The Dark Defiles and a Land Fit For Heroes (SPOILERS)

[acantha]

There is another thread of Morgan's finale to his Land Fit For Heroes series already, but i figure a thread for the series as a whole is probably appropriate now.

okay.

preface: i enjoyed both of the prior two books, but got really excited about the series' lore. i loved the atmosphere and the worldbuilding and that may be why this last book pissed me off so much. that said, i do believe the book is just plain bad even if you don't approach it the way i did.

Lets start with the problems:

1. the meager explanation of the grey places, the ancient war, etc in general feels rushed, and its hard for me to imagine anyone (regardless of their familiarity with the kovac's connection) being satisfied with it. it really comes across like morgan was pressured, either by himself or external forces, to keep the series to a trilogy instead of the 4 books it feels like it should have been.

2. we are given some tantalizing new stuff about the kiriath! who then remain otherwise totally unexplored, except for a passing reference in the dwenda exposition. oh yeah...

3. the dwenda backstory is revealed as being pathetically mundane, seemingly only so that Ringil can use it to embarrass them in a crucial moment

4. the explanation of the Book Keepers, the talons of the sun, etc is basically just a different set of meaningless metaphory titles. no real explanation here.

5. the dark court are further teased as being the ahn foi, aka the envoys, BUT WE GET NOTHING about them. gil chats with firfadar, takavatch winks at him, but really NOTHING EVER GETS SAID. in the end we don't even really know what they wanted.

6. the entire first half of the book at a minimum is faffing about in thinly veiled scotland analog doing NOTHING USEFUL. it could have been compressed down to two or three chapters, leaving more room for the really interesting stuff.

7. coda chapter 1 is downright offensive and Morgan should be embarrassed for putting it in print. especially given all the issues with Arceth's agency in the prior books, she finally gets a bit back in this one, only to have it implied she's going to throw it away and let a cabal of men put her on the throne because Jhiral rapes Imrana.

8. Gil's ending is vague and... maybe a happy ending? or maybe he's locked out of the world for all time? WHO KNOWS? its a shitty end.

TDD is a total failure at concluding this series, and it feels totally avoidable. Had the series been explicitly fantasy, or even not explicitly the far flung future of the Kovacs novels, i think that a lot of the problems would not have been so huge. A lot of the backstory could have been fantasy handwaved, because people would have been paying much less attention to it, but he spends three whole books building up this stuff, then does NOTHING WITH IT. While TDD doesn't offer any more firm evidence or exposition to confirm the setting as being deeply post-kovacs (other than takavach saying gil reminds him of someone WINK WINK GET IT GUYS HAHAHA), neither does do ANYTHING to disabuse the reader of it.

tl;dr The Dark Defiles is, sadly, just not good. it is the first of Morgan's books i think is a legitimate flop. it feels rushed, forced, honestly kind of ruins the prior two for me. its even more painful if you read his Kovacs stuff and got excited about the connections that seemed to exist between the two series.

[peterbound]

Really?

Man, I was hoping for some Kovacs action and clarification into the mythos.

Pisses me off.

[Darth Richard II]

Really?

Man, I was hoping for some Kovacs action and clarification into the mythos.

Pisses me off.

I can't tell if your being sarcastic or not anymore. :P

[Calibandar]

That doesn't seem sarcastic to me, it's what I would hope for as well.

Unfortunate to hear the book was such a downer, though of course it's only 1 person saying so , so far.

[Darth Richard II]

Well goodreads is goodreads, but the reviews over there are so far overwhelmingly positive.

[Yersinia]

Still gathering my thoughts about the story, but I'll say that I was a little distracted by the typos. Several chapters had garbled text at the beginning, and there was a bit of variation in the spelling of a certain black mage's name.

None of these were show stoppers, but I got the general impression that the book hadn't been given quite the attention that it deserved, somewhere in the publishing process.

Did anyone who read something other than the US Kindle version notice this stuff?

