Scan barcode
A review by shdnx
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear
3.0
This book had some truly awesome moments, especially around the wizard initiation ritual ("Go and earn your power!"). Unfortunately, apart from these few memorable pages, Range of Ghosts becomes just an average epic fantasy book.
At the core, the problem lies in that epic fantasy books, by nature, rely on their awesome scope - potentially large number of PoVs, events that shape the world, many locations, many different-but-overlapping conflicts/problems... things like that - to entertain. Usually they don't try to be full of action-scenes and in general set a slow(er) pace than their urban fantasy counterparts for instance.
(There are a few exceptions to this, books that are coincidentally the best in the epic fantasy genre in my opinion - most notable examples are The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and the Mistborn books by Brandon Sanderson. There is not many of them, and the reason is that they're incredibly difficult to get right - as we're seeing here.)
So let's see what Range of Ghosts features from the above:
- PoVs? Four, in fact, but two of which with barely any chapters. This isn't a problem in itself; four viewpoints should usually be enough - however, 2-3 of these are usually very near each other, and therefore only offer a vaguely different perception of the events.
- World-shaping events? Well, kind of. I suspect that the rest of the series will fare better in this regard, but a fact is a fact: this is not an epic book in this regard.
- Many locations? Well, our protagonists do travel a lot, but there is just not much difference between the locations, as they are described. I do not really see the different cultures, apart from a very few surface things, like how people dress - but, for instance, never in how they behave.
- Different conflicts/problems? No, there is only one (serious) conflict (some sect vs the world), and that's all, be happy with it.
"All right, fine, it's not a good epic fantasy book. But is it any good with the action?" - you could ask. However, I'm afraid the answer is "not really". See, the book pretends to be epic fantasy, so there are fighting scenes very rarely, and they are not even written that well. Some vague description of a few engagements, but I didn't feel the chaos and the intensiveness of a well-written combat scene.
Outside of the combat scenes, the story creeps forward very-very slowly. This is usually all right in epic fantasy books, because - once again - they're not like action movies: in fact, quite the opposite, they try to amaze you with their cool ideas, colorful world and vast scope.
Now there are some fairly cool ideas featured in Range of Ghosts, but they are just not awesome, and not significant enough to save it. As I already mentioned, the world feels rather uniform and boring, with very little real variety.
The characters are much the same. I can't recall a single character from the entire story who caught my interest in any way. They're just like the rest of their world: different-appearing on the surface, but quite the same in essence.
There's definitely potential for an epic scope however, in later books. The story does have this potential, but it goes mostly unexploited throughout the opening book of the Eternal Sky series. In that case, this book is a mere prologue, which was blown up to a full book's size.
So overall, while it is a fine book, Range of Ghosts is not really remarkable. Read once, then forget. It is disappointing, because the cover text looked very promising. Anyhow, I will try the second book sometime to see if there's any hope for the series.
At the core, the problem lies in that epic fantasy books, by nature, rely on their awesome scope - potentially large number of PoVs, events that shape the world, many locations, many different-but-overlapping conflicts/problems... things like that - to entertain. Usually they don't try to be full of action-scenes and in general set a slow(er) pace than their urban fantasy counterparts for instance.
(There are a few exceptions to this, books that are coincidentally the best in the epic fantasy genre in my opinion - most notable examples are The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and the Mistborn books by Brandon Sanderson. There is not many of them, and the reason is that they're incredibly difficult to get right - as we're seeing here.)
So let's see what Range of Ghosts features from the above:
- PoVs? Four, in fact, but two of which with barely any chapters. This isn't a problem in itself; four viewpoints should usually be enough - however, 2-3 of these are usually very near each other, and therefore only offer a vaguely different perception of the events.
- World-shaping events? Well, kind of. I suspect that the rest of the series will fare better in this regard, but a fact is a fact: this is not an epic book in this regard.
- Many locations? Well, our protagonists do travel a lot, but there is just not much difference between the locations, as they are described. I do not really see the different cultures, apart from a very few surface things, like how people dress - but, for instance, never in how they behave.
- Different conflicts/problems? No, there is only one (serious) conflict (some sect vs the world), and that's all, be happy with it.
"All right, fine, it's not a good epic fantasy book. But is it any good with the action?" - you could ask. However, I'm afraid the answer is "not really". See, the book pretends to be epic fantasy, so there are fighting scenes very rarely, and they are not even written that well. Some vague description of a few engagements, but I didn't feel the chaos and the intensiveness of a well-written combat scene.
Outside of the combat scenes, the story creeps forward very-very slowly. This is usually all right in epic fantasy books, because - once again - they're not like action movies: in fact, quite the opposite, they try to amaze you with their cool ideas, colorful world and vast scope.
Now there are some fairly cool ideas featured in Range of Ghosts, but they are just not awesome, and not significant enough to save it. As I already mentioned, the world feels rather uniform and boring, with very little real variety.
The characters are much the same. I can't recall a single character from the entire story who caught my interest in any way. They're just like the rest of their world: different-appearing on the surface, but quite the same in essence.
There's definitely potential for an epic scope however, in later books. The story does have this potential, but it goes mostly unexploited throughout the opening book of the Eternal Sky series. In that case, this book is a mere prologue, which was blown up to a full book's size.
So overall, while it is a fine book, Range of Ghosts is not really remarkable. Read once, then forget. It is disappointing, because the cover text looked very promising. Anyhow, I will try the second book sometime to see if there's any hope for the series.