So there are parts of it that I really like. The focus on dreams and the horror in them was super cool. I like hearing about the world and the different cultures and how different everyone speaks and dresses. I have liked the character development too, especially Perrin's. I actually felt like I related to his wolf stuff as a trans person.
But hooooooollllyyy shit how about a cis het sit down honey you need to fucking relax. Men and women aren't seperate fucking species you nonce. Also why can no one ever say what they mean?? In general but especially men and womens interactions are like halfway between a conversation and a discussion of platonic forms. I can't fucking handle it. It's bad enough that he can't seem to describe women without first establishing their relationship to men, and that he sees liking men as a moral thing, and everything I've mentioned so far.
But when Mr. Jordan decided to include dom/sub dynamics into THE FUCKING MAGIC SYSTEM I sincerely ragequit. FOR FUCKS SAKE. Not only that but a woman having to ask a man is treated like its a degrading, dishonorable thing, and the women who just sorta ask and want things like affection and sex are seen as strange and other! A woman flirted with a man you haven't even confessed to and you are contemplating kidnapping?? Murder??
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
anyway the books really are neat but I am 50 shades of gay and I don't think it's going to get any better. Maybe when sanderson takes over it does but those are just the last two books soooooooooooo. I guess I could read summaries and then go to the last two books but I could also just read another series, considering red rising or malazaan book of the fallen. or kingkiller chronicles.
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
if anyone does want to vouch for it feel free, I'm already feeling pretty stockholmy
The Commonweal, by Graydon Saunders, is a semi-self published series of novels that have garnered great acclaim from the Left/Left Liberal SF writing world. Noted Fans are Stross, MacLeod, etc.
It's a loosely connected series of books that take place in a 400 Year old Revolutionary Republic in a universe (possibly ours, history gets rewritten a lot and there may have been a total extinction event and reset.) Entirely dominated by sanity-lacking mage kings, established after one of the more isolationist God-Kings found out collective magic is stronger than individual magic, used it to make a clone army and magic railguns, killed all his rivals, and having done so disappeared, possibly back to an isolated mad wizard tower.
This posed a bit of an issue as now all the former subjects had to work out how to rule themselves. So they made a giant collective geas and bound themselves to it, and triple-bound the few captured Wizards sane enough to read the writing on the wall. The series mostly focuses on an isolated rural backwater, populated by a sub-species that hates mages even more than the normal population, and were already independent.
The main themes are a) How does a Socialist Republic in a hostile world get itself into the future b) What kind of people live there (and what kind of people are able to integrate with that society) c) What do you do when your socialist society has near-gods as ordinary citizens, like the previous ruler, who ruled in terror for 25,000 years as a giant spider (in order to put commoners at ease with a nice friendly non-lovecraftian form) and is now in the shape of a kindly grandma (Most people preferred the spider)
The main issue with the books, and why they're not with a major publishing house despite every SF editor on the planet liking them, are a severe lack of infodumps (some of the info above isn't really clear until 3 books in, though none of it are spoilers and you can infer it early on.) and a commitment to the bit of it being first person translations of a constructed revolutionary language with decimal time (a Decade is 10 days), gender-neutral language, and other idiosyncracies. In the words of one reviewer it "Makes a valiant attempt at being written in English". There's also a lot of civil engineering.
Here is Book One (which is a deconstruction of Military Fantasy and sets up the main series plot and Book Two (a deconstruction of magic school, with said magic school being a graduate program for "Chosen Ones" in a world where they tend to detonate and leave a large hole in the continental shelf before age 25)
Good books, but really hard to read. First time I've to use dictionaries in a long time.
Neat world building, but having the Captain be from a wished upon bloodline is trope-y.
Also a few more words to explain stuff and do fully sentences wouldn't hurt. Still excellent reads.
Yeah, though the Captain isn't from a bloodline, he's basically an Uruk-Hai and that gets fleshed out in...book 4 I think.
The prose does get a bit better after book 2, when he gets himself an editor unafraid to take the razor to his prose.
Yeah, it also feels as if in book 1 there are pages where friends did read over it and it is slightly more readable. Still enjoyable though. Had a look at book 2 and the difference does show. Doesn't feel as if it diminishes the style, though.
Real good books, but really hard to read.
Thanks! I read it as Commonwealth and that didn't give the correct results.