[shortstark]

A bit disappointed myself, like the OP said a lot wasnt explained , still dont know what the talons of the suns is, confused about the bookkeepers, thought archeth arc in the steppes was totally unnecessary promise to the dragonbane notwithstanding, i dunno but it seems as if ringil committed suicide by dwenda, we last saw him about to begin combat with thousands of them, then the bit with hjels birth suggest he survived it..phew, gonna stew for a while and do a reread, hopefully some matters will be clearer then.. yeah, at one point he had a sword attached to his palm, then he is fighting with ravensfriend, what the fuck happened to the changelings sword that was dangling from his palm earlier?

[Yersinia]

A bit disappointed myself, like the OP said a lot wasnt explained , still dont know what the talons of the suns is, confused about the bookkeepers, thought archeth arc in the steppes was totally unnecessary promise to the dragonbane notwithstanding, i dunno but it seems as if ringil committed suicide by dwenda, we last saw him about to begin combat with thousands of them, then the bit with hjels birth suggest he survived it..phew, gonna stew for a while and do a reread, hopefully some matters will be clearer then.. yeah, at one point he had a sword attached to his palm, then he is fighting with ravensfriend, what the fuck happened to the changelings sword that was dangling from his palm earlier?

I assumed that Ringil went out Butch and Sundance-style fighting an army of dwenda, but his consciousness was stored in the Ravensfriend. Later (earlier?) Dakovash transferred it to baby Hjel, which certainly gives an interesting extra layer to Gil and Hjel's relationship. The scenes with the two of them were always my favorites anyway.

Hjel was, I guess, the man that Ringil could've been if he'd lived in a kinder, gentler place. I did, however, wonder what was the point of transferring an adult's consciousness into an infant, if he couldn't remember who he really was, with the exception of an occasional martial metaphor.

I also wondered what happened to the Changeling's sword. It was loose. Maybe it just sorta fell out.

[JoannaL]

I enjoyed this book a lot (best of the three) and thought it was a fit and satisfying conclusion to the story of our main characters. It explained also the the grey places and the dwenda .

Yes, the kiriath stuff/helmsmen/living steel is not explained enough (and what is the void?). But I can live with this. The focus was on the three heroes, there stories ended great. We get a exceptional dragon fight, we get a ravensfriend-compatible gripping ending for Ringil and a rising of Arceth to become something more useful.

I left this "land fit for heros" with the feeling that after all this grimdark dirt mess there is still a reason for living and fighting even there.

[Yersinia]

Now that I've had some time to think about it:

While I understand the OP's objections and have my own mixed feelings about the resolution, I enjoyed the book overall and really loved the series as a whole. I'd become so attached to these characters that it was difficult to say goodbye to them.

It was also a bit painful to come to the conclusion that my favorite character had really gone over the edge and that it might be better for all involved if he were put down (not that I didn't still love him). With heroes like this, who needs villains, right?

One nagging question: How did Ringil know that he needed to return to Ornley under cover of fog if he had no idea what had happened during his absence?

I half expected the whole thing to turn out to be some kind of whimsical Quellist training sim, except that the "players" were taking it so damn seriously. Some of the terminology used at the end seems to hint at a virtual environment.

I really hope that Richard decides to write more fantasy someday, because this was what really sucked me in. Five minutes after finishing The Cold Commands, I was reading Altered Carbon, hoping to scratch that itch a bit more.

[The Reckoner]

I enjoyed the backstory for the Aldrain and the Grey Places, and the journey's end.

[peterbound]

So wait, are we all in agreement on the fact that it takes place in the same universe?

[Darth Richard II]

Didn't he explicitly say so?

[Yersinia]

If it's not the same universe, then I got all teary-eyed thinking about the scene at the end of Woken Furies and feeling sorry for this crazy Dark Court motherfucker for no reason at all. So... I'm just going to assume that it is.

[Brandon Stark]

I just assumed at the point of Ahn-Foi the cat was out of the bag.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1. I have been assuming that it is the same universe.

