I’ve been on one thing for so long that I need to step back for a little while and reassemble my original, much more coherent thoughts and ideas. My ‘just make up cool stuff as you go along’ instincts need to be restrained, especially here with BS3 when everything needs to make sense by the end. Not restrained, really – more given another outlet so I can stay focused with the main project.

I want this third book to be good.

So: random short story time. Our protagonist is currently in a desert, on a horse with a name. (He himself doesn’t have one yet; he may never have one.) I have a very vague idea of where he’s going and what he needs to do. I know very little else other than that. It’s a solo protagonist in an empty world, with no threads to resolve other than the ones I make up along the way – about as different to Boiling Seas 3 as I can make it, basically.

I’ll be back on the book, and soon. I just need a little brain holiday. So let’s see where it goes.

Who Are You Again? Character Names

There are many ways authors give their characters names. And it’s often important to get it right – I’ve talked a little about the – when these characters are going to take up so much stage-time, as it were. But where do I get names from?

An easy answer is just naming characters after people you know. I know lots of authors do this – I tend not to as a general rule, but I definitely have done so. If I do pick a real name I’ll go for people I’ve met, but not people I actively spend time with; it seems a little weird to write about a fictional version of someone and then go and spend an evening with them at the pub. But real human names are real human names for a reason, so it’s always worth remembering interesting ones for later.

Observation is another way to gather names. Keep your eyes open and you’ll find all sorts of interesting person- and place-names around you – the sort of thing I tend to record in my notebook, forget about for six months, and then dig out when I’m desperately wracking my brains for a village name in a short story. For instance ‘Whetstone’, the setting of The Fire Within (and, I realised later, of a completely separate short story that I might try and tie in later), is a real village in the UK that I pulled off a road sign. It’s often more fun to give people place-names and vice-versa, too. While I was in Pembrokeshire a few weeks ago, I jotted down a few good signs, and now I really want to name a character Wiseman Bridge.

Sticking with theme works too. If I’m writing a story set in space or on another world, I’ve gotten good mileage out of looking up early astronomers and scientists and nicking their names for characters – the sort of people who’ve got a crater or two on Mars named after them. It makes a fun easter-egg for knowledgeable readers too, and I definitely like an in-joke. (As readers of the Boiling Seas have either figured out already, or will do so in book 3…)

But there is another way to get names. The way that I got most of my secondary character names for years. I would labour for a long time getting my protagonists just right, but when it came to background characters and one-scene wonders, I had a foolproof method.

Because in the early days of my proper writing, I was a student. I was a history student. A history student with at least one or two essays on the go at all times; essays which required lots of reading, lots of books. My desk, therefore, was always home to at least one stack of at least seven or eight weighty historical tomes, most of which were secondary sources. Books on Ancient Rome, on medieval medicine, on satire and science-fiction and all sorts of other weird stuff. And on the spines of those books were the names of their authors.

And so when I was looking for a character name, I would glance up, pick a forename and surname at random from the stack, and that would do. Booksellers, map-makers, guards and whoever I needed – random names from the bibliography. It worked well – a wide range of secondary sources meant a wide range of nationalities too, which really helped make the world seem wider. And writing lots of essays meant a constant change-over of books, so I seldom had the same books twice. Even more significant characters got this method sometimes. Mikhail Siras, villain of The Blackbird and the Ghost? Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (1990).

While I’m glad I have an actual job and don’t have to write a massive essay every couple of weeks anymore, it is annoying to no longer have this handy and ever-changing resource. I have to actually think of names… or look at the credits in nearby film posters, or steal village names from maps, and things like that.

But I suppose in conclusion, the best source of names for writing is… names.

Probably didn’t need to write this whole thing out, did I?

Fantasy Maps Are Missing Something

Maps are great. Maps in books are even better. Having that visual guide to the geography of strange new worlds is a marvellous thing when it’s done well.

But something I’ve come to realise is that even the best fantasy maps are missing something very, very important.

Example number one: the map of Midkemia from Feist’s Riftwar books.

Copyright, of course, is Raymond E. Feist’s.

