A Darkness Returns – So Does The Riftwar
Over a year ago, I made this observation:
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.
Dear reader, to my incredible surprise, I was right.
It’s a new Riftwar book. Sort of. It is also, apparently, a new Firemane book, a sequel to Feist’s other fantasy trilogy that he’s spent the last few years writing in the post-Riftwar period. It’s all the characters (well, all the surviving characters) teaming up to save both worlds against a nice new Big Darkness.
Now, on the face of it, this sounds like another creator succumbing to the Disney Urge: the comic-book approach of mashing all their characters together for the sake of it and hoping that the audience will feel obliged to get onboard. But unlike Disney desperately scrambling to fix the MCU by throwing money at Robert Downey Jr. (when they could have just recast Jonathan Majors as Kang, a character whose entire schtick is that he has an endless number of different variants, and I’ll stop here before this post becomes a Marvel rant), Feist’s little multiverse doesn’t feel unreasonable. The entire point of the Riftwar, the foundational principle of that sprawling series, is that multiple worlds collide. The original trilogy and the Empire trilogy were two different series repeatedly crossing over, back in the 1980s, and the series was always about multiple worlds. So why the hell not throw in another one? Why not link the Firemane books to the Riftwar? If your seminal series is about connecting different fantasy worlds, why not connect your own?
I’m certainly willing to give it a shot. But first, of course, I’ll need to read the Firemane saga, which I began doing literally seconds after walking out of Waterstones with A Darkness Returns clutched under my arm.
A continent at uneasy peace after a huge war braces for the next big conflict. A new and ominous religion exerts its dominance; barons dream of becoming kings; assassins sharpen their blades. The last son of the destroyed Firemane line begins to learn of his heritage. And a young blacksmith finds his place in the world is a bit more complicated than he’d first thought.
That’s the first book, King of Ashes, which I just finished.
It was ok.
Don’t get me wrong: the world of Garn is well-constructed, with thought-out politics and geography, believable technological and social standards, and a nice sprinkling of cool magic stuff to spice things up. Declan the blacksmith could just make good swords… or he could make Magic Damascus Steel! Sailors could just deal with pirates… or there could be a hidden kingdom of evil merpeople waiting to abduct and enslave them!
But there’s a weird and clunkily delivered obsession with Sex and Murder and Horrible Crimes that just isn’t written with the emotional weight that it needs to be properly impactful. The prologue, setting up the end of the Big War, talks about the entire family of the defeated king being put to death, down to babies, in a way that just doesn’t feel comfortable for the writer. A disproportionate amount of the book is taken up with young Hatu – the last surviving Firemane, now a trainee assassin/rogue/whatever – having Teenage Sexual Feelings. We get it, Raymond. He’s a teenager. We don’t need three flashbacks in a row of him getting embarrassed over an erection, written in the same stilted manner.
There are a lot of aspects to this book that make me think Feist looked at how successful A Game of Thrones and that sort of grimdark fantasy was doing, thought ‘Yeah, I can do that’, and proceeded to… not do that very well. (Kingdoms at war? Political jockeying? Little magic remaining in the world, a focus on bastards, excessive sex and murder… yeah, it’s becoming more and more clear.) I appreciate the need for any author to try their hand at something different, especially after 30 books and 30+ years of the same series. But while King of Ashes definitely feels like a more mature and darker book, it also feels like bits of grimdark have just been thrown in (and poorly written) because Feist felt like they were supposed to be there.
But there’s a lot to like about this book. It’s a new, fleshed-out and thorough world, with some very strong concepts – the assassin nation of Coaltachin, the sinister Church of the One. I’m particularly enjoying the story of Declan the blacksmith: while the tendrils of the main plot are encircling him ever-tighter, his story is basically just about a young, skilled man making his way in a harsh world, and it’s very well realised. This is clearly a story that was planned as a trilogy and has only just begun, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest.
And then I can get back to Midkemia after all this time.
I’m a bit concerned that this crossover won’t work. I’m worried that blending the two worlds will either mean that the Riftwar characters get needlessly ‘grimmer’ in Feist’s currently-clunky way, or that the overall darker tone of the Firemane characters will be lost in the mix.
And I worry that adding in another world will take Feist’s attention away from the great setup he left at the end of Magician’s End for future Riftwar stories. I want to read about the “strange and alien life fashioned by wild magic” lurking in the bottom of the Big Crater; about Magnus guiding the worlds of Midkemia et al into a new and exciting future. I have a sinking suspicion that throwing the Firemane characters and world into the mix will mean that Feist entirely forgets about much of this setup in favour of blander Multiverse Stuff.
But at the end of the day… it’s Midkemia again. It’s Magnus, it’s Pug, it’s my favourite series continuing. Is it going to be good? Who knows. Am I going to read it? Absolutely.