2. Though I did think that some of the descriptions were rushed, I thought some of the looseness in the description was because in a sense we are viewing this world from the point of view of someone in it, and they simply do not have the vocabulary or the understanding to process a super high-tech world. That actually didn't bother me so much because it explores the boundary between technology and magic.

3. I assumed that the bookkeeper (and maybe others) were non-human in origin, but Kiriath and Dwenda were human. Helmsmen are obviously powerful AI. I am playing with the idea that the glyphs are simply programming codes of some kind (and then I went down a Matrix-y rabbithole, which I decided was too Alice in Wonderland anyhow (to extend the metaphor) - in case you are curious the rabbithole involved dreams of Kovacs consciousness when disembodied and that the various characters are in a sense shades of the souls belonging to bodies he inhabited).

4. I thought it was less than clear what Archeth would do when she got back. He did set up the Shakesperian trope of "greatness thrust upon her". I actually liked that bit because it plays with ideas of free will.

5. Ancient conflict seemed pretty obviously nuclear given the "wastes".

[buff daddy]

^^^^ 4. I think she's gonna rip the sleazebag emperor a new asshole, probably have to take on the whole god-emperess role after.

Anyway, I just finished this last night, thought it was great. I never read the Kovacs books so there were no expectations for me there. A lot of the background lore I'm not totally clear on but that's cuz a lot of that stuff was towards the end and by that point I'm reading fast and wanna finish. A lot of what Mlle Zabzie wrote up above me there makes sense though. I was bummed when Egar bit it early in book 2, loved that dude and he & Archeth had great chemistry. His death was awesome though, and Archeth interacting with more of his barbarian tribesmen, plus coming into her own at the same time, lessened the blow.

[blc]

Hello all

First post and all that, and it's a bit of a long one I'm afraid!

I've just finished reading The Dark Defiles, and well... we'll get to my thoughts soon enough.

DISCLAIMER: I am a massive... MASSIVE fan of the Kovacs novels and know them like the back of my hand.

For me, A Land Fit For Heroes is inextricably tied to the Kovacs universe, so here's a primer on those three books for those that haven't read them. Feel free to skip this part of you have (or couldn't care less ;) ) - I warn you I ended up writing a lot more than I planned to!

BACK STORY: Humans eventually get their ass to Mars and after a few decades grubbing about they find ruins and still working technology constructed by a hyper-intelligent race thousands and thousands of years ago. Humans call these beings "Martians", even though it's never clear whether these beings actually originated on Mars. Human technological evolution goes into overdrive, piggy-backing on the achievements of the Martians. We travel to, terraform, and colonise distant planets orbiting distant stars. We've worked out how to digitise the human mind and store it in a small metal cylinder implanted at the base of the spine (called a "stack"). Because the human mind can be digitised, it can be stored and transmitted digitally - even between planets (needlecasting). This allows humans the ability to swap bodies (called "sleeves") at will, and organic damage/failure no longer means an actual death. Unless you happen to be in poverty (which is quite common) and therefore can't afford a new sleeve, or your stack is destroyed and you don't have remote backup. If you have enough money, you can even clone your sleeves and carry on living your life in the same body, over and over again. But this ain't no Star Trek Federation style future: despite all the cool toys, we're still greedy, violent, capricious, selfish little chimps wearing shoes. Though humans grew out of physically flinging poo at each other, they never quite got past metaphorically throwing poo at each other.

