Book Talk: Making History in Fiction, and reading Daggerspell

About a month ago I picked up a copy of Katharine Kerr’s Daggerspell from the local bookstore. I’d never heard of it before, but it seemed like a good old fashioned sword and sorcery book, and I’d been looking for something like that. Something simple, I thought, and fun.

Boy, was I wrong. Well, about it being simple, anyway.

After working through some more of my backlog, I finally picked the book up to read the other day. What I found out was that Daggerspell is a criminally underrated classic of the genre that has to be one of the best examples of organic world building I’ve ever seen. With a story based around rebirth through countless generations, Kerr is able to create a history in her books that feels very organic. You see a world evolve over time in a way I really haven’t seen any other book do, and it’s fascinating and great.

So much of good world building in fantasy seems to come down to knowing where things came from. The history that led to whatever sets a fantasy world apart from the normal world, and creating a story that lets you feel attached to these historical things is just an incredibly cool way of bringing you into the story.

I’m also really liking that, while bigger things are obviously afoot (I’m only about three-quarters of the way through now), and it’s a story told across a very long period of time, it remains a very close, personal story. It’s about characters and relationships and change as much as it’s about wars and magic and things.

At the end of the day, that’s my favorite kind of fantasy to read–the kind that uses the trappings of the genre to give you a really good story about characters. The kind of stories you just can’t get in genres more heavily steeped in needing to stick to the rules of our own world.

So, I didn’t get the book I expected to get, I ended up getting something much better.