Erik's Reviews > Tiamat's Wrath

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Wonder, wondrous, awe. Let’s talk about it, let’s chat, k let’s go:

My previous book, Soldier of Mist, took me 3-4 months to read. Fantasy novel. Complex. Bit of a bore. Didn’t even finish. Then Tiamat’s Wrath, I burn through in less than a week. Speedy like a hedgehog or a roadrunner. Or a particle of light. So huge contrast in reading time. Kinda disturbing. Why? Why one book drew me in, and another did not?

Complicated answer: plot structure, issues with protagonist passivity, obfuscation, one is a story, the other… a fog. But don’t really care about that. Not this time. No, this time, care about WONDER. Big difference in WONDER with these two books. Soldier of Mist: no wonder, no curiosity, no transcendence. Protagonist Latro meets a beautiful nymph in the woods. “Hi. Wanna make out?” he says. More or less. Meets the goddess DEMETER in her temple: “Hi. Wanna make out?” Where’s the wonder, where’s the awe? This is intentional, to ground mythology, strip its mythos, transmute into grittier reality. But why? To what end? Transmute Gold into Lead. Success doesn’t look like success, looks like failure.

Then I read Tiamat’s Wrath. Great contrast in wonder. Like cloudy sky to infinite blue. One sky tells us to hide, hunker down. The other beckons, promises adventure. Want to go explore. In final two books, we explore. Who are the Protomolecule Engineers? Who are their adversaries? How do they function? What do they want? Mysteries. Fun to explore:

A solar system, with no planets but a giant diamond. A history gem? Library of the ancients? Crystallized consciousness? Yes. Or a neutron star, nearly brimming over. On the cusp of collapse. A whisper, a breath, an iota more, then devastation. Ponder the beings with such Physical mastery. Like Gods - or Demons. Or creatures moving through the void. Shadows stalking like lions through electric and magnetic fields, rending ships and people. How do we stop them? First, we must know how they do it. To conquer, first you understand. And once you understand, do you still wish to conquer? So science and peace are brothers.

All this Wonder is like a Bedouin cistern, unsealed before a wanderer’s thirst. Disturbing to discover I had become so parched. Makes me think. Where did all the Wonder go? Is it age? A factor, yes, but prosaic. What else? Many contributors, many thieves. But I’m thinking… social media, internet. It can entertain, educate, enlighten even. But can it inspire? Can it draw forth Wonder?

I posit no, it cannot. Content, a problem. Mostly low effort, low density of quality per consumption. Like candy. Easy to consume, minimal nutrition. Sometimes even negative nutrition. But more than that, a flaw inherent in the medium, in delivery of content. Tiny visual screens, weak audio drivers, no smell, no touch, no taste, flat prioriception. Delivery of information without experience of information. Like a prisoner looking out his barred window. Prison negative connotations but prison feels safe. Prison cell a controlled environment. But Wonder comes from being surrounded by frightening novelty: standing on the Moon, not looking at it through an eyepiece.

Such is provenance and pursuit of skilled story-telling. Tricks your brain, displaces the senses. Simulation constructed of and perceived through linguistic interface, transports you to a new time, new place, into new minds. S.A. Corey, that two-headed beast, is a skilled story-teller. Drama, yes. Suspense, yes. Conflict, yes. But those are easy, cheap, and therefore common. Wonder is rare and priceless and, at the summit of our vertiginous being, it is everything.