I just read the first book in the Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust. It was aptly titled Jhereg.
This book was interesting but not great. I thought a lot about Roger Zelazny when reading it and how Zelazny had a trump heirarchy set up that had to be compensated for before the “hero” could win.
Brust seems to have the touch that made the Amber series come alive but isn’t quite as masterful at it. In Jhereg I thought that the logical fallacy about Morrolan not being upset at Arielen (was that her name) attacking the target (damn I can’t remember his name) and having him “kill” her was a bit much to overlook. For me, I couldn’t overlook the fact that their trick overstepped the boundary into physical attack which was what Morrolan’s vow prevented. Regardless of how it happened, she should have been disowned, in my opinion.
Also, this was supposedly the first book in the series. The author makes note that they can be read in any order in the preface; however, he makes note of so many things that have already happened that it seems to read very clumsily (hence the subpar Zelazny reference).
Sometimes he conveniently made too many of the characters know eachother and get along. This was exemplified with Kiera (the thief) and Aliera (the Dragonlady) never having been introduced to eachother earlier but knowing and liking eachother. It seemed a bit forced to me and should have had more backstory written in that book. I can see why he didn’t write about it though because it would have pulled the main character too far away from the center of the plot and would have changed the “voice” of the novel from first person most likely. Also, I really didn’t like how he “summoned” another jhereg to win his last fight and accomplish his mission. It was even worse when Noilish (his jhereg familiar) easily fell in love with Raczha (sp? the summoned jhereg). I thought that was a bit too convenient. I liked it even less when it was explained away that the second familiar wasn’t really a familiar at all. ARGH!!!
With that said, I still enjoyed the book. It was a quick read at 170 some odd pages. Vlad Taltos was interesting and had a job that was far enough off of the typical fantasy edge to make it well. It reminded me of a more drawn out Theive’s World in that it seemed to still be low fantasy (fantasy that takes place in a minute area and does nothave life altering effects to all the inhabitants in the universe). Since I bought all three books together (I love the one volume things) I will finish reading them. I doubt I will read much else by this author unless the other two stories are drastically better. On a scale of 1 - 10 I would give him a 6.5. In other words he definately is not a bad author but he doesn’t do anything that is extraordinary enough for me to keep wanting to read him.
with the caveat that Teckla and one or two others of the books following suck big-time.
BIG time spoilers
I don’t know who the commie chick is that’s impersonating Cawti in Teckla and a couple of the following books, but it ain’t the Cawti I know. When the commie revolutionary slaps her and she just meekly takes it :rolleyes: I knew Brust’s politics were getting in the way of his storytelling skills. The Cawti I remember would have cut his eyelids off and poured lemon juice on the wound.
But the series improves considerably after a few post Jhereg books, and, except for the dreadful Teckla all of 'em have some merit. (And Teckla’s crucial to the main plot, you can’t skip it.) And by the time you get to the newest one (Issola, the series begins to get wonderful again and pick up the old magic that the first few books had.
I’d say “Try Taltos and Yendi”. If you still don’t like his stuff, give up. But just reading Jhereg (despite what Brust says) only gives you a third of the story.
Steven Brust is one of my favorite authors, and his Taltos books are one of the few fantasy series I still genuinely enjoy, despite the fact that it now runs to some nine books (very few authors can hold my attention for more than three books based in the same setting). One of the things I love about this series is that the first book in the series is set at the mid-point of the series’ story arc. This is why Brust says you can read them in any order, because he writes them non-sequentially. IIRC, the second book in the series takes place before the first book, describing how Vlad got started with the Jhereg. The third happens much later than the first two, and is mostly about Vlad’s problems with his marriage. The fourth book describes much of the backstory to the series, including how Vlad and Morrolon meet. A hell of a lot of the stuff in the series that seems, in the earliest books, to be improbable coincidence, is explained much later in the series as published, but not necessarily later in the series chronologically.
