What is it with fantasy authors and their fetish for agonizingly sloooooow setups?
In Swordspoint, we get a fantasy, renaissance-like setting, pleasantly free of any magic or world saving adventure. Instead, we receive a small scale political thriller set in a cutlure where it's both normal and legal for the nobles to settle their disputes through duels by proxy. Our characters are colorful, self-serving, not heroic, but often faithful to their own codes of honor. Sounds pretty good, eh?
Well, it's decent enough. Once you get to the second half of this book, that is. Before that, it's a shameless snore-fest. The intrigue that's going to evolve into the main plotline is crawling at a snail's pace in the background, while the reader is left yawning through more than a hundred pages worth of filler. This could have been a thrill ride, but, for some reason, the author felt the need to spend more than a half of the book writing about daily lives of the characters. The setting had potential, and I honestly wish that somebody else had this idea first. Kushner came up with a cool concept, but failed at execution.
A word of advice: if you want to read Swordspoint, prepare for some serious skipping.
Cool setting, interesting characters and snail pace
What is it with fantasy authors and their fetish for agonizingly sloooooow setups?
In Swordspoint, we get a fantasy, renaissance-like setting, pleasantly free of any magic or world saving adventure. Instead, we receive a small scale political thriller set in a cutlure where it's both normal and legal for the nobles to settle their disputes through duels by proxy. Our characters are colorful, self-serving, not heroic, but often faithful to their own codes of honor. Sounds pretty good, eh?
Well, it's decent enough. Once you get to the second half of this book, that is. Before that, it's a shameless snore-fest. The intrigue that's going to evolve into the main plotline is crawling at a snail's pace in the background, while the reader is left yawning through more than a hundred pages worth of filler. This could have been a thrill ride, but, for some reason, the author felt the need to spend more than a half of the book writing about daily lives of the characters. The setting had potential, and I honestly wish that somebody else had this idea first. Kushner came up with a cool concept, but failed at execution.
A word of advice: if you want to read Swordspoint, prepare for some serious skipping.