{"id":334,"date":"2008-12-21T11:36:01","date_gmt":"2008-12-21T02:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/21\/review-of-heroes-die-blade-of-tyshalle-and-caine-black-knife\/"},"modified":"2008-12-21T11:36:01","modified_gmt":"2008-12-21T02:36:01","slug":"review-of-heroes-die-blade-of-tyshalle-and-caine-black-knife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/21\/review-of-heroes-die-blade-of-tyshalle-and-caine-black-knife\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Heroes Die, Blade of Tyshalle, and Caine Black Knife"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"floatleft\">\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/whatever.scalzi.com\/2008\/10\/14\/tgbstover\/\">John Scalzi&#8217;s &#8220;Big Idea&#8221; on Matthew Stover&#8217;s Caine series<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/mattstover.blogspot.com\/\">Matthew Stover&#8217;s blog<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=daveva-20&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0345421450&#038;md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=daveva-20&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0345421434&#038;md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=daveva-20&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0345455878&#038;md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>A while back I subscribed to <a href=\"http:\/\/whatever.scalzi.com\/\">John Scalzi&#8217;s &#8220;Whatever&#8221; blog<\/a> and I saw his <a href=\"http:\/\/whatever.scalzi.com\/2008\/10\/14\/tgbstover\/\">Big Idea column on Matthew Stover&#8217;s new Caine Black Knife book<\/a>.  I read the first bit of the column, but then quit because it sounded interesting and I didn&#8217;t want to have the books ruined for me.  If you plan on getting the books my suggestion is to go in cold, because it is quite a ride when you don&#8217;t know what is coming. <\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>What really surprised me is that I went in thinking that these were fantasy books.  It says right on the cover &#8220;A Fantasy Novel&#8221;, which I thought was pretty strange.  What sort of novel needs to proclaim on the cover what it is?  Usually these categorizations are fairly straightfoward and you don&#8217;t need to try to convince the readers what kind of book you are.  (Well, that probably isn&#8217;t true, but just from a straight consumer point of view, I hadn&#8217;t seen something like that before.) <\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>When I got the first book &#8211; available from Amazon Japan! &#8211; I put it on my pile of books and eventually got around to starting it.  I read the back cover, and started to get a bit depressed: according to the back of the book, this was actually a sci-fi \/ fantasy combo type book that uses a device that I&#8217;ve really just grown sick of lately: the concept of alternate worlds.  This concept is all over the place, I probably first ran into with Piers Anthony&#8217;s Xanth series when I was a kid, and then <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covenant,_the_Unbeliever\">the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant<\/a> (I didn&#8217;t realize that that series was still ongoing) and it pops up all over the place really.  I&#8217;m just sick of it.  I don&#8217;t like this idea of a real world and a fantasy world.  If you are going to do alternate worlds, I have a hard time seeing how you can do it better than <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nine_Princes_in_Amber\">Roger Zelazny<\/a> and maybe I&#8217;m just tiring of the whole idea.  It seems to be popping up in video games a lot too, from Zelda the Twilight Princess to the more recent Metroid game and a whole bunch of Silent Hill games (but I haven&#8217;t played many games lately, so I&#8217;m just getting that from reviews and other stuff I see on the web.)<\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>I would rather have a story in a well-developed world rather than one that marginalizes one world or the other, or is a ridiculous escapist fantasy about escaping a boring real life and going into some exciting alternate reality (.hack and persona are two more that annoy me in that way.)<\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>So I was really expecting to hate Heroes Die.  I expected that I would put it down after ten pages, and regret buying.<\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>I was wrong.  The book completely sucked me in.  I don&#8217;t know if it was the characters, which are great, or the subtle undertones (or not-so-subtle as the case may be) of existential philosophy and commentary on totalitarian regimes and the &#8220;bread and circus&#8221; trap, but I really, really enjoyed these novels.  I had to go out of my to track down a copy of Blade of Tyshalle, which was hard for me to get in Japan but one of the Amazon.com third party merchants shipped it to me no problem ($25 for a paperback though, a bit expensive!) and luckily Caine Black Knife is also available on the Amazon Japan site.  I went through each of these books in about a week, reading snatches here and there.  I think I even got my wife angry at me once because I pulled the book out while we were waiting for a train, which apparently wasn&#8217;t the correct ending for an otherwise romantic evening seeing the movie Wall-E. <\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>I just finished reading &#8220;Caine Black Knife&#8221; three days ago and I&#8217;m disappointed that the second volume isn&#8217;t out yet.  I hope that it will be out soon, but knowing how these things go it will be a while.<\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>The good news is that it looks like &#8220;Heroes Die&#8221; and &#8220;The Blade of Tyshalle&#8221; will be put out in ebook form soon &#8211; I am looking forward to that so I can add them to my growing ebook collection so re-reads can be done on my ebook reader, currently <iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=daveva-20&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=B001GB87EI&#038;md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe> but I&#8217;m hoping to get <iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=daveva-20&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=B000FI73MA&#038;md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe> if they ever release a version for Japan.  I keep asking the digital contents guys if that will happen, but they haven&#8217;t given me a straight answer yet.  \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><P><\/p>\n<p>So, in summary: go and buy Heroes Die and the other two Caine books.  They are really great.  I should mention that they are really violent, and have some philosophical discussions about free will and the nature of man.  The violence makes those sections a bit easier to bear for some people, I&#8217;m sure.  \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Scalzi&#8217;s &#8220;Big Idea&#8221; on Matthew Stover&#8217;s Caine series Matthew Stover&#8217;s blog A while back I subscribed to John Scalzi&#8217;s &#8220;Whatever&#8221; blog and I saw his Big Idea column on Matthew Stover&#8217;s new Caine Black Knife book. I read the first bit of the column, but then quit because it sounded interesting and I didn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}