The ending situation is neither entirely satisfactory nor entirely stable, so there may be room for more books, although I wouldn't count on it. One of my other favorite series, Cherryh's Foreigner series, started as a standalone novel, expanded to a three book series, is now up to 21 books. One can hope.
Maybe! If Novik were planning more books in this world, I expect she would've stretched out this plot instead of thinking up new ones, but she could have other ideas or could change her mind. And, she does know how to do a long series decently - at least the first five books of the Temeraire series were really good.
This series seems to have 2 elements that I don’t understand why readers like it so much. 1. Magic. Lots of magic. What’s wrong with normal human rules? 2. An Armageddon type feel, with the reader feeling like one of the survivors. Why are we attracted to Armageddon?
Ok. A boarding school. What about the boarding schools created to assimilate or annihilate native peoples? That’s actually a real tale that needs to be told and would satisfy some of the same elements while teaching empathy toward other humans.
You bring up some really interesting questions. In brief, I think that one of the big advantages of stories involving magic is that they give the protagonist more obvious agency or at least different sorts of agency. We can and should definitely tell stories about the American Indian boarding schools, but our protagonist isn't going to be able to make any steps toward fixing the problems him/herself. The problem's especially significant there because of the larger society's view of them, but I think it's present to a lesser degree in most real-world stories.
I haven't spent as much time thinking about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, but I wonder if a similar feeling might be there? Though maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, as I don't think the Scholomance series would count as apocalyptic; the sky-high mortality there has been ongoing for at least centuries rather than being acute.
I could expand on this a lot, and I was thinking of how to do so (which's one reason I didn't reply earlier!), but I realized it could actually work as a full-length post! So maybe in several weeks?
Fantastic! I would love to see a post on why we are attracted to stories involving apocalyptic elements (even if characters experience as a chronic rather than acute occurrence).
The apocalyptic element actually interests me more than the magic element.
Also, with my prior comment - Evan ….you review the book in an interesting and readable way. Just to clarify. My comment isn’t to criticize you in any way.
Hi, thanks for the review; I'm enjoying your particular narrative-dissection lens!
I have to disagree with your first (and main) critique: you write "Unfortunately, to be able to wrap up the central moral conflict in one book, she simplifies it from how it's been presented earlier. ..." As you note, this isn't simplification-by-forgetting or other authorial negligence (probably!) , it's simplification-for-plot resolution. Any path for resolving the more fundamental ethic questions (that I can think of, at least...) mess around with the tidiness of the finale. At the very least; they'd force it into overlength.
You can argue that this is precisely the author's job - to solve this, and tidily - but I strongly disagree. Fiction's job may be to raise and elaborate the issues of life, but it isn't to solve them. In fact, IMhO fictional solutions by their essential arena will (almost?) never translate to IRL. And when they do, it's either because they're simple, or in weirdly specific (and often fantastical*) scenarios.
And this issue is (imo?) a trend across fiction. For example one of the classics of "SciFi&F-with-deep-philosophy" is Dune, which explicitly engages with fundamental questions (eg heroism, societal viability, ecology, "god emperors" who rule immorally for moral goals...) - without answering any of them.
Yeah, we can argue about this, but I've never seen a coherent explanation of Dune's answers. And worse, there's a lot of "Hwi's was personified Good, so attracted to Leto II's basic Goodness" etc etc. I doubt Herbert believed all these simplistic conceptual interrelationships actually transfer to IRL solutions. But they make good fiction, (and arguably even deepen the philosophical implications of the questions raised).
* (hmm. maybe that's why the genre is so good for raising the issues... I mean this seriously.)
P.S. Have I successfully blocked my e-mail address from showing? I'm finding substack's interface unintuitive, and that's a priority for me.
Hey! You raise some very interesting points; I would've replied earlier, but I was on vacation. And no, your email address isn't showing.
I agree, most authors aren't going to resolve significant moral questions in a book or even a trilogy. And, they shouldn't try, or it's going to ring false for a lot of readers who see the solution isn't going to actually work in real life. Out of all the criticism of Heinlein, this's among the most valid: that he seemed to present things as much too settled. (One of the reasons I like his "Moon Has a Harsh Mistress" so much is the last chapter showing that the libertarian revolution didn't stay libertarian.)
But Novik, I think, fails here in a different way. She doesn't present an inadequate solution to the moral problem; she turns the moral problem into something else. The initial complicated scenario turns out to have just been a mask all the time. It really had a simple answer, if El had only known a year ago in Book One. If anything, I think this makes it worse, because the analogous real-world moral questions aren't just masking a core of immoral dark magic.
A better ending that didn't try to simplify the problem would've been much more complicated and messier. If Novik had done it honestly, and if she'd had her characters actually tackle the complicated problem they appeared to be facing, El would've ended with unclean hands and a lot of questions about her own actions. But I think that would've been a better ending, and it would've actually followed through on a lot of themes from Books One and Two.
