Thoughts on the Powder Mage Trilogy by Brian McClellan
I am about to attempt the unusual here and review an entire trilogy as a whole. That trilogy is the Powder Mage Trilogy by Brian McClellan.
The reasons I am doing this are twofold. Firstly, I have recently blitzed through the series and so it feels like one long book to me rather than three individual ones. Secondly, McClellan was taught by Brandon Sanderson at Brigham Young University and so, as I learned a lot from watching Sanderson’s classes online, I feel a sort of kindred spirit with him. As I’m covering a whole trilogy I am going to be discussing things in detail but I won’t spoil or simply rehash the plot. I should also add that I listened to this series on Audible (this is something I do a lot) and the narrator, Christian Rodska, did an amazing job in bringing it to life.
Before delving into the meat of the review I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed this series and would certainly recommend it to any fantasy reader. I believe it was McClellan himself who coined the phrase ‘Flintlock Fantasy’ to describe fantasy with guns. If you’re interested in a setting based on the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars then this is for you. Rifles, bayonets and canons have long since replaced swords, arrows and armoured knights.
The series features powder mages, magical manifestations of the transition to gunpowder, who use black powder to enhance their physical strength, agility and stamina by eating or snorting it. Powder mages also have the ability to ‘float’ bullets, keeping their projectiles flying towards their target over extremely long distances with deadly precision, even bending the path of bullets if needs be. They can also ignite nearby stores of powder at will and can warp the blast in the direction they want, making them particularly effective killing machines if surrounded by regular soldiers carrying powder charges. Yet powder mages have long been persecuted because they threaten the established magic wielders of the Nine Nations, the privileged, who have a weakness to gunpowder. Only in the nation of Adro are the powder mages respected enough to be drafted into the national army as elite snipers, leading one mage in particular to rise to the high rank of Field Marshal. This Adran mage is Tamas, who is the central character of the trilogy.
It is with Tamas that plot, setting and character converge to create one of the most gripping openings to a series I’ve ever come across. “The age of Kings is dead and I’ve killed it,” says Tamas within the opening chapter of A Promise of Blood, following his military coup against the incompetent monarch and his Royal Cabal of Privileged. Field Marshal Tamas begins the story as an old and experienced soldier, already in his sixties, and was easily my favourite character of the series. He is a gifted commander, a powerful powder mage and a man driven to extremes because he sees no other way out. Adro’s King was about to sign an agreement with the neighbouring nation of Kez which would have effectively forced Adro’s citizens into a form of indentured servitude in order to repay the crown’s debts. Tamas’ coup, and indeed his whole motivation from book one to three, rests on the idea that the people of Adro, his people, ought to rule themselves and forge their own future.
This was a great setup for a long and epic story. A blend of fantasy and real historical narrative examining the clash of old world systems and powers against new rising technology and political ideology. At least that is where the series initially appeared to be heading. In many ways it did and all the right elements were there, but they were a little under worked in my opinion. This was an issue I had with the series more broadly and is what prevents it rising to become something which really resonates.
Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed the trilogy, it did leave me wanting a more. Some plots, sub-plots, aspects of the world and characters did not feel like they were taken to their ultimate conclusion or delved into in a huge amount of depth. This was probably due to the frequent shifting trajectory of the plot. Of course an evolving plot is not a negative point in itself, but it often felt like characters were achieving their goals and then their plots were rebooted, creating a feeling of constant stop and start.
The greatest instance of this, in my opinion, was the refocusing of the plot about a third of the way into the first book. Tamas’ opening coup d’état swiftly leads to a purge of the nobility and a royalist backlash, suggesting Adro would soon head the way of the ‘Terror’ that plagued France post-revolution. It makes for powerful tension and character moments where Tamas wonders whether he really has done the right thing. Yet this is quickly resolved and almost forgotten as a war with Kez becomes the focus of the trilogy. As a whole the trilogy felt like a series of smaller plots and lacked a larger unifying strand to tie it all together beyond ‘we have to beat the Kez’. Gods even get involved in events but this element also fades in and out as needed and lacked cohesion at times.
