I absolutely loved this book, but I have come to believe that Rothfuss will not finish this.
Roman Legions interests me. I don’t know much about Pokemon. Character development is very important to me.
But I like a well-written battle scene. The best I’ve read lately is in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, which also has great characterizations (and relatively little magic).
Thanks for the heads-up on the “Furies of Calderon” / Codex Alexera series. We’ve been enjoying the Dresdens but without character development I wouldn’t be interested in his other series. The fight scenes in Dresden are OK but I would not want 20% more of that and certainly woudl not want cover to cover fights.
It’s about as Roman as Tolkien fantasy is British. I consider it a fresh spin on fantasy, myself.
Pokemon is a comical way of putting it. The magic in the setting comes from the humans controlling elemental creatures called Furies, which allow the human to manipulate the elements as well as enhance themselves in some fashion. For instance, Earth Furies allow the user to reshape earth and rock as well as become supernaturally strong. The Furies don’t do direct battle against each other, but permit humans to accomplish superhuman feats.
Nearly everyone can use Furies to some degree or another, so in that sense it’s a ‘high magic’ setting, but it also takes a look at how reliance on magic can hamper a civilization in some fundamental ways.
Besides the magic, there’s a strong focus on battles, both political and military, and as such there are a lot of characters. But Butcher’s style is generally very workmanlike and straightforward, and he does a good enough job of coloring in most characters and providing exposition when an obscure one resurfaces, that it’s not difficult to keep track of who’s who.
Butcher seems to want to tell a story in which consequences and outcomes are a plausible result of the actions taken. As such, he does spend a lot of time on battles, because he likes to lay out exactly how the commanders directed their forces to allow the win. Even outside of battles, a lot of time is spent outlining a character’s reasoning and analysis of one situation or another. Deus ex machinas sometimes occur, but they’re almost always heralded by Chekov’s Guns.
I like it quite a lot, but then I’m a total slave to Wheel of Time, and Codex Alera is certainly better than WoT. I know to a lot of folks that’s not a compliment, but I’m enjoying it. I spend too much time ranting at characters’ stupid, nonsensical actions and behavior in WoT, and for CA I generally find them likeable and very rational. The few times they do act weirdly out of character or irrational, there’s a good reason for it. About the only thing I can really knock Butcher for is that the romances that crop up sometimes seem as shallow and immature as if the people involved were 15 instead of full-grown adults.
I find nothing wrong with the characterizations and character development in the books, other than them being a bit flatter than in Dresden. The first book is entirely about an assault on the main characters’ home region. It’s the very beginning of a six-book series. First books usually establish characters and settings and don’t necessarily jump into developing them right away, so I consider that criticism to be without merit.
I enjoyed the series. It didn’t captivate me quite the way the Dresden series does, but it was definitely worthwhile.
Hehe, I didn’t like the first book, but toward the end something or other pinged enough interest to pick up the second one. By the end of THAT one, I was hooked. Not nearly as hooked as with Dresden; they are definitely two different styles.
Fantasy with low/no magic? The first to occur to me is CJ Cherryh’s The Paladin, which has none at all.
If you didn’t know, the series was based on a bet he had to write about two horribly disjointed topics, if I’m remembering right. (a Lost Roman Legion and Pokemon.) (The Dresden series is pretty based on the politics of Zelzany’s Amber.)
I actually didn’t know that. Pretty impressive effort, if so.