It’s pretty good. The Kingdom of the Isles has loads of cities, great and small, all labelled, and as there are so many books in the Riftwar saga and therefore so much travelling, most of them get visited or mentioned at some point. The geography of trade and commerce is important; towns are built along strategic roads, ports in good anchorages – the workings of entire nations rationalised around this geography. It’s a damn good map. But it’s not quite there yet.

But for the comparison that best makes my point, we can look at Tolkien’s map of Middle-Earth – probably one of the most famous fictional maps ever drawn. Those sweeping mountain ranges, those esoteric place-names, the carefully plotted rivers and routes – it’s a masterpiece, and given the nature of the journeys in The Lord of the Rings, it’s very helpful that it is so detailed. But again, it’s missing something very important. And to show you what, let’s zoom in on the Shire, where it all begins.

And this of course belongs to the Tolkien Estate.

The distance from Hobbiton to Bree is, according to some hasty research, about 120 miles. The whole Shire is about 300 miles across, which is roughly the size of Wales. In all that space, there are, according to the map, a handful of settlements. In the book many more are of course mentioned – about 30 or so different little towns and villages.

Now let’s look at a real map. Let’s look at Herefordshire, which is where I grew up – and which is also, conveniently, one of the Midland counties on which the Shire is based, along with neighbouring Shropshire and Worcestershire. (Yes, I grew up in the Shire, I am small, eat too much food and have big hairy feet; I am literally a hobbit.) This is a map from the 1800s – it hangs on my wall right above my desk.

There are dozens of place-names there. Twice, maybe three times as many as the Shire at least, from Pembridge to Tenbury to Little Dewchurch. Tiny hamlets, hefty towns, villages that have been there since the Domesday Book. There are probably more than twice as many place-names in this single county of the U.K. than there are in the whole Shire that is based on it – and which, as previously mentioned, is something like ten times as large. And that’s just one county in a whole country in a whole world – one county whose number of named settlements is more than all those on the maps of Midkemia and Middle-Earth combined.

Now of course, the aforementioned fantasy maps are huge in scale. They’re mapping entire continents or countries, where this detailed map of a single county can afford to list every single village. Our modern world maps only show major cities and settlements too; it’s a necessary concession to matters of scale. But even if you don’t show it on the map, you have to remember that all these little towns are still there in the book. The Riftwar does this fairly well, mentioning many little villages and the like on characters’ travels from City-On-The-Map #1 to City-On-The-Map #2. But there’s still a lot of blank space out there, especially to the east – space where there should be towns, visible even at this scale, and they’re not there. Tolkien mentions his villages in the Shire, but how many other towns have the elves got? How many human cities get mentioned beyond Edoras, Minas Tirith and Osgiliath? Yes, I’m sure there are plenty, but my point is that it’s not enough. Look at that huge, empty space in Enedwaith – there must be people there. Or if not, there must be a reason why not…

And I’m guilty of this too. My one published map might be of a pretty small island, but it’s not that small – there should probably be more than two or three towns on the Corpus Isles. I excuse my geography in Ad Luna because, y’know, they’re on the Moon, and so sticking almost everyone in one big sci-fi mega-city is, I think, forgiveable. But the Corpus Isles of the Boiling Seas should be better populated if it’s to be realistic. When I’m drawing up the maps for book 3 (yes, there are going to be some), I’m going to have to remember that.

The point(s) I’m making is, essentially, that there’s got to be far more to a fictional world than what you can easily show on a map. Even if you don’t draw it, you’ve got to account for it. And so when you’re sketching out your vast expanses of rolling countryside and dotting in maybe three cities, consider all the other places people would be living – and maybe add a few more dots and names to your landscape.

How Many Words Must A Man Write Down

I’m a writer. I write a lot. It sort of comes with the territory. But occasionally I wonder, having been doing this for some time now, just how much I’ve got to show for it. And I don’t mean published works, long or short, self or trad – I mean raw mass, the volume of my ramblings over the years.

Simply put, I want to know what the big number is. How many words have I written?