Another point of view (POV) character is police inspector Adamant. He is gifted with a perfect memory which makes for some fascinating plot points, yet his investigations turn into something of a game of cat and mouse which gets slightly wearing by book three, The Autumn Republic. However, Adamant was still my second favourite character and the most well rounded after Tamas, offering a welcome respite from the high octane action the soldiering characters are often involved in.
Taniel ‘Two-shot’ is another powder mage and the son of Field Marshal Tamas. Despite being in his early twenties, he feels much older due to his already long service history in the military and having the exacting Tamas as a father. Of the three main POV characters he was the least compelling to me. He is the ‘gritty’ one, being brusque, aggressive, jaded from a past heartbreak and a little blood-thirsty at times – he spent just a little too much time fighting to get to know the man beyond the fighter. That being said, Taniel has some of the most heart-warming and genuinely unique interactions of the series with his companion Ka-Poel. She is a mute girl from a distant land and only communicates through simple gestures and facial expressions. Their exchanges are invariably well written, elevating those scenes and showing off McClellan’s chops when it comes to character interaction.
The last POV character is Nyla, who begins the series as a servant in a noble house before becoming displaced after the coup. She is unfortunately not given very much to do and seems to serve little purpose to the story until The Autumn Republic. When her plot does pick up it is interesting but by then I had already long since lost interest in her or what she was doing. It was largely the humorous minor character she is partnered up with which carried those chapters for me.
The magic systems in this trilogy manage to delicately skirt the fine line between being mystical and scientific without falling too far onto one side. The powers of the powder mages are well enough explained throughout the story, though it was a shame I had to wait until book three to learn more on the elemental system used by the privileged. The privileged tap directly into magical energy called the Else (a damn good name in my opinion) and I thought the need for specifically woven and patterned gloves was a nice touch, though I was left wondering whether different patterns could enhance or influence their magic.The third system comes close to being too unexplained for the level of story involvement it has but it works because the only character who understands and practises it is the mute Ka-Poel. However, we do get a decent sense of how it works and I was never left confused by its usage.
In this fan art by Jeff Yargas you can see an imagining of the privileged gloves.
There are also some real gems here such as the character Mihali; a genius chef with mysterious powers that help him produce food on a mass scale. The descriptions of the dishes are mouth-watering and the reliance that the characters come to place on him, both for their own dining pleasure and the morale of the Adran army, is a unique and interesting exploration.
The dialogue worked very well which is all the more important when you are listening to an audio book. The character interactions were believable and consistent, other than the occasional slip-up near the start of book one when a couple of characters come off as extremely unlikeable and brutal out of the blue. These could be hangovers from older drafts that slipped through the editing net. That happens. But overall the prose was clean, concrete and efficient. I’ve seen some reviewers suggest it goes too far in making ‘windowpane prose’ and becomes overly simplistic but I never found this to be the case. This is a more modern world than fantasy readers are perhaps used to and the characters we are following are mostly from military backgrounds or the lower classes of society. They wouldn’t have the time nor inclination to be flowery and so it makes perfect sense that the writing is approached in this manner. Tamas is not Kvothe.
Overall this was a solid trilogy which falls just short of being great. This is probably due to the lack of depth and explanation we are presented with at times. McClellan may have rectified this through his series of novellas set in the same world but I have not read them and so cannot say for sure. That I managed to get through sixty hours of it in under two months speaks volumes as I am not averse to putting a book down if I’m not enjoying it. The Powder Mage Trilogy is a fun series and an accessible one for readers looking to dip their toes into fantasy but are wary of the larger one-thousand page tomes.
Book 1 = A Promise of Blood
Book 2 = The Crimson Campaign
Book 3 = The Autumn Republic
I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below. If you have read this series as well what did you think of it and would you like to see more fantasy set in this historical period?
