A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I re-read this while I was in Taiwan, for the first time since high school. It held up better than I’d expected.

Written by the duo responsible for the Dragonlance books and other popular but not critically respected works of fantasy, this trilogy is surprisingly enjoyable. The prose is lousy and overheated, but the worldbuilding is very logical within its own wacky parameters, the characters are fun, the story is consistently entertaining, and the ending is genuinely startling. I’m not saying this is a work of genius or anything, but for old-school big fat fantasy, you could do a lot worse.

In this world, absolutely everything is done by magic, and technology is forbidden. Yeah, yeah, I know, big cliché. But what Weis and Hickman do that’s cool is take that cliché to its logical extreme. Rich people float above the air to display their wealth of magical strength, poor people and political exiles are stuck with limited access to magic and live wretched hardscrabble lives, and the occasional person born with no inherent magic at all is proclaimed Dead (more on that later.) When the color of clothing can be magically altered in an instant, of course the exact shade of one’s robes and its appropriateness to the moment at hand are a matter of great importance in court.

Machines are banned, even simple ones like waterwheels. Levers are banned – when a character spontaneously uses a branch rather than telekinesis to move a rock, everyone reacts with shock and horror. Furniture is magically shaped, so when another character sees a chair that’s been constructed out of mutilated, sawn, and joined-together bits of trees, he reacts with more shock and horror. Oh, and sex? Also banned. Sperm is magically transported from husband to wife.

Needless to say, not everyone abides by these rules. But there are mage enforcers to punish those who don’t, sometimes by turning them into giant statues who stay conscious in a kind of living death or by sending them across a magical barrier to who knows where (more on that later, too.) And Dead babies are put to death. Little d death.

When the emperor’s baby is born Dead, his mother’s totally literal crystal tears shatter against and cut his chest, giving him scars that will later reveal his identity. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Years later, a boy named Joram manages to hide his Dead state by learning sleight of hand to fake having real magic. This plus his upbringing by an insane mother gives him plenty of angst – and the book has only just started.

The story follows Joram (who is the subject of a prophecy that he will destroy the world), a mathematician and mage named Saryon who is tormented by his evil desires for engineering and sex, a pretty aristocratic blonde girl Joram falls for, a comic relief fop named Simkin, and a brave artistocrat allied with the renegade technologists. They mostly seem like a fairly standard bunch. Except that…

( Fun with genre tropes! )

Forging the Darksword: The Darksword Trilogy, Volume 1