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Of gods and startups
Sep. 22nd, 2023 12:34 pmFor some reason Max Gladstone’s Ruin of Angels has been sitting on my shelf since it came out. I liked the first Craft quintet, so I think my completist brain just felt weird about another Craft book with different cover art and title convention and all that? Anyway, I was missing out, because Ruin of Angels is just as much of a fun time as the others, combining the hellscape of finance capitalism with the hellscape of necromantic god-war blood magic fantasy stuff. A train heist is also involved, as we know how I feel about heists.
Our protagonist, mostly, here is Kai Pohala, a priestess/idol-maker/investment banker from Kavekana, who scores a whirlwind business trip to the Iskari colonial city of Agdel Lex, which does not go according to plan. Agdel Lex is built on top of a place just known as “the dead city,” which is the former civilization of Alikand in its last moments, eternally being torn apart in the death throes of a major Craftsman in the Gods War. There are also, secretly, pockets of Alikand, remembered into being by the descendants of the old ruling families, before the Iskari showed up to impose their very specific and top-down version of order and good governance on the place, which at the moment is unfortunately just about the only thing preventing the dead city and all the creepy monsters in it from breaking through. The Iskari are some sort of squid-based parasitic religion with impressive mind- and reality-control powers, and also they are smarmy dickwads–really excellent villains all around.
Another thing Agdel Lex has is Kai’s estranged sister Ley, a preternaturally charismatic human who lots of people wind up loving and wanting to work with and generally taking paths other than “avoid at all costs” around, which usually seems to be ill-advised. Ley redeems herself at the end by working with a bunch of other people to help de-upfuck the situation that she got them all into by always trying to do big ambitious projects without telling any of the people she dragged into what the fuck was going on. Fortunately we don’t have to spend a lot of time in Ley’s head because for the first 90% of the book she truly just sucks as a person. Instead, we spend time with Kai, obviously, and with Ley’s ex-girlfriend and delving partner Zeddig, and Zeddig’s other delving partner Raymet, and a mysterious lone Camlaander knight errant named Gal, and a street urchin prophet named Izza, and our old buddy Tara Abernathy. These people do not all necessarily work as a team, and frequently find themselves at apparent cross purposes with each other, largely due to the fact that they are all operating on extremely limited information (a situation that is frequently at least partly Ley’s fault). Everyone tries to pick apart what the fuck is happening and protect, to the best of their ability, Ley as she flees from the cops and the squiddy Rectification Authority agents, who are after her for a murder that she absolutely, 100% committed. (She had reasons, but was she going to tell anyone what they were? No, she was going to demand help because Just Trust Me.)
I realize this grumping may make it seem like I dislike Ley as a character. I assure you the opposite is true. Ley is a great character. She is just a great character of a fucked-up, infuriating, utterly insufferable person. I enjoyed being all like “What is this bitch’s problem” very much.
This novel is longer than any of the other ones in the Craft series so far but I feel like that’s perfectly acceptable as we get to explore not just a new city, but a new three-cities-in-one, and also how laboriously difficult it is for our gang of fucked-up weirdos to get on the same page about anything is a pretty integral theme here, so stuff takes a while. The pace is fairly frenetic, as everyone is continually scrambling to stay ahead of the Rectification Authority, the cops, zombie gangsters, Ley, and sometimes each other.
Anyway, there’s been another book released in this series that I totally missed hearing about, so I’m hoping it’ll take me less than another five years to read Dead Country.
Our protagonist, mostly, here is Kai Pohala, a priestess/idol-maker/investment banker from Kavekana, who scores a whirlwind business trip to the Iskari colonial city of Agdel Lex, which does not go according to plan. Agdel Lex is built on top of a place just known as “the dead city,” which is the former civilization of Alikand in its last moments, eternally being torn apart in the death throes of a major Craftsman in the Gods War. There are also, secretly, pockets of Alikand, remembered into being by the descendants of the old ruling families, before the Iskari showed up to impose their very specific and top-down version of order and good governance on the place, which at the moment is unfortunately just about the only thing preventing the dead city and all the creepy monsters in it from breaking through. The Iskari are some sort of squid-based parasitic religion with impressive mind- and reality-control powers, and also they are smarmy dickwads–really excellent villains all around.
Another thing Agdel Lex has is Kai’s estranged sister Ley, a preternaturally charismatic human who lots of people wind up loving and wanting to work with and generally taking paths other than “avoid at all costs” around, which usually seems to be ill-advised. Ley redeems herself at the end by working with a bunch of other people to help de-upfuck the situation that she got them all into by always trying to do big ambitious projects without telling any of the people she dragged into what the fuck was going on. Fortunately we don’t have to spend a lot of time in Ley’s head because for the first 90% of the book she truly just sucks as a person. Instead, we spend time with Kai, obviously, and with Ley’s ex-girlfriend and delving partner Zeddig, and Zeddig’s other delving partner Raymet, and a mysterious lone Camlaander knight errant named Gal, and a street urchin prophet named Izza, and our old buddy Tara Abernathy. These people do not all necessarily work as a team, and frequently find themselves at apparent cross purposes with each other, largely due to the fact that they are all operating on extremely limited information (a situation that is frequently at least partly Ley’s fault). Everyone tries to pick apart what the fuck is happening and protect, to the best of their ability, Ley as she flees from the cops and the squiddy Rectification Authority agents, who are after her for a murder that she absolutely, 100% committed. (She had reasons, but was she going to tell anyone what they were? No, she was going to demand help because Just Trust Me.)
I realize this grumping may make it seem like I dislike Ley as a character. I assure you the opposite is true. Ley is a great character. She is just a great character of a fucked-up, infuriating, utterly insufferable person. I enjoyed being all like “What is this bitch’s problem” very much.
This novel is longer than any of the other ones in the Craft series so far but I feel like that’s perfectly acceptable as we get to explore not just a new city, but a new three-cities-in-one, and also how laboriously difficult it is for our gang of fucked-up weirdos to get on the same page about anything is a pretty integral theme here, so stuff takes a while. The pace is fairly frenetic, as everyone is continually scrambling to stay ahead of the Rectification Authority, the cops, zombie gangsters, Ley, and sometimes each other.
Anyway, there’s been another book released in this series that I totally missed hearing about, so I’m hoping it’ll take me less than another five years to read Dead Country.