There is a simple answer, because for a little over 8 years – since the deaths of Monty Oum and Sir Terry Pratchett – I’ve written a minimum of 500 words a day. Every day. I have not stopped. Even yesterday, when I overslept by an hour and managed to get 500 words down in about 20 minutes before dashing off to work, which is definitely some sort of record.

8 years, 2920 days, 500 words a day: that works out at a minimum of 1,460,000 words. Not bad.

But a minimum is a minimum. So let’s do some maths (dangerous, I know) and pore through a lot of word-counts, and see if there’s a more precise total. Here, then, is a list of everything I could be bothered to count.

Enjoy the peek behind the curtain, too. Some of these titles you’ll be familiar with. Most, you won’t. Some of the latter you’ll hopefully see some day… most you definitely won’t.

Ok, so I didn’t write Shakespeare or my own graduation guide, but they had to go somewhere.

Ad Luna: 88,000

The Blackbird and the Ghost: 62,000

Nightingale’s Sword: 98,000

Boiling Seas 3 (so far): 53,000

The Fire Within: 18,000

Before The Dawn (the original draft): 127,000

The Future King: 287,000

Negative Saints: 18,000

Salvage 7 (including the unfinished part 2): 118,000

The Scar: 67,000

The Seven Shards (including the unfinished part 2): 237,000

Smoke and Neon, Blood and Gold: 90,000

That Bit Of Warhammer: 40,000 Background That Got Out Of Hand: 39,000

The Short Stories I Counted Before I Got Bored: about 180,000

Which, altogether, comes in at 1,482,000. Huzzah: I have beaten the bare minimum!

But this is just the finished products. (Or the most recent versions, for the ones I haven’t finished editing yet. Which is most of them.) I’m not including a lot of short pieces – any of the Curtis Brown lockdown workouts, for instance. Or all the stuff I wrote for that videogame that never happened. Or these blog posts, which I’ve been doing regularly for quite a while now. Or countless half-finished or half-started bits and pieces, which clog up my hard drives no end, or the rewrites, the alternative versions, all the stuff consigned to the cutting-room floor. And if you add in 4 years of academic essays and dissertations, and another 3 years of documentary scripts and history book chapters from my old job…

 It’s entirely possible that I’ve cracked 2 million words at this point. And that is a big number indeed. It’s almost 4 Lord of the Ringses. It’s almost as long as Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. Well, the first 5 books. Of 10. Not counting the novellas.

Obviously, most of these words are rubbish. Most of them will never see the light of day. Those that do will be re-read, re-written, edited and warped beyond recognition. (Seriously, you should see the original drafts of some of the titles above. Or maybe you shouldn’t.)

But even if just 5% of those words were worth reading, that’s still enough for a decent book. And it’s not like I’m intending to stop or anything. This is the first 8 years. Plenty more to go.

So who knows? In a few decades’ time, I should have written enough decent words to add up to a properly good series or two, and enough rubbish ones to build a space elevator.

The Great Riftwar Re-Read – Conclusion

So, I’ve done it. I’ve finally finished the Riftwar. 30 books, more than a year. If you count from when I first started the series, it’s taken me about 15 years. Which is nothing compared to Raymond E. Feist. For all the criticisms I’ve levelled during these reviews – all of which I do think are fair – I have to take my hat off to the man. 30 books in over 30 years. While the journey was long and at times meandering, to bring such a huge saga to a genuinely gripping and emotionally satisfying conclusion is a feat nothing short of epic. The Riftwar is one hell of a journey.

Would I recommend you, dear readers, undertake this whole journey? Honestly, mostly: no. If you just want to read some damn good fantasy, then read the original trilogy: Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon. Read their Tsurani counterparts too: Daughter, Servant and Mistress of the Empire. The beginning of the Riftwar is without doubt the strongest and best-written part of it. It’s also the bit with the actual Riftwar in it! Feist and Janny Wurts spun two magnificent worlds and magnificent stories within them, and these two trilogies are the absolute best bits of all of them. The stories of Pug and Tomas, of Prince Arutha, of Jimmy the Hand, of Mara of the Acoma, are stories that everyone should read.

