While I enjoy epic fantasy, the kinds of stories where the fate of the world hangs in the balance, it is refreshing to read stories that are smaller in scope. The focus is still on the mountains, but the vista would be diminished if the sun weren’t falling in just that perfect way. The mountains are grand in any light, but by the light of the dawn they are rendered especially gorgeous: that is the language of Swordspoint.
Its imagery, descriptions, and language are masterful without becoming their own entity, existing instead on the very edge of the reader’s consciousness, like the sun creating a silhouette of something beautiful, and in the process creating a superior work of art. If there is a middle ground between the transparent prose that Sanderson helped popularize, and the lyrical, almost poetic prose of someone like Rothfuss, that is where Swordspoint dwells.
Even when I sat down to open Swordspoint, I was cautious, approaching it like someone poking an injured monster to see if it is still alive, anticipating that I would again read through a fantasy novel and finish thinking that it was just okay, and when does the next Stormlightbook come out, and why won’t Rothfuss ever finish the Kingkiller Chronicle? Less than a page of Swordspoint was all that was required to chase away my doubts and hesitations and any thoughts of other fantasy stories, because it was that beautiful. After all, what is fiction but a mirror to the larger story of human history? Or perhaps a magnifying glass would be a more apt piece of glassware.Īll of which is to say that, while I knew that I wanted my next few reads to be fiction, I harbored a certain degree of trepidation as I made my selections. Dan Carlin from Hardcore History says that history ruins fiction for him, and I can begin to understand his point. I don’t know how much of this is related to the simple difficulty of statistics, according to which the chances of selecting one of the necessarily smaller number of excellent books will be less than the probability of selecting from the enormously larger quantity of mediocre novels, and how much it is the result of my evolving tastes.
Outside of a handful of standby authors I read consistently, when I pick up a new fantasy or science fiction book I am frequently disappointed. Part of why I read so much nonfiction and history these days is because it seems increasingly difficult to find really good speculative fiction.
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