Jim Butcher: Small Favor

Jim Butcher: White Night Veikko Bartel: Mörder

Jim Butcher: Small Favor

Book Ten of The Dresden Files

Dear Author,

In Death Masks, Harry Dresden asks the Archive about her power.

"My mother passed it on to me," she replied. "As I was born, just as she received it when she was born."

"And your mother lets a mercenary drive you around?"

"Certainly not. My mother is dead, wizard." She frowned. "Not dead, technically. But all that she knew and was came into me. She became an empty cup. A persistent vegetative state." Her eyes grew a little wistful, distant. "She's free of it. But she certainly isn't alive in the most vital sense."

It sounds like every Archive passes on her power when the daughter is born. But in Small Favor, Dresden and Warden Luccio have a conversation:

“The Archive...has been around for a long time. Always passed down in a family line, mother to daughter. Usually the Archive is inherited by a woman when she’s in her early to mid-thirties, when her mother dies, and after she’s given birth to her own daughter. Accidents are rare. Part of the Archive’s nature is a drive to protect itself, a need to avoid exposing the person hosting it to risk. And given the extensive knowledge available to it, the Archive is very good at avoiding risky situations in the first place. And, should they arise, the power available to the Archive generally ensures its survival. It is extremely rare for the host of an Archive to die young.”

I grunted. “Go on.”

“When the Archive is passed...Harry, try to imagine living your life, with all of its triumphs and tragedies—and suddenly you find yourself with a second set of memories, every bit as real to you as your own. A second set of heartaches, loves, triumphs, losses. All of them just as real—and then a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And more and more and more. The perfect memory, the absolute recall of every Archive that came before you. Five thousand years of them.”

I blinked at that. “Hell’s bells. That would...”

“Drive one insane,” Luccio said. “Yes. And it generally does. There is a reason that the historical record for many soothsayers and oracles presents them as being madwomen. The Pythia, and many, many others, were simply the Archive, using her vast knowledge of the past to build models to predict the most probable future. She was a madwoman—but she was also the Archive.

“As a defense, the Archives began to distance themselves from other human beings, emotionally. They reasoned that if they could stop adding the weight of continuing lifetimes of experience and grief to the already immense burden of carrying so much knowledge, it might better enable them to function. And it did. The Archive keeps its host emotionally remote for a reason—because otherwise the passions and prejudices and hatreds and jealousies of thousands of lifetimes have the potential to distill themselves into a single being.

“Normally, an Archive would have her own lifetime of experience to insulate her against all these other emotions and memories, a baseline to contrast against them.”

I suddenly got it. “But Ivy doesn’t.”

“Ivy doesn’t,” Luccio agreed. “Her grandmother was killed in a freak accident, an automobile crash, I believe. Her mother was a seventeen-year-old girl who was in love, and pregnant. She hated her mother for dying and cursing her to carry the Archive when she wanted to have her own life—and she hated the child for having a lifetime of freedom ahead of her. Ivy’s mother killed herself rather than carry the Archive.”

I started feeling a little sick. “And Ivy knows it.”

“She does. Knows it, feels it. She was born knowing exactly what her mother thought and felt about her."

Please don't sue me for the extensive quote, Mr. Butcher. Why does the Archive tell Harry a different story than Luccio? Is one of them lying to Harry Dresden? Or did you forget what you wrote so many thousand pages ago?

A second thing clashes with an earlier book. When Harry Dresden first encounters a Denarian in Death Masks, it takes all three Knights of the Cross to save his life. It costs the life of one to get Harry out of Nicodemus' clutches alive. This time, he has to face more than a dozen Denarians. There's only Kincaid and the Archive to help him. Harry Dresden not only survives; between them they take down eleven Denarians. Later, Harry and his two knights attack the six strongest Fallen angels. Again Harry Dresden survives - which we expect because he needs to be alive for the next book - and almost strangles Nicodemus. Deirdre runs away at the mere sight of a half-drawn sword. It seems you downsized the Denarians from nigh-invincible nightmares to strong, but manageable monsters. It feels like cheating.

I'm still staying with the series, but I hope those watered-down Denarians don't get much more screentime.

Yours sincerely
Christina Widmann de Fran