ALTERED CARBON: Some super-rich dude with unlimited cloned sleeves at his disposal and nearly three and a half centuries of life under his belt wakes up one day to find himself dead. Physical death is no impediment to someone with so much money; he's revived into a fresh clone and starts demanding answers beyond the convenient suicide conclusion the police have reached. He plucks an ex-Envoy called Takeshi Kovacs from his prison sentence as a disembodied digitsed human on distant planet (Harlan's World) and basically forces him into investigating what he assumes is his murder. Turns out he did actually kill himself to forget some messy business with prostitutes and the murder thereof, but we get to see Kovacs' bloody and brutal means of finding this out. The Envoy corps was a training program for super spies. Uber spies, you might say. Wherever the rule of the UN Protectorate was threatened, or you needed some crack tech-ninja troops, the Envoys were deployed. They're trained in techniques such as persuasion, subterfuge, combat, tech wizardy, deep-cover, etc, to a degree that borders on the supernatural. They could sell sand in the Sahara and convince you that it will make you rich. Also, they have full memory recall, because... because of reasons. Anyhoo. Despite being manipulated by people with power and money, and subsequently deeply embarassing and/or killing his manipulators, Kovacs uncovers the truth and is shipped back to Harlan's World with a fat little pay off waiting for him.

BROKEN ANGELS: Takeshi Kovacs is fighting in an elite mercenary unit on a little mudball world called Sanction IV. The locals, owing nominal allegiance to a political ideology called Quellism, are pissed and are rebelling against their UN Protectorate overlords. The Protectorate hires this merc unit on the sly to fight on their behalf so that other planets don't find out about the rebellion and decide to follow suit. Kovacs was actually sent by neo-Quellists on his home world to turn the tide against the Protectorate, but he switched sides halfway through because it turns out that both sides are full of shit - might as well be on the side that's going to win and the side that's going to pay him. Of course we don't find out this twist until the end of the book... While recovering from some nasty attack in a hospital ship a little birdie suggests a way out of the war. See, he knows someone who's discovered the biggest archaeological find ever since the history of ever: an actual, functioning, working Martian warship which has a faster-than-light drive... Ought to be enough to buy your way out of anything - all we gotta do is go claim it. With the help of a brutal little upstart corporation, off they go to find and claim this warship with a little band of spec-ops mercs. The warship is through a mystical portal that can instantly transport stuff from one side of the star system to the other, but it turns out it's locked into a millenia-old parking orbit and is periodically exchanging fire with an unknown aggressor (an aggressor which may have been the downfall of the Martians). These weapons are pretty nasty: fired at faster than light speeds and almost drive the puny humans screaming insane as they conjure up images or ghosts (I never worked out which) of the Martians in their death-throes a millenia or two ago. Eventually Kovacs makes it back to Sanction IV, cashes in and buggers off out of the Sanction star system with a nice tidy pile of money.

WOKEN FURIES: Kovacs is back on his homeworld, Harlan's World, back to criminal ways and has a particularly bloody and vengeful beef with a local religious sect. Ex-Envoys aren't allowed to serve governmental posts and no one trusts them enough to employ them in any serious capacity. Pretty much the only way they can make money is crime - a career which Kovacs engaged in pretty much as soon as he left the Envoys (before the start of Altered Carbon) - or mercenary work. Putting his little quest on hiatus he falls in with a small band of mercs (yes, more mercs), known as deComs, whose mandate is to destroy semi-intelligent killing machines for a living. A few hundred years ago on Harlan's World there was a political uprising called the Unsettlement, in which Quellcrist Falconer and her Quellist followers rebelled against the ruling Harlan dynasty. Of course they were eventually crushed and scattered, but not before both sides deployed some pretty nasty kit - artificially intelligent killing machines, which have now rendered one of the major continents uninhabitable. Nominally, that's the mission the deCom crews have: take down these machines - mimints - and get paid by the government for it, reclaim New Hokkaido for humans. Not much land on Harlan's World y'see and they don't go up high very much because of the ancient orbital Martian battle platforms: anything that gets more than 800 feet up gets vaporised by "angelfire" from the orbitals. During an encounter with the mimints the commander of the deCom crew, Sylvie Oshima, falls ill - some kind of electronic weapon, it's assumed. The engagement falls apart and everyone beats a hasty retreat. deCom commanders have computer systems implanted into their heads so that they can fight electronically as well as with actual guns - at one point it's mentioned that the average deCom head has more processing power wired to their brain than the central databanks of most large cities. Sylvie recovers, but then starts acting as if she's a different person - at times she's Sylvie, but at times she claims to be Quellcrist Falconer. SHOCK! Can't be! She's long dead - killed by angelfire hundreds of years ago! By the end of the book we discover that, yes, this is actually Quellcrist Falconer co-habiting in the body of Sylvie Oshima. More specifically, Falconer was downloaded into Sylvie's command systems - from a Martian orbital. Sylvie explains: they're not actually battle platforms, they're virtual environments and there are Martians in there - angelfire doesn't destroy, it digitises people and uploads them into virtual. The orbitals were getting a bit full - all those humans lanced by angelfire, slowly going insane in an alien virtuality - so they started downloading humans into systems they thought could handle a digitised human... such as the vast processing power in a deCom command head. The epilogue says that Sylvie and Quellcrist Falconer are learning to talk to the orbitals, and pretty soon they'll be able to have a proper "Unsettlement" this time - finish the job started centuries ago.

