The Steel Remains
3.0 Stars
9-16-2017

[Ed 1: Publish or Perish! This is the second version of the review, as a failing hard drive took out the first version before it was published to the web. I liked the first review better; this is just a tribute to that first review.]

[Ed 2: I read this book basically in a single sitting, while staking out a hotel for my bounty hunter business. I think that contributed to me getting fed up with this author's style, and my resulting dislike for the sequel.]



A fast reading, grim-darkish fantasy that combines any number of different themes and ideas. It also has a lot of stabbing and sexing. The world is somewhat Abercrombian, as it has grim warriors and lots of injustice and misery. (Though these characters aren't quite such constant sad-sacks as Abercombie's characters). The world is also somewhat Vancian, and as it is set in a far, far future that has technology, magic, and technology advanced enough to be magic. There are baseline medieval humans, fantasy muslims, lizard people, dragons that rule over the lizard people, world/plane traveling high-tech humanistic engineers, the engineer's AI cores, world/plane traveling sidhe, multiple realms of existence, ghouls, a dozen different fantasy beasties, impact craters from orbital weaponry, several spirit-gods, etc. etc. Hmm, so maybe more WarHammer than Vance. In any case, the author shoves a lot of different flavors into his world. And he does at least put his own particular twist on each of these flavors. An early example of this is the ghouls; rather than the standard fantasy ghouls, instead you have these gray-slime-tentacle beasts that hollow out a corpse and then puppet the corpse for use as armor/locomotion. Neat.

The above might make it sound like the story is balls to the walls crazy, but there are actually a fair amount of "normal" elements in the tale. The story has nations, religions, families, friends, tribal politics, politics, law, and economics. The fantastic exists in the world, but does not usually impinge on the story too much. For example: there are dragons, dragons have shaped history, and few people have even killed a dragon and made commemorative knives out of their teeth. But a dragon never actually shows up in the story or directly influences events, it is just this thing that exists in the world. The later parts of the book do start to deal more with one particular fantastic element, but much of the rest of the story is mostly a human story.

And speaking of humans... there is a lot of sex in the novel. A lottttt. A lot of gay sex too. In this regard the book reminded me of Mark Smiley's novels, but while I always found Smiley's sex scenes to be delightful and hilarious, the ones in this book are kind of 'meh' and skippable. The gay sex also plays a large role in the plot, as one of the main characters is gay and faces a great deal of prejudice for this. This aspect of the book didn't particularly work for me, since in my own personal victim Olympics women get the gold, and LGBT people get maybe the bronze. And women are treated *terribly* all throughout this book. Actually, most people are. For this reason the main character complaining about his particular struggle while surrounded by people who are getting it far, far worse didn't really work for me. Or to rephrase it slightly, if you are treating other people worse than they are treating you, maybe don't complain about your fate so much. (Begin derail: sort of like the Houston mansions with the "Don't tread on me" flags outside. Who the f' is treading on your million dollar mansion and its team of servants? End derail.) Another similar issue that didn't really work for me is the slavery in the book. The book is nominally anti-slavery, but it also litters its pages with lavishly described nubile sex slaves, which I think undercuts any moral position the novel is trying to take.

So! In the end this is a well written, wandering stew of grim fantasy, adventure, sex, and sometimes over long but mostly apt scenes of violence. It's not entirely like any other fantasy book I've read, but it's also not something I completely connected with or loved despite the author's competence.