I wrote a while ago about The Expanse, a series of sci-fi books that I really enjoyed. (I recently re-read the first one, and still found it to be pretty great.) I figured I would proceed onward with the works of James S.A. Corey, but, alas, that's not actually a dude; it's two dudes, and as far as I can tell, Daniel Abraham is the one that handles the heavy lifting of the prose-writing in those books. I figured I would catch up on the rest of the stuff he's written and, after dashing through the books in the Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin series, I'm fairly confident in saying this: shit's dope.

Now, understand that I'm not a big fantasy guy, outside of video game and RPG system plots. I've read Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, sure, and a few of those laughable Sword of Shannara books, but apart from that, magic and wizards hasn't really been the kind of thing that I reach out for when I’m looking to pick up a new book. (And yes, I’ve tried the Game of Thrones stuff enough to know that they’re really not for me.) Part of that is just due to the fact that I don’t read a lot of fiction anymore, but the sheer repetition of the same old orcs and wizards across many of the fantasy series that I’ve dipped into has been off-putting. It’s like Tolstoy wrote: “Happy families are like science fiction, which seems more vibrantly varied in the imaginative flights of its best practitioners, but unhappy families are like fantasy novels, which are for dorks.” I think it went something like that, anyway.

Anyway, Abraham’s two fantasy series are both pretty damn good. It’s possible I like them largely because they’re both magic-light fantasy settings; these aren’t D&D worlds where every village has a priest casting Cure Light Wounds when you get a stomachache. The Dagger books are purposefully set in an almost magic-free world, hundreds of years after the extinction of the dragons that ruled the world, and while magical swords and creepy priests eventually show up, the bulk of the plotlines are driven by believable characters without any unique abilities (unless you consider simply surviving in the world a unique ability; it’s a dangerous place). The bulk of the chaos in the story is driven by armies and generals, but, somewhat amazingly, considering the genre, most of the battle scenes are dispatched in five or ten pages. The war is what drives the story, and the characters fight, command, and survive that war, but rattling sabers aren’t what Abraham’s interested in; it’s the way all of the characters interlock throughout the years of conflict that he emphasizes, and he does pretty well at that.

The Long Price features a more core magical experience, with a dozen or so wizards (they’re called “poets,” but yeah, they’re basically wizards) with the ability to command god-spirits capable of reshaping the world with a whisper or a thought. I didn’t like this quite as well as I did the Dagger (in the sense that I finished the four books in perhaps a month as opposed to the marathon two-week session that got me through the other series), but they’re still really interesting and feature many of the strengths of the Dagger books, although the central characters feel a tad more muted than their companions in the other series. They also tend to be a bit shorter than the Dagger books, for those with limited time.

It’s difficult to sum up what I like about Abraham’s work. Nothing about it is especially moving or difficult; he just writes pageturners that consistently fail to annoy me in the way that a lot of fantasy does. His use of language is always readable with occasional bursts of elegance. His characters have internal lives that are interesting, and his treatment of their personal relationships feels restrained and tempered instead of overly passionate or overwrought like you’ll find in some of the more flowery writers working in popular genres. People fuck and fight and fall in love and kill each other without resorting to moonlit soliloquies or pages upon pages of exposition. The books can feel somewhat brisk as a result, but hey - it's not like every book needs to be Infinite Jest.

I dunno, I dig it. The Expanse books are better than either of these series, although that series also looks like it’s tending towards an open-ended nature that at this point makes it feel a little unfocused. I’m assuming that the next Dagger & Coin book will be the last one, just from the general momentum of The Widow’s House. It’ll be interesting to see how he wraps that one up. For a series that revolves around a plucky banker fighting against a brainwashed central government that wishes to control the world, there’s a little plot twist at the end of Widow’s House that makes me suspect that the entire work is some kind of meta-troll on economic libertarians, which would be amusing.

Anyway, read them if you like, or don’t! But read the Expanse books, for sure, even if the upcoming SyFy series looks fairly skippable, just based on its production values.