Okay... Deep breath... Back to A Land Fit For Heroes... Take another deep breath...

It's clear that the Dark Court/Sky Dwellers were Envoys, ex-Envoys, or people they recruited, and were serving the rebellious Quellist cause. It's also pretty clear that the rebellion on Harlan's World eventually moved to Earth - why else would the Ahn-Foi have "murdered" the moon unless they were fighting a pretty nasty battle? It's also clear that they brought some pretty nasty weapons with them - see aforementioned "murdering" of the moon. Given the connection running through Broken Angels and into Woken Furies - in Kovacs' words, "Fucking Sanction IV..." - it's entirely possible that some of the weapons deployed in this battle were Martian in origin, although it's not clear whether these were deployed by the Ahn-Foi or the Protectorate. The lurid displays at the end of Woken Furies would certainly fit with some of the weirdness in both Gil's world and the Grey Places; but did the Ahn-Foi with their newfound command of Martian systems commandeer the Martian battleship or did the Protectorate bring it to Earth to defend themselves?

I've no doubt that Martian tech was involved in the assault on Earth. The point of the Envoy corps was so that the protectorate had a core of battle-hardened and battle-ready supersoldiers/superspies that they could deploy needlecast at the slightest hint of a threat to their power base; sending ships in the "traditional" way would take far too long, since humans lacked any kind of FTL capability. In Woken Furies the discoveries and tech coming out of the Martian battleship research seem confined to the advanced computer systems deployed by deCom - no mention of FTL travel. By the time the Ahn-Foi got to Earth at sub-light speeds the Protectorate would have doubtless heard about Harlan's World and prepared/retaliated accordingly.

Sadly, this connection to the Kovacs world completely overshadowed the story for me. I want to know who the Kiriath are, where they came from and why they were so much more advanced than humans of the time - are they connected to the Ahn-Foi or the ancient war? What are the Helmsmen and the Warhelms - are they simply the AIs they seem to be or are they something... else...? Just what exactly are the Grey Places? How does all of this fit with what I know about Kovacs' world? What the hell are the Book Keepers? Is the alien race that the Martians were fighting in Broken Angels involved in any way? We got some odd hand-waving explanation about the dwenda but to me it felt half-arsed to me. Super-modified/enhanced humans? Yeah, I can believe that - plenty of mental and genetic manipulation in Kovacs' world, after all. Super-modified/enhanced humans who forgot they were humans, gained supernatural eldritch powers to enslave humans and have the ability to wink in and out of "normal" existance? That's going to take a little more explaining.

