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I have always liked reading fantasy, from a young age. Maybe it started when I got the Dutch edition of Tanith Lee’s The Dragon Hoard? (Which is hilarious, by the way. If you have a young child in your life, this makes for a great book to read together.) I read a lot of the SF and Fantasy in the local library, especially as a teenager.

My parents put me in the “homework club” at secondary school. My grades were not good, because I was too lazy to really do any homework at home. The homework club convened every day (except the Friday I think) after school hours, and you’d sit there for two hours to do your homework. You were not allowed to leave before the end time, but if you had nothing left to study, you could read a book. I’m sure the intention was for the students to read books for their literature lists, but in the end we could just read whatever we wanted.

One of the boys at the homework club was reading something that was obviously fantasy, because it was titled “Dragonlance”. I think it was “War of the Twins”? Of course I was interested and I asked him about it afterwards. He described tabletop roleplaying games to me (which I thought was very strange and abstract) and how the books were like a description of what happened in the game. (Modern RPGs call this “the fiction”, which, in the case of Dragonlance, it literally is.) We got to talking about fantasy books and became friends in the easy way that boys can decide someone is a friend if they share an interest. Some time later, just before the autumn break, he told me that he was going to host a group to play these mysterious games at his house and that I should come too.

So I went there on the first day of the break (I think it took me two hours by bicycle to get there, he lived in a village at the other end of the city!) and I played my first tabletop RPG. So basically the Dragonlance books are responsible for getting me into RPGs — which they were designed to do, to get more people interested in Dungeons & Dragons. Except that we didn’t play D&D but Rolemaster, and it would take me another six years to play D&D in earnest. And I never read those Dragonlance books either, because I moved completely outside of the D&D “ecosystem”.

So when I came across the Collector’s Edition of the Dragonlance Chronicles, which are the first three novels to be released in the setting, I thought it would be interesting to finally read them. And it’s indeed interesting — but it’s not good fantasy. Be aware that the following will contain spoilers.

As I understand it, the books were written to sell more D&D by showing what kind of adventures you could have when playing D&D. And it is indeed a rather faithful recreation of the fiction that is created by playing D&D, if you squint you can see the rules systems operate just under the surface. That in itself is not bad, but it is also a faithful recreation of the kinds of adventures you’d have in an “epic” campaign played out by teenaged boys. It really has it all. The “you all meet in a bar…” beginning. The janky inconsistencies in background events because nobody remembered clearly what happened last session. The plot immunity, because as a GM you don’t want to kill off your PCs too easily so you have to insulate them from the worst combat results. There are all-powerful “GM NPCs” where a GM just wanted to play a cool guy (or gal) and basically used this NPC to overshadow the PCs.

The first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was written in 1984, well into the second feminist wave. But the way women are written and their relationships with the male characters is… not good. The romance (if you can even call it a romance) between Riverwind and Silvermoon make me wonder if the writers ever met two people who were in love. And for some reason they find it very important to let the reader know that all of the women are virgins. There may be a bit of fooling around, but obviously there is no sex before marriage! The single exception is Kitiara, who, to nobody’s surprise, turns up as an “evil” enemy commander. Much is made of how she takes men to her bed, and it takes only one night to turn a “good” character to her evil side. The message is obviously that sex does bad things to people!

There’s some sexual violence casually mentioned too. Some of it is in the past and not really dwelt upon (Tanis’ origin story), some of it is passed off as “just the way things are” (Tika having to deal with drunks pawing at her) and one bona fide attempt at rape that thankfully doesn’t get anywhere (when Laurana gets kidnapped). Yes, the 80’s was a different time etc, but it sure left a bad taste in my mouth.

D&D has a bad case of biological essentialism: all kender are child-like in demeanor, all dwarves are grumpy, etc. That is reflected in these books as well: Tanis is a half-elf, which means he is some kind of diplomat because he straddles two “races”, making him the leader of the group of course. And we only really see a single dwarf, and he’s grumpy… On one hand you know what to expect, on the other hand it makes the non-human characters a bit predictable and as the story progresses a bit tiresome.

The characters are supposed to be good friends, but they spend an awful lot of time full of mistrust of each other, very angry or outright fighting. Maybe this is also modeled on how teenage boys form friend groups? Raistlin deserves a special mention — we’ve all played in a campaign with an asshole who played an asshole character under the guise of “that’s what my character would do!”

The trilogy compares itself to the Lord of the Rings: the back flap even has a quote from Dragon Magazine, which names it “…a trilogy that should at last satisfy the old demands for ‘something to read after the Ring books.'” They don’t name the books by name, perhaps because TSR (the publisher of both D&D and these novels) had been sued by the Tolkien estate 7 years earlier for using names from Tolkien’s works and they tread more carefully after that. And of course Dragon Magazine is full of praise for the trilogy, because that was published by TSR too!

But that’s where any comparison has to end. Tolkien’s works are epic in the classic sense: there is a rich world with a rich history, some of which we get a short peek at. Things are going on just out of sight and the characters make a plan on how to achieve their goals in the middle of that. In these novels, by contrast, everything is just a set piece that is there, waiting idly for the characters to arrive. At no point did I have the feeling that there was a world off-screen (if you can call it that for a book) that was believable and in motion. It’s all so… pedestrian.