The wonder of Brust’s work is the way everything comes together as the series unfolds. Taken as a whole, The Adventures of Vlad Taltos is one of the most intricately plotted works I’ve ever read, all the more so in that Brust resolves plot points years before he ever sets them up, and yet has never (that I’ve found, anyway, and I haven’t looked all that hard) caught himself up in a major contradiction. An excellent example is the latest two books, Dragon and Issola. Dragon happens sometime before the events described in Jhereg, Issola describes the most recent adventures of Vlad, placing the two books some ten years apart from each other, chronologically, but Dragon was clearly written to setup the events in Issola. The climax of Issola would seem to be a deus ex machina if you haven’t read the preceding book, which sets the precedent for what happens later without making it crucial to the resolution of the plot. So when you get to the end of Issola, you don’t think “What? How the hell does that happen?” you think, “Hey, that’s just like what happened in Dragon!” I hope that makes some sort of sense, but I’m trying to avoid spoilers here. Don’t stop with Jhereg, because reading just one book only gives you the barest hint of the scope of this series.
Steven Brust has also written a number of other, equally good if not as amibitious novels. The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After are set in the same world, but concern themselves with events happening centuries before Vlad Taltos was born. They are also clever re-workings of The Three Musketeers, and are even written in the style of Dumas. They are full of swashbuckling action, high romance, and are laugh-out-loud funny. To Reign in Hell is an interesting, if flawed, retelling of Paradise Lost’s war in heaven, with an even more heroic Lucifer as the main character. (Roger Zealazny wrote the introduction, BTW.) I was also especially impressed by Freedom and Necessity, a historical novel that may or may not also be a fantasy, set against the political turmoil of early 19th century England. Really, really incredible.
Oh, and Fenris, I really liked Teckla. Not the best, but the human drama was pretty wrenching for me, and I didn’t feel that Brust was agreeing with Cawti’s politics. I felt he was just as frustrated by them as Vlad. And I think you’ve misplaced Dragon in the chronology. Or it’s not the book I think it is. Isn’t that the one where Taltos has to find the stolen Morganti weapon and ends up joining the army? I’m pretty sure that’s set before, or shortly after, Teckla.
I actually do think they could be read in a variety of orders (there are some books that ought to be read before others, but definitely not all.)
I would suggest publishing date order and having the other books around to go back (or forward to).
Spoiler for Teckla:
I didn’t find Cawti “commie” at all. And Teckla worked for me, not my favorite of the series, but it worked. I know people like that - I’ve seen that before. To me, Vlad & Cawti’s attitudes toward personally being relatively privileged in a society where they are visibly members of an underprivileged class and how they think and deal with it are something that Brust nails better than any fiction and most non-fiction I’ve ever read.
dorkusmalorkusmafia are you just running through the “b” section of the sci-fi shelf at the library, or what?
Personally, I would say the exact opposite: I tend to think of the Vlad Taltos books as enjoyable but ultimitly fairly dismissable fantasies, while the Khaveraan books are incredilby innovative and I never, ever get tired of them. Except for Pratchett, who else is doing truely clever writing? And I think Freedom and Necessity is one of the most incredible books published in the last decade–not so much because it is a Great Book, but because it was published at all. I mean, I loved it. Every minute of reading it was pure joy for me. But the whole time I was imagining this conversation in the back of my mind as Brust and Bull pitched this idea to the publisher:
(very mild spoilers)
Writers: 'We want to write this book together."
Publishers: “Great! A fantasy!”
Writers: No, not really. I mean, some of the charecters believe in magic, but only in the way that you expect to find amoung middle-class Victorians as they dabble in spiritualism. All historically consistaint.
Publishers: Well, there’s lots of sex and violence at least?
Writers: No, not really. The plot centers on an failed early socialist economic movement and other social problems of the early Victorian period–get this, Engles is a charecter! And he spends a great deal of time discussing Hegel! We’re real pumped about that.
Publishers: Ah! Victorians! So lots of sexual hang ups!
Writers: No, pretty much everybody is well adjusted in their sexual attitude.
Publishers: Well, at least it’s a fast paced drama with lots of action.
Writers: Um, no, actually it’s told as a series of letters between the four principles, interspersed with newspaper articles and parlimentary records. We really think this novel has a power to bring in the British history majors with minors in philosophy by the boatload. Anyone who loves writing research papers is gonna love this book.
Publishers: Great then–get to it!
I really have no idea how the novel would read if you went into knowing nothing about Chartism or Hegel or the social-political turmoil of 19th C. Britain. But if you have even the slighest background in those areas (and mine is pretty slight), the book is like, oh, like I imagene it feels if you are a vegitarian in a small town and you are used to having to cook all your meals yourself and then you go to a big city and they actually have resturants just for you!