The ending situation is neither entirely satisfactory nor entirely stable, so there may be room for more books, although I wouldn't count on it. One of my other favorite series, Cherryh's Foreigner series, started as a standalone novel, expanded to a three book series, is now up to 21 books. One can hope.
Maybe! If Novik were planning more books in this world, I expect she would've stretched out this plot instead of thinking up new ones, but she could have other ideas or could change her mind. And, she does know how to do a long series decently - at least the first five books of the Temeraire series were really good.
This series seems to have 2 elements that I don’t understand why readers like it so much. 1. Magic. Lots of magic. What’s wrong with normal human rules? 2. An Armageddon type feel, with the reader feeling like one of the survivors. Why are we attracted to Armageddon?
Ok. A boarding school. What about the boarding schools created to assimilate or annihilate native peoples? That’s actually a real tale that needs to be told and would satisfy some of the same elements while teaching empathy toward other humans.
You bring up some really interesting questions. In brief, I think that one of the big advantages of stories involving magic is that they give the protagonist more obvious agency or at least different sorts of agency. We can and should definitely tell stories about the American Indian boarding schools, but our protagonist isn't going to be able to make any steps toward fixing the problems him/herself. The problem's especially significant there because of the larger society's view of them, but I think it's present to a lesser degree in most real-world stories.
I haven't spent as much time thinking about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, but I wonder if a similar feeling might be there? Though maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, as I don't think the Scholomance series would count as apocalyptic; the sky-high mortality there has been ongoing for at least centuries rather than being acute.
I could expand on this a lot, and I was thinking of how to do so (which's one reason I didn't reply earlier!), but I realized it could actually work as a full-length post! So maybe in several weeks?
Fantastic! I would love to see a post on why we are attracted to stories involving apocalyptic elements (even if characters experience as a chronic rather than acute occurrence).
The apocalyptic element actually interests me more than the magic element.
Thanks.
Also, with my prior comment - Evan ….you review the book in an interesting and readable way. Just to clarify. My comment isn’t to criticize you in any way.
Hi, thanks for the review; I'm enjoying your particular narrative-dissection lens!
I have to disagree with your first (and main) critique: you write "Unfortunately, to be able to wrap up the central moral conflict in one book, she simplifies it from how it's been presented earlier. ..." As you note, this isn't simplification-by-forgetting or other authorial negligence (probably!) , it's simplification-for-plot resolution. Any path for resolving the more fundamental ethic questions (that I can think of, at least...) mess around with the tidiness of the finale. At the very least; they'd force it into overlength.
You can argue that this is precisely the author's job - to solve this, and tidily - but I strongly disagree. Fiction's job may be to raise and elaborate the issues of life, but it isn't to solve them. In fact, IMhO fictional solutions by their essential arena will (almost?) never translate to IRL. And when they do, it's either because they're simple, or in weirdly specific (and often fantastical*) scenarios.
And this issue is (imo?) a trend across fiction. For example one of the classics of "SciFi&F-with-deep-philosophy" is Dune, which explicitly engages with fundamental questions (eg heroism, societal viability, ecology, "god emperors" who rule immorally for moral goals...) - without answering any of them.
Yeah, we can argue about this, but I've never seen a coherent explanation of Dune's answers. And worse, there's a lot of "Hwi's was personified Good, so attracted to Leto II's basic Goodness" etc etc. I doubt Herbert believed all these simplistic conceptual interrelationships actually transfer to IRL solutions. But they make good fiction, (and arguably even deepen the philosophical implications of the questions raised).
* (hmm. maybe that's why the genre is so good for raising the issues... I mean this seriously.)
P.S. Have I successfully blocked my e-mail address from showing? I'm finding substack's interface unintuitive, and that's a priority for me.
Hey! You raise some very interesting points; I would've replied earlier, but I was on vacation. And no, your email address isn't showing.
I agree, most authors aren't going to resolve significant moral questions in a book or even a trilogy. And, they shouldn't try, or it's going to ring false for a lot of readers who see the solution isn't going to actually work in real life. Out of all the criticism of Heinlein, this's among the most valid: that he seemed to present things as much too settled. (One of the reasons I like his "Moon Has a Harsh Mistress" so much is the last chapter showing that the libertarian revolution didn't stay libertarian.)
But Novik, I think, fails here in a different way. She doesn't present an inadequate solution to the moral problem; she turns the moral problem into something else. The initial complicated scenario turns out to have just been a mask all the time. It really had a simple answer, if El had only known a year ago in Book One. If anything, I think this makes it worse, because the analogous real-world moral questions aren't just masking a core of immoral dark magic.
A better ending that didn't try to simplify the problem would've been much more complicated and messier. If Novik had done it honestly, and if she'd had her characters actually tackle the complicated problem they appeared to be facing, El would've ended with unclean hands and a lot of questions about her own actions. But I think that would've been a better ending, and it would've actually followed through on a lot of themes from Books One and Two.
Ah. What you're saying makes sense. Thanks.