Guy Gavriel Kay

[williamjm]

18 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Finished Under Heaven yesterday.  Solid read.

Where to go next for GGK?  Tigana I ve read as well.  

Sounds like Finovar Tapestry is a trilogy and everything else is only Easter egg sort of connected?

The Sarantine Mosaic is a duology, the only other series he's done.

Ysabel also has a strong connection to the Fionavar books. Other than that the order of reading isn't too important in terms of plot.

I think Lions is a good suggestions for the next book, although the Sarantine Mosaic and A Song for Arbonne could be other good alternatives.

[Jaxom 1974]

On 10/19/2022 at 9:34 PM, mcbigski said:

Finished Under Heaven yesterday.  Solid read.

Where to go next for GGK?  Tigana I ve read as well.  

Sounds like Finovar Tapestry is a trilogy and everything else is only Easter egg sort of connected?

Just reiterating what others said. Lions.  

18 hours ago, Ran said:

(The Last Light of the Sun, Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago, and All the Seas of the World).

Children, Brightness, and Seas are a loose trilogy, but all can be read independently. Brightness is absolutely in the discussion for, "which book could be better than Lions"...

[polishgenius]

Finally read All the Seas of the World. Liked it, as I expected to, but I've been finding all of Kay's novels since River of Stars a bit scattershot in their pacing and focus, and this was no exception. 

 

Think there are three reasons for that tbh: 

(gonna spoiler tag this partly for length and partly to keep my technical kvetching hidden from anyone who isn't interested. There are spoilers for all three, but I'm keeping them as vague as possible)

Spoiler

The first applies to all four: he's grown a fascination with the 'smaller' stories that intersect his big stories, and while it can be interesting to read in the moment, it essentially sees him get distracted. I don't mind an aside, or a vignette-filled story, but I don't think it's Kay's strength- and because he's doing so many of them but keeping the books the same length, the 'main' plot has less time devoted to it. 

 

The second applies to all three of the Fall of Sarantium trilogy, in separate ways: Kay loves telling stories of huge, key turning points in history (real, imagined or sped-up). His best books, imo, tend to hang on those turning points- the key scenes that we all remember tend to either be that moment themselves, or earlier moments that push the characters and plot in the necessary direction. The issue here is that the key turning point of this group of books isn't in them. As a result he seems to struggle to find a single plot to focus on: Earth and Sky has essentially two separate narrative arcs. Brightness has a superb individual one on a personal level in the duelling nobles, but Kay seems to struggle with the relatively small scale of that and adds extraneous bits and bobs that probably aren't needed. All the Seas has the biggest problem, because by the book's own admission the aim and final event doesn't really matter.  There's an inciting event and a final event but they're only tangenially related and the interim between them is spent almost entirely on the characters ordering their lives in ways not actually to do with the final assault. 
It also means that his characters are always impotent to achieve, or even come close to achieving their biggest aim. He can't undo the fall of Sarantium- that would be silly. But as a result he has to find smaller things for them to focus on and while in the first two he does find that he seems to me to struggle how to frame it, because he still wants focus on the greater, unatainable, aim. 

 

The third applies only to this one: it's set between two books we already have, with characters and places from both. That really restricts Kay's options in what he can do, and it also feels like he's indulding in a tour of old friends as much as telling a focused story. It also probably amplifies what I was saying in the previous point: if he hadn't already written Earth and Sky, he might have made the finale more earth-shaking, but he couldn't do anything that would fuck with his lead-in to that novel. In fact as far as I can tell from a brief look at the actual story of Oruc Reis and Barbarossa, the ultimate outcome of the raid is ultimately less significant than any of the fights in that time over Tunis or Algiers, of which Tarouz seems to be a composite. 

 

Also: while their origins are reversed, Lenia's character is almost exactly Danica's character again, which was quite weird tbh. 

 

 

Anyway all that doesn't mean I didn't like the books, though I suspect in the long run this will be my least favourite of the three. It just lacks anything I think I'll find really memorable. It was fun and I liked Lenia and Rafel. But frankly I'm ready for Kay to move on from this setting now.

 

 

Maybe he'll finally write the Poland-based book I'm convinced with very little evidence that he's been itching to write for decades. 

[Jaxom 1974]

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

  Hide contents

 

 

The first applies to all four: he's grown a fascination with the 'smaller' stories that intersect his big stories, and while it can be interesting to read in the moment, it essentially sees him get distracted. I don't mind an aside, or a vignette-filled story, but I don't think it's Kay's strength- and because he's doing so many of them but keeping the books the same length, the 'main' plot has less time devoted to it. 

 

 

The second applies to all three of the Fall of Sarantium trilogy, in separate ways: Kay loves telling stories of huge, key turning points in history (real, imagined or sped-up). His best books, imo, tend to hang on those turning points- the key scenes that we all remember tend to either be that moment themselves, or earlier moments that push the characters and plot in the necessary direction. The issue here is that the key turning point of this group of books isn't in them. As a result he seems to struggle to find a single plot to focus on: Earth and Sky has essentially two separate narrative arcs. Brightness has a superb individual one on a personal level in the duelling nobles, but Kay seems to struggle with the relatively small scale of that and adds extraneous bits and bobs that probably aren't needed. All the Seas has the biggest problem, because by the book's own admission the aim and final event doesn't really matter.  There's an inciting event and a final event but they're only tangenially related and the interim between them is spent almost entirely on the characters ordering their lives in ways not actually to do with the final assault. 
It also means that his characters are always impotent to achieve, or even come close to achieving their biggest aim. He can't undo the fall of Sarantium- that would be silly. But as a result he has to find smaller hings for them to focus on and while in the first two he does find that he seems to me to struggle how to frame it, because he still wants focus on the greater, unatainable, aim. 