The fact that Brust can switch between the casual, colloquial voice of Vlad, the Dumasesque voice of the Khavveran novels, and the 19th C. long-winded expository voice of Freedom shows him to be a writer of incredible range.
There is actually a whole little clutch of very good SF writers all in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area who collborate/edit each other books: Brust and Emma Bull, Patricia Wrede, Caroline Stevermer, Pamela Dean, and I know there are a couple others. None of them have been super dramatically sucessful, but a steady stream of clever, well-crafted fantasies comes out of the Twin cities (Wrede and Stevermer’s Sorcery and Cecelia is one of the wittiest, sweetest fantasies ever written, IMHO). They tend to make little toasts to each other in thier books–for example, the psedo-introduction to Five Hundred Years After is writted by the Dean of Pamla University (Pamela Dean).
HTere is a new Khaveern book coming out in December, and I plan to buy it in hardback–that isn’t something I can afford to do often.
I have to disagree with you on this Fenris. I don’t agree with Steve that you can read them in any order, but I do prefer them in the order they were originally written. Partly because Brust’s writing style changes as he ages, and partly because it is so much fun seeing all of the hints and passing references that fit together in all the books. BTW, Dragon is chronologically right after Taltos, not Orca.
Manda: Meh, personal taste. I thought the intricate plotting of the Taltos books was more impressive than the writing in the Khaavren books, and that’s really saying a hell of a lot, because the writing in the Khaavren books is fantastic. Plus, I just really like Vlad.
Oh, and until I read Freedom and Necessity, I’d never even heard of the Chartists. And I really, really liked that book.
A) Ewwww. You liked Teckla? Eeeeewwwww. If I had had any respect for you before, I’d have lost it! (kidding!!! GD&R )
B) I swear I read somewhere that Brust liked and approved of Cawti and her Commie* pal’s politics and was frustrated that Vlad Just! Didn’t! Get! It! (Notice that Noish-pa, one of the all time great characters in fiction is more-or-less on Cawti’s side, 'though he’s not too impressed with the Commie ). I can’t find the cite right now though. I could have lived with most of it, if the Commie friend had been chopped into little bits and fed to Liosh by Cawti after [spoiler] he slaps her. I can’t forgive Brust for letting her let him get away with that. It was such an obscene violation of character.
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C) You’re right. Dragon goes before Jhereg.
Manda: Don’t even get me started on Sorcery and Cecila: It’s a wonderful book and I keep wanting to get my friends to read it, but it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay outta print and impossible to find. And I’m not loaning MY only copy!
Fenris
*Note: the term “Commie” is used for humorous purposes. I realise that Cawti’s pal was not a Commie as such. He was an asshole though.
from my review of The Book of Jheregon www.sffworld.com1
"…The problem with him is he’s a bit of a wuss at times and relies too much on the help of the seemingly godlike abilities of the Dragonlords in the first two books. The third book thankfully digresses from this reliance on deus ex machina to pull Vlad from the fire. Also, the reasons the Dragonlords are helping him at all are not very well expressed.
The second thing I didn’t like about the book was Vlad’s familiar, Loiosh. He appears to be included in the book soley for comic relief, although he does keep an eye out for Vlad and occasionally mixes it up in some of the fight scenes. Unfortunately, Loiosh’s constant smart-aleck remarks reminded me of how I felt about Jar Jar Binks in Episode 1.
The third thing that bothered me is the supoporting cast. All the Dragonlords and hired thugs are completely one dimensional. Vlad’s wife is more complex, but what the heck is an assassin doing with a wife? His assistant, Kragar, is completely subservient for some unspecified reason.
My last complaint deals with the stories themselves. These are more mystery novels than Fantasy. The plots are sometimes overly complicated - to the point where they appear convoluted, and some of the connections and discoveries seem contrived. This is especially true in the second book.
So what did I like about the book? Mainly the world Brust has built. It’s an intermingling of races where humans are not the dominant force. There’s a cyclical caste system at work that, while not very well explained, is at least original and interesting. One gets a sense of a vast history that will hopefully be explored in greater depth in the other books.
Overall, it’s an entertaining read, but lacks the depth necessary to acheive the status of greatness."
I absolutely adored the Vlad Taltos novels – and now that they’re coming out in trade paperback, it’s time for me to start replacing my falling-apart, losing-their-covers-from-having-been-read-so-often copies.
