"Land Down Under"

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I promise this post will have nothing to do with Vegemite.

I finished The Vondish Ambassador by Lawrence Watt-Evans earlier today. I picked it up from the library b/c it was in the new release section. I read about half of it, and was enjoying it, then made the mistake of looking it up online. Lawrence Watt-Evans is a fantasy author who has been turning out novels for thirty years. The Vondish Ambassador is the latest in his Legends of Ethshar series. It is currently ten novels long with almost as many tie in short stories. This man cranks out books like he is drowning in words and trying to save himself. Wikipedia lists him as having authored more than forty books and a hundred short stories. It tuns out I could have been reading this one for free online. He serialized it on his website using a pledge system when his publisher told him no more Ethshar books and his public said more please. It's not up anymore since it was picked up and published, but it must have been thrilling for his fans to read a new chapter every few weeks. He apparently sent copies of the book to people who contributed a significant about while it was being serialized. I wish I had picked up an earlier book int he series to get started, but there you go.

The book is about the Ambasador from Vond, a empire to the south of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars where the novel takes place. He finds a local guide who is our point of view character. There are assassination attempts, and spies, and other political machinations, and then the end happened rather quickly and left me and our P.O.V. character so out of the loop that I could see the tags still on the deus ex machina. Ethshar seems like a great world, very in depth, lots of kingdoms to explore, but I don't think I'm looking for a new fantasy series right now. There's also like a dozen different types of magic in the universe. Don't get me wrong, I like worlds with multiple magic sources: Discworld has Mages, Witches, Gods and Sorcery; Mistborn has Allmancy, Feruchemy and Hemalurgy. But more than ten types of magic seems a little much to me. Part of why I stopped playing Rifts was how many types of magic there was. It's hard to balance, hard to keep track of, and ultimately seemed to take away from story and focus more on keeping facts straight.

Anyway, it was a great day to sit outside and finish this 200 or so page novel.