The Caves of Mars is the flip side of my doublesided ‘Ace Double,’ which also includes The Space Mercenaries. Look, I’m just going put it out there: The Space Mercenaries is better. The Caves of Mars moves slowly, but interestingly through some world building and character/relationship background and building, but then speeds towards… I don’t know. An irritating and unconvincing deus ex machina style ending.

It begins with a trip to Mars that goes awry, with the hero, Ric, a space pilot and man of action, losing his arm checking out something in an ice cave for his friend, the nervous nelly scientist, Alan. They both used to be in a sort of love triangle with the improbably named scientist, Candi.

But they had happened upon some super awesome fungi that cure all your ills. But it is the clearly nefarious Doctor Krill who takes the lead on this stuff. Marketed as something called Martian Panacea or ‘M-P,’ the Law (capitalized) outlaws it out. As they say, when M-P is outlawed, only outlaws will have M-P. So there’s this plot where the disconsolate and suicidal Ric gets a secret message from Alan and sneaks into a secret M-P hideout in Mexico. Around this time, he figures out it’s a sort of cult and…

Well, let’s skip past all the bits where Doctor Krill, despite catching Ric and Candi en flagrante declicto – and I don’t mean the sexy kind, but the obviously seditious kind. But Krill basically says, ‘I’ve got my eye on you!’ and lets them go. Kind of.

Anyway, there is an alien intelligence left by a long forgotten race and Ric cunningly stops Krill’s plot to clone a race of martians to serve him by – and here’s where I’m not totally sure what actually happened – implanting his own DNA into the test tubes so that the reborn martians will now worship Ric as a god, which is, don’t get me wrong, better than Doctor Krill being worshipped as a god, but I’m not convinced this in an unalloyed good.

It had the hope of being a decent, second-rate space opera, but devolved into a not so decent, third rate space opera.

I read The Name of the Wind, I enjoyed it, so I went to the library to check out the sequel, which, except for being ridiculously long (look, people, not even Tolkien needed so many pages; you don’t need to write  door stop every freaking time), was generally better than the first book.

The main character, Kvothe, when we first hear about, is a legend who has done legendarily awesome things. Unfortunately, most of the first book was about him in school, which… I mean, that’s okay, and everything, but I really wanted to read about mythic adventures of this other, older Kvothe.

This book is still mostly about that younger Kvothe, but at least we get some hints of the future Kvothe, the super awesome magician.

But I have to go back to a point I’ve been harping on lately. All you fans of these books and of Harry Potter, did you know that someone who is a much better writer than either Rothfuss or Rowling wrote a book about the schooling and rise to greatness of a young magician, from childhood all the way to early manhood that is not only much better, but is also just a couple of hundred pages long? That’s right! You could have gotten an improved experience in only a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost! It’s called A Wizard of Earthsea and even if you read all the sequels (I think there are three), the total number of pages would be less than a single one of those Harry Potter free weights. And, not to belabor the point, but you would be reading books that are much, much better.

Okay, I’ll get off my high horse now.

It’s good. But it’s not that good.

I’d heard raves about it and reviews mentioning Arabian Nights style tales within tales. So a third person limited narrative and then a narrative by a chronicler (called ‘the Chronicler’) writing down the story of Kvothe the Kingkiller. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. It is like Heart of Darkness. You can make a lot of the fact that the narrator is actually a guy on the Thames listening to someone else’s story, but there’s really no need. Heart of Darkness is brilliant and you don’t need to make a lot of that minor narrative trick to realize that it’s great. More importantly, that narrative trick has only the tiniest amount to do with its greatness.

So Kvothe is an epic figure with an down to earth nature and it starts out very much the archetypal tale of the hero’s beginning: the tragedy and then growing up an orphan with vengeance, like a hard bead of acid, gnawing at his heart.

But then he goes to the University and… well, let’s just call it Harry Potter-esque. Granted, Kvothe is a more interesting character than Harry Potter, but then so are the flushings that follow a meal of authentic Gujarati cuisine, washed down with prune juice and Guiness and then followed with a dessert of candied tamarind. I can’t say this often enough, so I’ll say it again: if you want to read about a wizard school, you will never do better than to read LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. What LeGuin does that Rothfuss does not it maintain the same tone and style for the epic bits and the schoolyard bits. Rothfuss seems to switch between classic Tolkien and some kind of mid-century tale of bright young English schoolboys and their antics, only with a little magic.

But let’s not get carried away. This is a good book. If you like fantasy, this is better than 90% of what you’ve been reading. A lot better. But don’t get fooled into thinking it’s in the very top echelon.