I agree with Lok - I’d rather read them in the order they were written. I enjoy when a writer can set up a story with the characters having pre-existing relationships, then explain in later stories how that relationship came about. It’s a neat feeling when you can read one of the succeeding novels and say, “Ah HA! I was wondering where he got Spellbreaker!”, or, “So that’s how he met Sethra.”
And Teckla – BOY did that book disappoint me. I think the thing that got me the most was that Cawti’s sympathies toward the Commies seemed to spring almost from nowhere. All of a sudden, bingo, she’s a revolutionary! It seemed to me that Brust wanted to somehow create tension between Vlad and Cawti, and he chose a ham-handed way of doing it.
Fenris, I just finished reading Yendi last night. It was placed after Jhereg in the little trilogy and it ruined the chronology a little for me. Thanks for posting the internal order to them.
Epimethius, you must have misread because I was saying I thought Brust’s work was subpar. I love Zelazny. The Chronicles of Amber is probably one of my favourite series that I have read to date.
Amarinth, LOL I don’t know what you are talking about. I have actually been picking up any set of series that look to be good reading. I tend to read a book a night a few times a week and this one looked to be something different.
Miller, the reference I was speaking of between Brust and Zelazny was my own. There is a glowing recommendation from Zelazny on the cover of the book and I went from there. In Jhereg I saw that he set up a heirarchy of how things worked but too many plot points seemed contrived. Whereas in the Chronicles of Amber the heirarchy was what kept the plot going and everything there seemed to be explained perfectly.
Last night I read Yendi. Those of you who have been responding know it is about how he met his wife, Cawti. This one worked a lot better for me and I got to see more of Brust’s exposition. I really liked how he showed the Lady in Green’s plottings. It would have been a lot better for me if they published the three books in a chronological sequence. The trilogy that I have goes in this order: Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla. I will be reading Teckla later this week.
Anyway, I think my initial disappointment in him was from all the references of things that happened before which seemed totally contrived to me. However, after reading Yendi I see how a lot of this worked on in Jhereg. I assume that after I read Teckla even more of it will start to fall into place. I really like the low fantasy aspect of the individual novels. From what most of you are saying, the set of low fantasy turns into high fantasy when taken as a gestalt. In other words, all the stories individually work as a minor form of fantasy. They don’t really do anything that seems completely universe changing. However, over the series you see that all the minor plots from the previous books have actually changed the world drastically, or at least had the potential to do so. My first impressions seem to have been misplaced. I didn’t like him because the plot points seem contrived but at least part of them are explained away in the later books so they are no longer contrived.
After reading Yendi I started to like him a lot better. From what it seems though, Teckla (the next one that I will read) has been getting mixed reviews. After those three, which should I go to next?
I will finally have something to add to the next “Brush with celebrity” thread. I went to school with Steve. Small town, small school.
I bought and tried to read “To Reign in Hell” when it was published, not my thing I guess. I’m glad to hear that he is at least reasonably well regarded among dopers who like fantasy.
**The trilogy is in the order that the books were originally published. And I’m very happy they went with that choice rather than the way that the Narnia books are now published, which IMHO sucks.
I figured it was something like that. I wouldn’t say that Butler is a B author though. She really seems much more like literature than others out there. I do have a guilty pleasure of reading Robert Aspirin’s Myth series though. Shhh don’t tell anyone.
It is nice to see that they were given sometype of order. I think the chronology is pretty screwy in it though. I assume that he also wrote them out of order (rather than writing them in a large series and then submitting them to his publisher out of order) which is quite amazing. I assume it is easier to plug up some plot inconsistencies and holes that way though. You simply write one of the mid to later editions and then go back in the timeline and fix any inconsistency that is pointed out to you. It is really quite amazing to keep all those things together and at least internally consistent.
For what it is worth, the only thing that really bugs me is the fact that revivification is so easy and common (albeit costly) in the series. It reminds me of the “he’s only mostly dead” thing from the Princess Bride which equates the novels to camp which after reading what I have read so far I know is not true.
Well, just going off the text, the way I read it was that Cawti was more interested in seeing that the Easterners get better treatment than breaking the Cycle or instituting a pseudo-Communist government. It’s just that the only other person who was also advocating this was this moron would-be commie, so she had to put up with the political bullshit to do what she thought was important: help her people. I felt that she was seriously conflicted about the whole thing.