Why yes, it is annoying that they don’t all fit in one line and I have to double-stack the Empire trilogy. Don’t even talk about the Legends books.

As for the rest of the saga? Well, there are definitely great books there. Prince of the Blood/The King’s Buccaneer. The Serpentwar has its merits, though it drags in the middle. I will always, always have a soft spot for fantasy James Bond in Talon of the Silver Hawk. But to even start on this journey is a temptation to try and finish it, and for most readers I really wouldn’t recommend doing that. The weak books stand out as much as the strong ones – Exile’s Return, the Darkwar, etc. Feist pivots to this grand narrative of universal threat, and while that’s satisfying to some, it’s nowhere near as strong as the earlier books. Kelewan is also woefully absent past Sethanon and the Empire trilogy, which is a crying shame, given that it was one of the founding worlds of the whole saga.

Most readers will get the very best of Feist and Wurts by reading those opening trilogies, and leaving the rest of the saga on the shelf. That’s my considered recommendation, after reading the entire saga.

But if you’re like me? If you’re a sucker for a grand universe and an ongoing, generational narrative? If you’re ok with reading bad books if there are good books coming, and if those bad books still advance that overall story, even if they don’t do it very well?

Well.

I spent over a year reading 30 books. Many of them great, many of them really not. And the moment I finished Magician’s End… I wanted to read Magician again. I wanted to go straight back to the beginningof the saga and read it all again. I emerged from this great sea of magic and dragons and story, and I want to dive back in.

The Riftwar is a long and winding journey. And I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

And I know that I will.

Hang on.

An Interview with Raymond E. Feist (The Fantasy Review), February 7th, 2023

Feist: “Writers rarely retire unless circumstances require them too. I’m working on the 1st book of the DragonWar Saga, A Darkness Returns.”

A Darkness Returns.

Returns.

Well.

I’m going to need a bigger bookshelf.

Riftwar Re-Read #17 – Magician’s End

This is going to be a long one.

I’m posting this not on a Sunday but on a Thursday, because I stayed up all of Wednesday night finishing Magician’s End. It is not a perfect book by any means. There is much waffle, and ultimately the contents of this book could basically have replaced A Crown Imperilled, which, while fun to read, wasn’t that relevant.

But once I got to the second half, I could not put it down. It’s a love letter to all 29 books that came before, and it’s wonderful.

Much of the first half of Magician’s End is, essentially, spent on waffling. Pug, Miranda, Nakor and Magnus, having been whisked away to a higher plane of existence, spent some time finally ‘learning’ what the stakes of this final confrontation are – unsurprisingly, the end of existence at the hands of the Dread – as well as figuring out how to stop it. On an objective level, this whole arc takes up far too much space and could – and should – have been taken care of much earlier in the trilogy. But as the ‘lessons’ each magician learns are taught by characters from the series’ past, I can’t help but enjoy this bit. Pug get to meet his old teacher Kulgan again; Nakor gets Prince Borric – it’s another throwback to the series’ past, and helps add to the love-letter aspect of this whole trilogy and particularly this book.

Meanwhile there’s a Kingdom civil war going on, with Prince Hal, his brothers, Ty Hawkins and Jimmy the Hand III fighting to ensure the succession goes as planned. It’s fun stuff, though it’s almost entirely unconnected from the grand ‘stop the end of the universe’ narrative. None of the non-magicians are even aware there’s a battle for the fate of existence going on, even if they all do briefly intersect with aspects of Pug’s storyline. But while I predicted that Hal was going to end up king pretty much instantly, it’s still a satisfying payoff. And again, Feist is cyclical here. The Riftwar began with three young ConDoins averting war and taking the reins of the Kingdom, and so it also ends. Hell, there’s even a third battle at Sethanon to cap things off, though this one for once has no magical significance at all – but it’s still a nice touch.

Though the new Kingdom is in quite a different shape to how it was back then. The map of Midkemia, absent for the previous books of this trilogy, returns – and, just in time for the end of the book, it’s been updated! A few new cities and towns established over the course of the series have finally been added – very welcome, as much of the plot directs the reader to the map to establish where everyone is and where they’re going. This is nice – until by the end of the book one of those cities, and an entire mountain range, has been wiped off the map entirely.

