Jesse > Recent Status Updates

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE HAPPENING IN THE LAST 50 PAGES 🤣😂🤣 I have my ideas about why betrayals are such a fundamental plot twist for the YA fantasy genre but this is ridiculous

Shed a tear for Shade, because YA fantasy can’t stomach young adult men transitioning into fathers

100 pages left for the prison break???? No f’n way, how will all the twists and betrayals fit in?

I am pretty checked out of Mare’s narrative of self-hatred. I’m pretty sure that most of the quirky new bloods she has picked up are going to die horribly and the survivors will line up to tell her I told you so in their own special ways.

50 pages later and Shade and Farley are confirmed couple. sorry, shade, but you’re a dead man. You don’t get to pair off and live this early in a quadrilogy. lol I bet her dad kills him, too

Well I’m 99% sure shade is gonna die but now we have a weird dude who can apparently see one leg into the quantum future. This guy DEFINITELY cant live through the series.

Ahhh farley has been ill lately. Is she… with child???

OH GOD KILORN IS PUSHING THEIR AWKWARD RELATIONSHIP DYNAMIC OUT INTO THE OPEN I CANT WATCH

Ah yes, the part of the book where the title appears. The deus ex machina out of the Maven ambush doesn’t feel the least bit earned. I think this was a handy way for Aveyard to hit the fast forward button on the new blood campaign. Also, I was hoping we were done with the Cal romance at the end of the first book but what is YA fantasy without a romance hook, after all!

chock full o’ betrayals

Right now I am feeling strong parallels to the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Divergent trilogy with the mixture of sea and air travel as a cornerstone of Siege and Storm, transience being integral to the second acts of both, and numerous other bits with the 2nd act usually being the one where the heroine’s self esteem is at its nadir.

lol well I can’t say that I was expecting Kilorn to shove her in the cell but in retrospect given the economy of action in YA idk what else I expected!!

Welp;

Big ol’ action scene and we are on to the second act of one of the YA templates, an exodus from shelter to shelter. Good to see no one died in the first 50 pages! Also, a submarine?????

Awwww yeeeeah the super negative top reviews got me blood pumping for this one!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just love when a mystery makes it to the accusing parlor!!

Now that we are on to Lije visiting locales the story has taken off quite a bit. Daneel has been kind of stale as a foil to the detective so I’m okay with him getting stuck at the estate. Also, attempted murder by child!

A pretty sociology-heavy segment and a preview of the sort of quirks that Lije gets to see in the unusually contact-free Solarians.

lol, earthman having to solve a spacer conspiracy from his spacer-provided mansion is sort of a bottle plot. Also the goofy Gladia walking around in the nnnUuuuUuUuUuUude

Lots of fun with space travel! Lije is out of his element here as his Earth-born phobia of the outdoors is his major obstacle. Dwelling on this psycho-drama is a big part of his characterization and probably will be for a good portion of the novel. Daneel is introduced fairly early and there is an added wrinkle as he is playing his human part for the Solarians.

“The Flower-Women”

The second story of Xiccarph and its naughty sorcerer supreme, the ridiculously-named Maal Dweb. It’s a passable battle of sorcery, committed by a dude who is Bored, against snake-dinosaur-serpent beings who are harvesting barely-intelligent siren plants that Suck Your Blood for alchemical components. It’s, uh, a glorious mess.

“The Weaver in the Vault”

Another Zothique tale, but it has more of that Hyperborean flavor of ne’er-do-wells venturing into Forbidden Territory, with predictable results. I actually enjoyed the banter these three roughnecks had before they got into the doomed city. Like “The Charnel God”, the title creature is another not-quite-malignant entity that derives its sustenance from the flesh of the deceased.

“Vulthoom”

More Martian shenanigans. Two down-on-their-luck earth men are propositioned by what they understand to be the Satan of Mars. The truth is more amoral when talking about interstellar beings but it’s still bad news for conventional mortals. I didn’t really connect with Smith’s bosom buddy main characters; unfortunately, they’re the protagonists we got.

“The Voyage of King Euvoran”

More Zothique, more arabesque. This one generically reminds me of the voyages of Sinbad, except it’s Zothique, so instead of something like the bird people Sinbad marries into it’s bizarre horrors like vampire colonies. This has the structure of a sobering fairy tale / parable as the King pays a heavy price for his desire but accepts his fate with AK-like humility.

“The Dark Eidolon”

Smith’s heart was with The Arabian Nights and especially the derivation of Vathek so it’s only appropriate that the dark land of Zothique is a doomed earth that takes its cues from oriental tales dialed up to extremes. This dark tale, more than previous installments, shows just how cheap human life is on the dark continent where humanity dies out in its twilight.

“The Charnel God”

Zothique!! This is a badass fantasy story in a city which is generally not bad to live in except for questionable practices regarding the dead. Which is fine if you aren’t a visitor whose wife has cataleptic seizures that resemble death. Things are further complicated by a grotesque necromancer who murders a similar young woman so that he can re-animate her. Cool sword and (mostly) sorcery.

“The Secret of the Cairn”

An artist bears witness to trans-dimensional aliens and gets briefly sucked into their world. Generally Smith stories tend to be nightmarish adventures when aliens are involved but this one has the ring of a parable in just what the aliens are doing and what the effect is on his curious protagonist. The ending is not cataclysmic but bittersweet.

“Genius Loci”

A malign, shamanistic spirit devours all animal life in an isolated, depressing glade. It’s a pretty good weird horror story as the MC watches the dissolution of his friend - and later, his friend’s fiancé - in obsession with the glade. It reminds me of “The Colour Out of Space”, both stories centered around deliberately non-human intelligences (and not just Smith’s funny aliens).

“The Third Episode of Vathek” (with William Beckford)

Most of Smith’s youthful fiction was orientalist and almost certainly inspired in part by Vathek. Finishing the third episode takes things sort of full circle. Smith doesn’t dwell on Beckford’s twincest angle; this is mostly delivering on the premise of how Zulkais and her brother were damned.

oh dear lord i forgot that the next story is the finished-by-Smith third episode of Vathek