Reviews and Comments

It's a bit about writing. It's also a bit about King's childhood, how he first started writing, his drugs and alcohol problem (how I could I have missed that the Tommyknockers was about cocaine???) and about how many of the rules of writing are more like suggestions when you get down to it.

King is not gentle about his own prose style and admits he's written some stinkers and has been pretentious when trying to write to an outline... but that's why the book works. There's not a single page that you want to skip over, because everything he says is relatable and human.

There's also a horrifying story about his car accident in 1999, all the more so because King isn't telling it to scare us. It's plain and simple, moment after moment recollection. Hearing about the details makes it clear that he's lucky to be alive.

EDIT: Anyone notice that the reviews that give low ratings to this book or say that there's "nothing new" in the book also tend to have glaring grammatical errors and "bloated" paragraphs? Or complaints about it "not being a book about writing." Here's a hint: King does storytelling. That's how he works, that's what he does. He's never going to be Strunk and White; his C.V. is essentially him showing his methods by example. See what he does, and then do the same.

Don't like it? Think it's "genre fiction?" Never read any King before because it was too common? **** you. I have no time for you. You're like someone who orders a pepperoni pizza and then complains it came in a cardboard box and has melted cheese and meat slices on top. May you write books about frustrated grad students who dream of sleeping with frustrated housewifes of frustrated college professors.

...I am so goddamn tired of stew. And bandits. And mouthy students. And thinly disguised shaolin monks. And beautiful girls who serve mead at a tavern. And stew.

And a "pixie" speaking in rhyming couplets. RHYMING COUPLETS. I felt like I was reading a 70's DC comic.

And the sexy pixie sex maiden of sexville was a damn sight easier to stomach than seeing Kvothe turn into the Goddamn Batman when he runs across the (stew eating) bandits pretending to be part of his tribe. And of course he takes the two girls back, and the town thinks he's a hero, and he breaks some poor idiot's arm who calls the girl bad things and everyone LOVES him for doing that and the mayor gives him money afterwards because Kvothe is just the Awesomest.

And then he gets back to University and all his tales of wonder and legend come back to him and everyone at University thinks he's even more awesome than before and girls flock to him like he just doused himself in Axe Body Spray.

ARGH.

I am frankly amazed that Kvothe hasn't killed, maimed or simply lost someone he cares about yet through his actions. It should have happened by now. It's a little incredible that it hasn't. For all of Kvothe's power and wit, he's incredibly careless, and it's implied in the final pages of the book that he has no clue who Denna's patron is, even though it's screamingly obvious and appallingly clear what sort of consequences his actions provoke.

Anyways. It's an easy book to read, the language is simple and clear, and it's funny. Just please. Please. Make this man suffer more, I beg you. He needs it so very badly, and so do I.

The nice thing about this book is that there's very little fancy language. There's no strange names for things. The protagonist is a child prodigy, but this is set up from the very beginning, and it's made expressly clear that cleverness by itself is a double-edged sword that leads to overconfidence and arrogance. The fact that it keeps working for him makes me want to smack him, but as this sentiment is clearly reflected in the book itself, it makes it okay.

Speaking of which. You could call Kvothe a Mary Sue, but that's not quite right. He's not an Everyman, and he certainly has a personality of his own. It's more apropos to say he's what happens when you drop Richard Feynman into a medieval kingdom -- you spend half your time listening to a folky story about a car breaking down, and then two chapters in, you're floating down the river on a raft using a motor cobbled together out of the car's engine and a converter using the solar panels in his pocket calculator and some fresnel lenses he scraped out of the windshield and WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING.

Ahem.

So that's one thing. The other thing is that this book is a tease. A total, no-kidding tease. It will spend three pages telling you about the agony to come, and the hidden wonders of the ages. When you get to the story in question, you realize it's a wonder from his perspective, and a horror of embarrassment and awkwardness. This works especially well with the problems that Kvothe can't outsmart, such as women and his own feelings about them. Kvothe's agony over "the girl" is both painful and obvious to behold -- everyone tells him that she's bad news, and he can't help but agree with them. Yet he's a sentimental idiot with enough brains to berate himself for it.

One thing that the book does absolutely right is not telegraph the awesomeness of Kvothe. He has to earn his stripes. No-one hands down a prophecy and it's clear that while Kvothe is a prodigy, the Arcanum has seen his like before and doesn't treat him like the center of existence. The lack of portentousness is more of a refreshing change that I expected.

Except... well, it's portentous in retrospect. It just is. It's called the Kingkiller Chronicles, forchrissake. It's being related back by the protagonist, who the World in the present time clearly thinks is Just Plain Awesome. There are all sorts of hints dropped of the "unlucky future." And the World related is very clearly "the shire" -- it's bog standard fantasy kingdom land. It's got some wrinkles (people are notably kinder and more generous to the downtrodden than they are in other novels) but you would never mistake this for China Mieville or one of the other master world builders.

Still. It's worth reading, just for the experience of reading someone who knows how to tell a story in a straightforward fashion.

The bit I like most? The totally blase reaction the media has to the deaths of several superheroes. It's not just that they're not surprised. No, they have a betting pool on which supervillains are going to do the most damage. It's entertainment for the media, and it's gruesome in a way that tells you how little superheroes are thought of once they're gone. Superheroes are in it for the ego, or for the pure exercise of power, or simply to get laid. The world praises them, flatters them, and then dumps them when they're done.

And then there's the Superdead. The accepters of gifts. They may not be damned exactly (although many of them took exactly that deal) but they're heroes who are still realizing what sort of gift they received. It's a cold world.

Empowered and her friends stand out in this crowd not because they're powerful, but because they still have the power to care about people who "don't matter" and each other. It's an odd lesson to learn in between the bondage and the burlesque, but this series has a way of surprising every time.

It's a Greg Egan novel -- which means that half of it is an extrapolation of theoretical physics in another universe. Which all the characters understand right off the bat, or even worse, understand implicitly. Half the fun of Egan is working out what underlying physics model is responsible for half the odd things you see in the beginning of the book, but once the protagonist becomes a physicist and starts laboriously explaining it, it becomes fairly obvious that you're reading an arXiv paper.

The physics of this one is tricky, as initially I had thought that it was set in our universe with their planet under extreme time-shifted velocity relative to the rest of the system. It is not. It is different from beginning to end, it just looks deceptively similar. See the video here for more details.

So what's the rest of the novel like? The protagonist is a female in a species with a particularly nasty biological quirk, and has to deal with the sexism and cultural expectations in a world where females are not expected to rise to a position of strength. She has to deal with males who think her professional existence against nature, and resist the attractions of males for her duty. All like our own world, but not quite. Again, you can clearly see Egan's hand at work underneath the scenes, but the rigorous rational nature of the book and the protagonists ensure that there aren't too many surprises here.

All things considered, it's a fun read, but limited by the lack of personal fulfillment in the protagonist's life -- she is attracted to science, but defending herself against the society around her. With that in mind, it's at least workmanlike if not joyful.