Because that whole ‘end of the universe’ plotline wasn’t going to resolve itself. The last act of the book – almost half of it – is taken up by the final gambits and battles against the Dread. Pug has been doomed to sacrifice everyone he knew and loved since the Serpentwar. Now we see that pay off. And it does actually pay off all the hanging plotlines, somewhat to my surprise. Some better than others, in fairness: we still don’t get to see the angels properly, but we learn what the alien Sven-gar’i are for, we learn what Draken-Korin was for, what the Space Elves were doing – it all does get resolved.

And it is fantastic. I read the whole last half of the book in one sitting. I couldn’t put it down. Everything, and everyone, came together to solve this final problem: the elves of Elvandar, their evil cousins to the north, the surviving Space Elves, the Conclave of Shadows, the Academy at Stardock, Pug and company, and – finally – Tomas, Dragon Lord and one of my favourite characters of all, who leaves the forest of the elves for the last time.

He flies out and meets Draken-Korin, the resurrected Dragon Lord whose purpose we finally learn. It’s to kill Tomas. By which Feist means ‘kill Tomas the personality, and allow Ashen-Shugar, the world-crushing Valheru, to take the reins again so he can beat up the Dread.’ Seeing a Dragon Lord unleash his full power again is glorious, and Tomas’ acquiescence is bittersweet. For all of Magician we saw this teenage boy struggle against the power that overwhelmed him, and Feist calls back to that original fight beautifully. From Magician:

“I am Ashen-Shugar! I am Valheru!” sang a voice within, in a torrent of anger, battle madness and bloodlust.

Against this sea of rage stood a single rock, a calm, small voice within that said, simply, “I am Tomas.”

And from Magician’s End:

Again he stood on rocks, with an inky-dark sea swirling on all sides. He had climbed out of that black tide over a century before and knew what it meant to be swept under and pulled down by it. It was an ending and a beginning for him. He laughed in a triumphant voice and dived head-first into the water.

“I am Tomas!”

It’s beautifully written. Tomas hasn’t played anything like the major role Pug has in the whole Riftwar series, but he was there at the start, one of the original protagonists, and he’s there until the bitter end. Because of course Tomas manages to regain control right at the end – so that, when Pug goes in to close the final rift, cast out the Dread and meet his doom, he does so with Tomas at his side. Pug and Tomas, together, against the end of the universe. It’s the only way this series should have ended, and it feels right.

And of course Pug watches Tomas die. Ashen-Shugar doesn’t, of course, which means Pug can defeat the Dread by basically hurling them into the Void, along with Ashen-Shugar, trapped in a fight that they will literally never end and thus safeguarding existence forever. Pug then has to close the rift that he is trapped inside – again, calling back to the end of Magician, when he helped Macros the Black do exactly the same thing. This time, though, there’s no way out. And in collapsing the rift, Pug also basically drops a magical nuke on Midkemia, levelling a mountain range and killing thousands (no other choice and all that) – including his own son Magnus. But he saves the world. He saves existence. And, after a chat with the gods – because they thought he “deserved to know” that his plan had actually worked, which is a lovely bit of closure – Pug finally dies. Though not before resurrecting Magnus, so he dies happy.

The Magician has ended.

This whole book really is a love letter to what must have been a thirty-year labour of love in the first place. It’s full of callbacks: thematic ones to plotlines past, like the princes’ war for the Kingdom, the rifts, Tomas’ story; but also explicit reminiscences and reappearances, like the brief moments we get of Kulgan, of Borric, and of course of Macros the Black. Kalkin, God of Thieves, appears in the guise of Jimmy the Hand, and I can’t help but think it’s Feist talking directly to the reader when Kalkin says that Jimmy was always one of his favourites. And though there was far too much setup, much of which could and should have been edited down, Feist manages to make pretty much every plotline of the previous 29 books matter in the final conflict. The third Battle of Sethanon couldn’t have been won without some daring Tsurani-descended cavalry. Magnus would have been eaten by the Dread, if not for the son of Gorath, the dark elf protagonist of Krondor: The Betrayal. All these little things might take a lot more setup than strictly necessary, but it works.