While we're on the subject of explaining, just who exactly are the rest of the Dark Court/Sky Dwellers? Why the hell is Kovacs posing as a god to humans when he has such revulsion for religion? (That's a bit of an understatement btw - religion is a major subplot in Woken Furies, and plays a pivotal part in Altered Carbon) Are the Ahn-Foi characters that I already know? Three of them are easy:

Dakovash/Takovach = Takeshi Kovacs

Firfirdar/Vividar = Virgina Vidaura (Tak's Envoy trainer, also an ex-Envoy in Woken Furies)

Kwelgris = Quellcrist Falconer (the "wolf" connection is there in the lupine descriptions that Morgan often uses for Sylvie Oshima, a body that Falconer once inhabited)

"Firfirdar" had me scratching my head in vague recollection at first, but when Hjel called her "Vividar" it was almost as much of a give-away as "Ahn-Foi". But who are the rest? Who's Hoiran/Urann? He seems to be the nominal leader of the Ahn-Dark-Sky-Foi and is - at least in League mythology - wedded to Firfirdar. Kovacs and Vidaura would have brooked no superior giving them orders, and the only person that Vidaura had any kind of serious relationship with (at least that we're told about) was Jack Soul Brasil. Brasil was killed during the events of Woken Furies - Real Death, that is: his stack was burned out, so he had well and truly bought the farm. She'd shagged Kovacs a few times - before and after Brasil snuffed it - but it wasn't anything that would amount to a wedding.

Because of the connection to the Kovacs world there are too many unanswered questions for me. If Morgan had not made the connection and instead explained it with "BECAUSE MAGIC, THAT'S WHY" then I'd have had no problems with that. I can't look past that connection though: I want to know the sequence of events AFTER Woken Furies that led to the birth of the civilisation now present on Earth. IS this actually Earth in the first place, or is this some kind of elaborate virtuality? If that's the case then is it tied in to the Martial orbitals?

It's not all bad though; there were some excellent fight scenes and I enjoyed watching Archeth "find herself", as it were. It's a bit of a shame that Egar was killed off - as a character he was great fun - but I'm not sure how it could have ended up any other way: he got bored on the steppe and he was effectively driven out of Yhelteth - what else was left for him? The Warhelm vs. Helmsman thing was a nice little addition, and it was good to see one of these ancient Kiriath... things... being slightly less cryptic for once. I buy the fact that the Warhelms - and possibly the Helmsmen - are AIs, but I'm not so sure that an AI would describe itself as being "summoned from the void" - do they know they're AI or are they programmed in such a way that they cannot know? I was sort of hoping that, through the machinations of the forces that had manipulated them, Archeth and Ringil would be forced to face each other in a battle for the Yhelteth throne. But I suppose that would be a little formulaic and cliched.

I liked the series, but for me The Dark Defiles was not an ending which had me squealing with delight in the way that Woken Furies did. (Actually it didn't quite happen like that at first - I read Woken Furies before the other two books, really bloody liked it, read the other two books, then read Woken Furies again, and THEN squealed with delight...) No doubt I'll read A Land Fit For Heroes again though.

[kuenjato]

I liked the series, but for me The Dark Defiles was not an ending which had me squealing with delight in the way that Woken Furies did. (Actually it didn't quite happen like that at first - I read Woken Furies before the other two books, really bloody liked it, read the other two books, then read Woken Furies again, and THEN squealed with delight...) No doubt I'll read A Land Fit For Heroes again though.

I read it one go over the past couple months - Kovacs novels followed by this trilogy (just finished TDD). I thought the Kovacs novels impressive but also flawed, increasing as the series went. As for this--I enjoyed it, but the Kovacs stuff felt like easter eggs and, aside from one or two points, The Dark Defiles felt like book 3 of a 4 or 5 book series (just as The Cold Commands felt like a middle-period Joran book in terms of pacing and coherency). While I understand that Morgan was trying to undermine reader expectations (as he only reminded us of it a half-dozen times or so), I have to admit growing bored with segments of this last book, the generally good writing notwithstanding.

[Winter's Knight]

Re: Arceth. My understanding is that her lover was impregnated by the emperor, which'd allow her to kill him and take over as regent for the time being. The Helmsman tells Gil as much-that she'd be regent first and eventually empress.