Emil Petaja asks the reader an important question: what if Finland was populated by secret space wizards?

Yes, that’s right. This book is that bats–t crazy. It starts out like a classic silver age science fiction novel, with a lost spaceman who has survived this cosmic zone of death called the Black Storm. The Storm is growing and it disintegrates everything it touches. Even the crew of the ship that picks up our intrepid spaceman (who is, we will learn later, named Ilmaren) slowly and painfully melts into atomic nothingness just from having been near things that were in or near the Black Storm. He blames himself (as do most people in the first half of the book), but later it is off-handedly said that it couldn’t be him, but maybe his spacesuit was contanimated? Felt like there was some more detail we could have gotten there, but by that time, we are off to the land of the space wizards who descended from the people of modern day Finland. Mostly, they live like gnomish wizards underground, but once a year they come up and party (protected by an illusion, so normies don’t discover them) like it’s approximately 1000 CE.

You will be surprised to learn that Ilmaren is actually a chosen savior of the galaxy who must journey to land of goblins, elves, and hell hounds, created by an evil witch who got herself a Star Mill due to… well, it’s a long complicated retelling of Finnish mythology that is barely even metaphor, apparently. Anyway, Ilmaren saves the die by traveling through a tapestry using space magic and destroys the Star Mill (though not the witch! she escapes!) using a science magic… um… light saber, I guess. It’s really not clear. He’s sort of trapped in the little space witch world, but he seemed hopeful, so I guess it’s a happy ending. And we are meant to assume that the Black Storm will not destroy the entire universe anymore, so, job well done.

I am done with these Witcher novels. I’m enjoying the Netflix series. I tried playing the video game, but just wasn’t up for learning anything new on that front.

I will simply repeat what I’ve said before: the titular Witcher, aka, Gerald of Rivia, is much better as the star of short stories than as the protagonist of a novel.

The second novel of the Witcher series, it’s better than Blood of Elves, but not as good as Last Wish nor Sword of Destiny, which were a short story collections. If you’re watching the series, the second season diverges strongly from the books (the first season pulled heavily from the short stories), though viewers of both will pick up on something that was mentioned at the end of the second season and is clearly foreshadowed in the book (though I might not have guessed had I not seen the series).

One interesting thing is that the titular Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is made smaller. He is badly injured by the end and is also portrayed as being relatively small compared to the power wielded by wizards (including his sometimes lover, Yennefer).

After reading this science fiction novel and then recommending it to a friend (I won’t say it was great writing, though perhaps it is better in the original, but it’s good writing and I just found it very fascinating), he immediately noted the en media res factor, with Lee tossing into a well thought out, but very outre science fiction universe and society. Mathematics based around calendars can, apparently, affect reality in some way that winds up wreaking havoc on technology based around other ‘calendrical’ systems. It’s like if the presence of a vinyl record player caused your all your iTunes songs to either blow up your phone or play nothing but ‘Baby Shark’ at ear splitting volume.

He also commented on how this society placed an emphasis on the wearing of gloves and how that was also part of the society of the Radch Empire in the amazing novel, Ancillary Justice.

This got me thinking and I eventually decided that Frank Herbert’s Dune was the forerunner of all this. The culture and the social and technological mores of that universe were detailed, well thought out, and completely alien to us. While Ninefox Gambit is no Dune, I can see the lineage.

I was, at first, excited that Burroughs had returned to the original hero of the Mars (or Barsoom) stories: John Carter.

I am officially tired of reading long, unfinished series of fantasy/science fiction novels, with each and every novel being longer than the last. I think this one clocked in at 1300 odd pages. Are you better than War and Peace? No? Then consider tightening your narrative.

Ok.

It wasn’t that bad, I was just ‘over’ this fourth book in the so-called Stormlight Archive about five hundred pages short of finishing it. Which, before you ask, I did finish it.

Sanderson does still write some great action sequences. He has characters (one in particular) who can fly (that’s technically not what he’s doing, but close enough without explaining an unnecessarily complicated magical system) and does a good job at depicting combat in multiple dimensions.

At least, if the author is try to his word, this particular storyline will end with the next book.