And while the series is over, the world isn’t. Feist makes that very clear indeed. There’s a little bit of Dread stuck at the bottom of the massive crater where those mountains used to be, waiting to be a Big Villain for Magnus – who has now taken Pug’s mantle as the Black Sorcerer, just as Pug inherited it from Macros. Said massive crater is also full of “strange and alien life fashioned by wild magic”, the perfect hook for future stories. The Kingdom might be at peace once again, and the threat of the Dread over, and it’s ultimately a happy ending, but the world of Midkemia spins on.

And of course, there’s one little epilogue. One little extra bit, that at once gives a fitting end to Pug and is the ultimate callback to the very beginning – and I mean page 1 of Magician. Years later, Magnus is walking through Crydee. He comes upon a boy, gathering crabs on the rocks, in the aftermath of a storm. The boy is the son of the castle cook. He is clever, and quick, but doesn’t know what his future holds. Soon he’ll be old enough to become an apprentice, but he’s worried that none of the masters will choose him.

His name is Phillip. But everyone calls him Pug.

See you on Sunday for my final thoughts on this saga as a whole.

What Am I Doing: March 2023 Edition

It’s another grey, cold day in London – apparently spring is meant to be happening but you wouldn’t bloody know it – which means it’s time for an update post. In addition to my crippling LEGO and Warhammer addictions I’ve been getting into Transformers, which has caused my wallet to cry out in pain; otherwise general life ticks over very nicely. But you’re not here for that, you’re here for writing stuff. So here we go.

Boiling Seas 3 Progress Tracker

We’re now at around 45,000 words, at least 10,000 of which I anticipate having to cut. The biggest struggle at the moment is balancing two very separate plotlines and 3 POVs. It wasn’t so difficult in Nightingale’s Sword, as Tal, Lily and Max were almost always together, and when they were doing different things it wasn’t for long. But of course now Max is in a very different place to Tal and Lily, dealing with some very interesting things that I can’t talk about because it’ll spoil the book for you. (But know that I really want to.) The main issue is timelines. I think I’m going to have to go back once this draft is done and write out what’s happening every day to make sure things roughly line up, as I suspect that currently Max has spent about 6 months wherever she is, while Tal and Lily have passed around 3 in their part of the world…

But it’s coming along nicely. I’m about to get to the bit I’ve been looking forward to most of all, too, so that’ll be very fun indeed.

Short Stories and Stuff

It’s actually looking rather good on the short story front. I have, of course, had several rejections, which is par for the course in this business really, but it’s far from all doom and gloom. In addition to one story that’s been on a shortlist for several months now awaiting a final decision, I’ve got another piece in the final 10 for a rather exciting competition… that I can’t tell you about just yet, because the official announcement isn’t up yet, but as soon as it is I’ll be all over it. I also got to do a solicited submission – as in, they asked me to send them something – which was a nice change. Whether they like it or not is another question, of course…

Oh, and I had another story accepted for publication. In Australia, excitingly. So that’ll be fun. Again, more info coming as soon as official things are said.

Reading Stuff

I have started Magician’s End. No turning back now: the end of the Riftwar is alarmingly close. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’ll let you know when I’ve finished it, probably next week. I also had a go at Intergalactic Bastard, but for the first time in a long while I DNFed. The writing style just didn’t do it for me. Sorry, Dave.

A side note – I did get knocked out of the SPSFC, in case anyone hadn’t realised yet; good luck to all the more fortunate semifinalists!

 A Song For The Void, however, was great. A very nice bit of eldritch horror, especially considering that I don’t normally read that genre. The historicity helped – since devouring all of Sharpe I love me some 19th-century action – and it balanced nicely with the consuming dread and some genuinely unsettling gory bits.

So that’s where I am right now: cracking on with Boiling Seas 3, awaiting competition news and the opportunity to properly announce some more good news. In other words, doing pretty good.