 

The third applies only to this one: it's set between two books we already have, with characters and places from both. That really restricts Kay's options in what he can do, and it also feels like he's indulding in a tour of old friends as much as telling a focused story. It also probably amplifies what I was saying in the previous point: if he hadn't already written Earth and Sky, he might have made the finale more earth-shaking, but he couldn't do anything that would fuck with his lead-in to that novel. In fact as far as I can tell from a brief look at the actual story of Oruc Reis and Barbarossa, the ultimate outcome of the raid is ultimately less significant than any of the fights in that time over Tunis or Algiers, of which Tarouz seems to be a composite. 

 

Also: while their origins are reversed, Lenia's character is almost exactly Danica's character again, which was quite weird tbh. 

 

 

Maybe he'll finally write the Poland-based book I'm convinced with very little evidence that he's been itching to write for decades. 

Personally I'd like to see him write something within his England/France setting again...tackle the story of Rollo and Normandy or possibly the Norman Conquest...

[Ran]

If by "the setting" you mean the specific narrow slice of it that is the pseudo-Adriatic and Mediterranean, yeah, I think maybe it'd be cool if he tried something else. But the basic Jad-Kindath-Ashar setting, I'm cool with it. A lot of other places he could explore with their own, interesting stories. He's run the gamut from the setting's equivalent of the 500s (Sarantine Mosaic) to the late 800s (The Last Light of the Sun) and the 1000s to 1400s in a highly compressed way (The Lions of Al-Rassan), to about the setting's equivalent of the early 1500s (Children of Earth and Sky and the novels that proceeded it) in the course of just 7 novels. There's particularly a really big area there, the 1000 to 1400 period, where he would certainly have room.

The thing I'd personally be interested in is depicting the Jaddite version of the Crusades, or better yet the Crusader Kingdoms. 

[Jaxom 1974]

Doesn't All the Seas of the World kinda show some of what that would look like...? Even in small scale?

[polishgenius]

46 minutes ago, Ran said:

If by "the setting" you mean the specific narrow slice of it that is the pseudo-Adriatic and Mediterranean, yeah, I think maybe it'd be cool if he tried something else.

 

Yeah, I literally just mean the post-Byzantine east-Med setting. 

 

47 minutes ago, Ran said:

The thing I'd personally be interested in is depicting the Jaddite version of the Crusades, or better yet the Crusader Kingdoms. 

 

I actually don't think he can do that. The three religions are obviously modelled on the Abrahamic religions, yes, but there is no Holy Land to link them in that way. The Jaddite faith doesn't have a Jesus figure and even the outlawed version with a son doesn't have him take human form, so there's no homeland where the savior walked to protect, or pretend to protect. The Kindath are specifically framed as being wanderers, like their moons, so they also don't have a promised land. And with no theological link to the other two religions, there isn't a particular reason for the Asharites to have such concern for the same stripe of land as either. 

[Ran]

Interesting, I hadn't really thought of that. I feel like in Lions, the discussion between the wandering Kindathi who the Muwardis hosted for awhile made me think that there were some theological shared history if you go back far enough. 

But yeah, no Abrahamic text seems to exist to connect them. And I guess the thing closest to Jesus was destroyed by the iconoclasts in Sarantium...

[Maltaran]

4 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Personally I'd like to see him write something within his England/France setting again...tackle the story of Rollo and Normandy or possibly the Norman Conquest...

You mean the Last Light of the Sun setting?

[Ran]

1 minute ago, Maltaran said:

You mean the Last Light of the Sun setting?

LLotS is more Alfred the Great than Norman Conquest.

[Jaxom 1974]

13 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

You mean the Last Light of the Sun setting?

 

11 minutes ago, Ran said:

LLotS is more Alfred the Great than Norman Conquest.

I'm suggesting using the setting there and going the next step...Kay has jumped around timestamps before, but the setting of LLotS is ripe to take the next step...and it could also help expand on his France analog, which hasn't been a significant player yet, though AtSotW certainly added some tidbits...

[williamjm]

5 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

I'm suggesting using the setting there and going the next step...Kay has jumped around timestamps before, but the setting of LLotS is ripe to take the next step...

Or maybe he could take inspiration from the Scandinavian part of LLotS and do his take on the Icelandic sagas. That might suit his recent fondness for doing lots of side stories.

[SeanF]

On 9/21/2023 at 2:31 PM, polishgenius said:

 

Yeah, I literally just mean the post-Byzantine east-Med setting. 

 

 

I actually don't think he can do that. The three religions are obviously modelled on the Abrahamic religions, yes, but there is no Holy Land to link them in that way. The Jaddite faith doesn't have a Jesus figure and even the outlawed version with a son doesn't have him take human form, so there's no homeland where the savior walked to protect, or pretend to protect. The Kindath are specifically framed as being wanderers, like their moons, so they also don't have a promised land. And with no theological link to the other two religions, there isn't a particular reason for the Asharites to have such concern for the same stripe of land as either. 

The closest to a crusade would be a campaign to take back Sarantium, or parts of the Sarantine Empire.

Jaddism has many of the institutional features of Orthodox/Catholic Christianity, but it’s God is more like Apollo, and his son is like Prometheus.

[Jaxom 1974]

Because I've been re-reading/re-listening to a number of Kay novels to start the new year, I'm torn over this question:

Rodrigo Belmonte or Folco Cino d'Acorsi...?