And, I think that if Cawti had killed the guy, that would have been a worse violation of her character. Remember, the way both Vlad and Cawti moralized their job was that they only killed Dragaerans, who weren’t really “human.” One of the reasons I liked Teckla was that it forced Vlad to confront his essentially racist attitudes towards Dragaerans, and the beginning of his recognization that you cannot moralize assassination, no matter who the target is.
More than all that, what I liked about Teckla was the way Vlad and Cawti’s marriage falls apart. Most fantasy novels, when it comes to romance, end when the hero marries the princess, and they live happily ever after. The dissolution of their relationship is one of the realistic and modern touches that sets the entire Vlad Taltos series apart from the pack of bloated, thirty-six book “trilogies” that is now the mainstay of fantasy writing.
Well, the novel is written from Vlad’s POV, and the changes Cawti is going through are suppsoed to blind-side him. The point is that Vlad has been taking his relationship with Cawti for granted, and hasn’t noticed that his wife is not the same woman he married.
Well, this is personal taste, but I thought it was interesting that the stories were told from the view point of the least powerful member of the party. Kind of like how the Hobbits were the focus of LotR. I didn’t see the interventions by Morrolan, Aliera, and the other “big guns” as a Deus ex Machina, simply because Vlad is friends with these people in part because they can pull him out of situations he can’t get out of himself. Vlad isn’t the “fighter” of the party, he’s the rogue.
Again, personal taste: I like Loiosh. I think you’re dramatically underestimating his importance in the series, though. There’s at least one point in every book where Loiosh is instrumental in saving Vlad’s life. Plus, on a literary note, it gives Vlad an audience, aside from the reader, for his constant sarcastic asides.
Why wouldn’t assassins get married? Especially to other assassins? Just ebcause they’re cold-blooded murderers doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings. And the reason Kragar follows Vlad is made explictly clear several times. Kragar has some sort of psychic “invisibility.” People, for some reason, just can’t see him unless he makes himself obvious. This makes it impossible for him to be a leader, so he has to be a follower. I also disagree that the Dragaerans (not all of them are Dragonlords) are one-dimensional. Their characters aren’t all fully fleshed out in any one book, but are composited accross the series.
You say that like “mystery” and “fantasy” are mutually exclusive. Fantasy can be a hugely inclusive genre, second only to science fiction. If I write a story about cowboys fighting off ghosts of slain Indians, the story is equal parts fantasy and western. The taltos books are fantasies in setting, but are more like hard-boiled detective novels in terms of story. This is most emphatically not a bad thing. It is precisely what makes Brust’s novels better than the average fantasy fare. The fact that Brust packs more plot into a two hundred page novel than all of Robert Jordan’s books rolled into one is, again, something he should be celebrated for, not criticized.
Wow, sorry for the I Am Spartician length of this post. Brevity is not my strong suit.
You know, Fenris, over the years I have found you somewhat amusing and all, but now I want to have your baby. You cool with that?
If it wasn’t terribly illegal and immoral and just plain wrong (cough cough) I would have gotten ahold of the book through interlibrary loan and labriously photocopied every page. But like I said, that’s illegal. I keep waiting for the Harry Potter phenomenon to bring it back into print–you’d think with battered up old copies of it going for $30+ on Ebay, the publishing world would wise up. Certainly some other great fantasy works have been brough back into print on the strengh of the Rowlings sucess (Diana Wynne Jones entire body of work is back in print, for example).
Have you read Wrede’s Marelion the Magician and the sequel, Magician’s Ward? They are set in the same universe, ut without the same epistolary structure, and while good ,they aren’t quite as perfectly charming. Have you read Freedom? I am pretty sure it started out as the same game as Sorcery and Cecelia–it’s the same format writ large, and I know that Wrede, Brust, Stevermer, and Wrede are all part of the same cadre of writers.
dorkusmalorkusmafia, Teckla is depressing, and dreary, and not really very rewarding. I always assumed that Brust hiumself was going through a nasty divorce or something along those lines when he wrote it.
Miller, I’m glad you like Freedom. As far as Vlad vs. Khaaveran, I agree that it’s mostly a matter of personal taste. dorkusmalorkusmafia, you might check out HTe Phoenix Guards next and see if it floats your boat–give it a hindred pages or so so give your brain time to get used to the idiom.
