Corvus
3.0 Stars
5-23-2018

A skillfully written, but also kind of dumb, historical-fantasy-war-adventure.

One the one hand, the author is a good writer, and he has a fast paced and action filled story with descriptive and well done combat and realistic tactics and strategy and such. The author has set his story in a just slightly ahistorical/fantastical version of Ancient Greece and its city states, and the descriptions of the gear and tactics and daily life and tools match up with the best theories we have about what that was all like. And the story is paced well, not too long, with not too many extraneous bits, and with a short but sensible dramatic structure.

On the other hand, the title page of the book has a blurb-recommendation by Steven Erikson, who is the godfather of terrible fantasy door stops. And when you think about it, you can see why Erikson would like the novel. It has this feel of manly men and blood and tragedy for no particular good reason. While the moment to moment writing is fine, there's a lot of open questions about what the story and plot are doing and why they are doing it. E.g. Why set this story in a fantastical version of Greece? Did the science fictional and ahistorical elements really add anything to the story? (no) If you are doing a fantastical story, why hew so closely to these historical plot lines? E.g. why not just write historical fiction, rather than off-by-10% semi-fantasy historical fiction? Were we supposed to be rooting for the majority of the PoV characters? They seemed like kind of dicks in the greater scheme of things and there wasn't any real reason to hope that they would succeed rather than their opponents. Along the same lines, were we supposed to feel bad when bad things happen to them and their people? Or is the story more "milk man gets served milk"? (yes) Did the story need so much rape? As usual the answer is probably not.

So, this was a technically competent historical-fantasy adventure story (a bit like a text version of the movie _Gladiator_, but without the gladiators?) that was lacking in overall direction and meaning.