Happy Thanksgiving! I love this season. Refocusing on gratitude drastically improves my life each year. For the past two or three years I’ve gotten fairly sick every Thanksgiving—notably before the holiday began, rather than as a result of meeting up with so much family. Keeping an attitude of gratitude has helped keep the aching throats, sinuses, and heads bearable.

Bloggyness Review—Saga of the Forgotten Warrior

I’ve been enjoying the Monster Hunter International series so much that I decided to dig through all of Correia’s work until I’d read everything. While waiting for Monster Hunter Siege to free up on Libby, I grabbed Son of the Black Sword and House of Assassins—the first two books in Correia’s Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, an epic fantasy series—and I had an excellent time. I read both of these fairly chunky books in four to six days total which, considering the reading time I get, is quite the blitz. If nothing else, that alone is a pretty glowing review.

Anyway. Saga of the Forgotten Warrior is a really interesting series. It both showcases the real range that Correia has on him and solidifies, in my mind, some things I expect to always feature in a Correia story (his signatures, if you will); the books make excellent uses of his strengths in an epic fantasy setting, with minimal stumbling on his weaknesses. I would say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Let’s start on that range. If you look up book series written by Larry Correia, you find some pretty clear themes: Contemporary fantasy. Military. Big, big guns. Oh, and, of course, ridiculously dangerous monsters (which our hard-as-nails, battle-scarred protagonists manage to dispatch anyway). Anyone with a passing familiarity with Correia would probably describe him as the “gonzo action, guns-and-monsters guy” and, in my experience, they’d be right. Largely.

In comes Saga of the Forgotten Warrior. This series is epic fantasy. You’ve got magic. You’ve got intrigue between warring factions. You’ve got a clash of fictional cultures distinctly different from real-world cultures, as well as each other. You’ve got a big plot with lots of viewpoints, plot threads that weave intricately across books, and world-destroying consequences. In short, fans of just about anything Brandon Sanderson or Robert Jordan will find themselves in familiarly unfamiliar territory here.

And it reads really well, too. Correia’s quick pace and streamlined prose makes what could have been a chunky, ponderous experience read like a breeze. He’s extremely skilled at providing exposition in natural, brief, unintrusive ways, and there isn’t a single scene that feels wasted or unnecessary. These skills that he honed writing action-heavy military fiction feel right at home in an epic fantasy setting.

None of that would matter if the story and world weren’t compelling, of course, and thank goodness they are—you quickly grow to really care about the characters of this world, and you want to know what’s really going on in the world. You quickly and seamlessly learn everything you need to know to feel the stakes while the story progresses.

Correia’s signatures are front-and-center: blood-pounding fight scenes with high stakes, a dangerous protagonist who is exceptionally competent in a narrow area, and dangerous monsters that are nigh-unkillable. If you like these aspects in his other books, you’ll be very pleased with what you find here, although I think the difference in setting makes them feel meaningfully different—like how fudge and chocolate gelato are still variations on eating chocolate, but are very meaningfully different experiences.

As for Correia’s weaknesses, there aren’t many, and they might be strengths to the right reader, but they are present in this series. Sometimes fight scenes run a little longer than I’d like. The hyper-competent, relatively emotionless (or narrowly-emotioned) protagonist is often less interesting than the characters that surround him. And the protagonist definitely has far too much plot armor for my liking. (It’s well-explained in-world why the protagonist is essentially unkillable, but it still makes his fights have much less of an edge when he’s been beaten to hell and back four times and is still out-fighting the rested, uninjured warriors.)

Long story short: I’m enjoying Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, and I’d recommend it.

Son of the Black Sword kicks the series off. Ashok is a battle-hardened warrior with a magical blade that grants him the battle prowess of fifty generations of warriors. Perfectly obedient to the Law, Ashok finds his entire life turned upside down when it is revealed that the Great House he hails from has been hiding his true identity from everyone—including him. I found the first chapter or two somewhat weak, but the book really picks up after that point.

House of Assassins picks up right where Son of the Black Sword leaves off. The begrudging leader of the rebellion against the Law and the Capitol, Ashok sets off to rescue the kidnapped Prophet of the Forgotten One, who was kidnapped by mage-assassins. Even more revelations along the way change the very nature of the world, or at least your understanding of it. (Just like with Franks in Monster Hunter International, this book has so many funny moments that arise naturally from tough-as-nails and ultra-serious characters realistically interacting with a world that has, arguably, more dimensions than they do.)

Writing Updates

Halfwhisker is moving along at a decent pace. The book is currently at about 188,000 words, a 14,000–word increase from my last post. I’m drawing ever closer to the climax of the book, and expect to be finished between 200,000 and 225,000, at least with how things are currently going.

Cover art for Inner Demon is still in-progress. Self-publication of the ebook won’t wait long after; once I’m fully happy with proofs, physical will follow, and then audiobook. Physical and audio likely won’t be published until next year, unfortunately.

Visions of the Future, that article I’ve mentioned a handful of times—well, it’s progressing some. I’ve combed through my notes and made an outline for the article. Now I just have to find the time to write and revise it.

Send-Off

Have a most excellent Thanksgiving, and stay healthy!