I don’t read anywhere near widely enough any more to be able to really quantitatively assess this, but it feels like there’s been a shift away from the Generic Medievaloid epic fantasy setting where armored knights are the pinnacle of military tech, toward more epic fantasy settings based on eras with guns. At least, that’s been a definite shift in my reading of genre fantasy, highlighted by nearly simultaneously starting Django Wexler’s Shadow Campaigns series and Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage series. Those are both based on 1800-ish military tech, with Wexler’s plot explicitly mirroring the Napoleonic wars while McClellan’s is much more strongly divergent from real-world examples. Both series are complete, and come to reasonably satisfying endings.
That’s put both authors on my buy-anything-they-write list, so I picked up McClellan’s new book, In the Shadow of Lightning without really knowing much of anything about it. The cover copy is weirdly spoiler-y, giving away a key driver of the plot that isn’t explicitly revealed until deeper into the book than I would normally expect to see on the cover.
The book opens with Demir Grappo at the height of his powers— he’s a “glassdancer” who can magically move glass with his mind, slaughtering enemies with flying shards, and commander of an army sent after a rebel city. Having defeated the rebels with brilliant military strategy, he announces a magnanimous act to end the war, only to find that his troops have been ordered to put the city to the torcch instead. The slaughter breaks him, mentally, and he resigns his commission, vowing to disappear.
Some years later, Demir is making a living as a hustler in the remote provinces of the empire, rigging “cudgeling” matches where fighters enhanced by glass-based magic pummel each other. A friend from the old days finds him and tells him that his mother has been brutally murdered in broad daylight; he returns to the capital of Ossa to take up his position as head of the Grappo guild family, from which he plans to find her mother’s killers no matter the cost, aided by his childhood friends Kizzie (the bastard daughter of another guild family, now working as an enforcer) and Baby Montego (the greatest cudgeling champion in the Ossan empire, now retired but still immensely famous and wealthy).
In parallel with this, we have the story of Thessa, a “siliceer” who makes the magical glass that enables most of the analogues of high tech for this world— cureglass that speeds healing, witglass that sharpens the mind, forgeglass that enhances strength and endurance, etc.. She’s the senior apprentice of one of the world’s great masters of the craft, but the city-state they inhabit comes under attack from Ossa, and he entrusts her with the design for a secret project he was working on with Demir’s mother, probably the reason for her murder and maybe for the war. She and Demir take a little while to meet up, but eventually join forces.
The third thread of the plot follows Idrian, a “breacher” in an elite Ossan unit commanded by Demir’s uncle, who uses massive amounts of glass magic to turn himself into a nearly unstoppable fighting machine. He’s also dependent on glass magic to hold a creeping madness at bay, so he’s willing to go to great lengths to assist Demir’s projects. He’s also forced into difficult military situation as Ossa’s opponents hire the world’s greatest living general and her mercenary company to turn the tables of the war, with Demir as the only Ossan leader with any hope of stopping her.
This is, generally speaking, a fun read, and does most of the things McClellan does well. The primary weakness of the book is that it’s the first of a new series, in a world with a fairly complicated magic system, so there’s a lot of exposition. This is generally handled pretty well— showing how things work through plot action more than just lecturing about the details of glass magic— but there’s so much to establish that it still gets pretty heavy at times. McClellan does a nice job keeping the action scenes legible, though, so even when the jargon is at its thickest, things never stop dead.
A secondary weak point is that the characters are a little familiar from McClellan’s past work— Baby Montego and Idrian both have strong elements of Ben Styke from the second Powder Mage trilogy, for example. I don’t think this is all that bad, really, as they’re fun characters, but I could see someone else having a problem with it.
Plot-wise, this does a nice mix of setting up some threads to go in really obvious directions, and follow a satisfying trajectory to the expected result, while others take dramatic and unexpected turns. There’s a Very Big Reveal at the very end of the book that’s not what I’d call clearly foreshadowed by anything that comes earlier, but on the bright side, it does suggest some interesting new directions for books to come.
So, all in all, I enjoyed this, and look forward to seeing where he takes it from here. Next up in genre fiction reading is Robert Jackson Bennett’s Locklands, the concluding volume to another series doing interesting things with using magic as an analogue to technology.
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