The scale certainly is meant to be epic: a world-spanning war with the evil side using dragons! And the first dragon we meet is terrifying! But soon, they’re relegated to being merely flying mounts with teeth and an attitude, and the whole thing feels cheapened. It’s like “oh, yeah, the dragons are also around somewhere…” and I feel that if you call your novel cycle “Dragonlance” there should be more dragons and more lances in it than this cycle has. We only see a dragonrider using a lance against another dragon, and it’s turned into some kind of slapstick with a kender and a dwarf crawling all over their dragon mount…

And yes, there are “funny” moments in there as well, whole scenes turned into some kind of slapstick. That certainly doesn’t help with setting an “epic” mood! Another gripe is how whole episodes are just skipped. “Oh, when we re-join our heroes they went to the ice wall and retrieve a piece of a dragonlance from a dragonrider encased in ice, and are now on their way back.” I mean, how is that not a big part of the story!?

Is it all bad? I mean, it’s not good, but I did read the whole thing and gave it 2 stars. Because it is interesting. You want to know what happens next, how the story develops, what new set piece is next. I did not read the whole thing through in one go — I had to read a little ‘palate cleanser’ in between the second and third book because it was getting to be a bit much. But if you frame it as pulpy fantasy aimed at teenaged boys, then it’s enough to keep your attention. That being said, I will not seek out any of the other books in the Dragonlance setting. Once was enough for me.

I haven’t been posting here for some time now, because composing a blog post would cut into my reading time. Remember kids: if you are determined enough, you too can turn reading into a vice!

When I was a Young Adult myself, YA was not a distinct category, and thus I read Old Adult sci-fi and fantasy. So I read Tanith Lee, Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, Ursula LeGuin, and many more. In retrospect, I don’t think all of them were appropriate for a 15-year old, but hey — I got away with it because the adults didn’t care, in true Gen X fashion.

I’m reading for fun, so I’m not looking for anything too heavy, and there is a lot of YA fantasy. So it seemed like a good place to start, and there are thousands of websites with lists of recommendations of what to read. And I thought that, once I got underway, I would find more books to read that are similar to the ones I started out with. And one series that consistently pops up in those recommendation lists is the Glass Throne series by Sarah J Maas. And my local library has all seven books (in the Dutch translation) so I set out to read that — the first book in the series is the first book I tracked on the Storygraph and might be the first book I loaned from the local library.

I read other books in between, but today I finished the last book in the series, and I have Thoughts.

In The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya, the expert swordsman, sees the Dread Pirate Roberts approach. He thinks to himself that it would be fun to fight left-handed, as a way to challenge his own skill. And to his surprise, his opponent fights left-handed as well — such an interesting situation! But his opponent is better than him and pushes him back towards the edge of the cliff where they are fighting. Then Inigo smiles, and when asked why he is smiling as he is losing, he says: “I’m not left-handed!” and switches to right-handed fencing. Now, Inigo drives back the Dread Pirate Roberts, but when he has been cornered, he confesses: “I’m not left-handed either!” and switches to right-handed fencing too and re-gains the upper hand! (I read the book, did not watch the movie, but this clip is of that part of the movie.)

To us, “I’m not left-handed either!” is shorthand for something being revealed that the reader (or viewer) had no way to know beforehand, an underhanded narrative trick. It’s funny in The Princess Bride because Inigo is playing this trick and then the trick gets played against him — but if a character in a story shows (or unlocks) an ability just in time, it’s a bit lazy. For sure, negative things happening to a character can be a great way for personal growth and sudden realizations, and of course you need a way to let the reader come down from that tension arc in some way. But if the only way you know how to do that is by having the character shout the equivalent of “I’m not left-handed either!” and do something that the reader had no way to see coming, then it becomes irritating.

The thing is that Sarah J Maas is so very good at it. She is well-versed in creating these desperate situations. The set-up is certainly grand and epic and sweeping, so there is a lot of room for evil plots coming to fruition and for the good guys to get into dire straits. And the series starts slow, so the tension arcs are longer and you have more time to think things through. But by the third book things heat up, and especially the last book, which has to resolve so many plot lines, has 900+ pages of these tension arcs, one after the other, almost all resolved by “I’m not left-handed either!” That made the first part quite a slog, but I was determined to finish the series, and as it progressed I fell for the trick, even if I saw it happening.

For example, the main character sends some letters out. And then in a later book, a fleet arrives to assist in a battle, and it is revealed that she called in some old favours and this means they narrowly escape destruction! As a reader, you had no way to know that one of those letters was to the commander of one of these fleets, and that they would heed the call. It’s just a deus ex machina, a ploy to save the characters from whatever dire fate was closing in on them.

And so the series becomes some kind of “desperation porn”: all seems lost and the enemies are closing in, and surely the characters won’t be able to escape this time. But lo and behold, it is revealed that one of the characters (it’s often the main character) is actually not left-handed either, and they get away semi-unscathed! And as the series progresses, that loop speeds up. By the last book, we get such a loop every few pages, it’s pretty exhausting.

I don’t think Sarah J Maas is a good writer. Her characters lack depth and most of them are kinda unpleasant (with Elide being the only notable exception). The characters are one-dimensional actors in a grand plot.

The real star is the plot — it is certainly grand, and I like that. In all fairness, some things were plotted out in advance and then the pieces of the puzzle fall in place and suddenly some things make a lot of sense. I liked that. I think she is very good in thinking of a plot and how that develops and gradually opens up, but it would have been better if someone else had done the writing of how characters in that world actually experience that plot.

There are also some… concerning… patterns in the book. Of course romances are part of the story. But almost all of them have a huge age gap — sometimes hundreds of years. And while she seemed to try her best to be ~diverse~, all the relationships that get any kind of space in the books are very heterosexual. In fact, all the main characters that do not end up in a ‘safe’ heterosexual relationship are killed off in the battles at the end. All of these are certainly some choices the writer made!

Was it a waste of time? Certainly not, I enjoyed my time reading the series even though there were quite a few eyerolls in there too. Do I recommend it? No, I don’t think I would — surely there’s better stuff out there. Will I read anything else by Sarah J Maas? No, I will not.