Customer Reviews

Fires of Azeroth (Morgaine Cycle)

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This whole series, consisting of "Gate of Ivrel", "Well of Shiuan", "Fires of Azeroth", and "Exile's Gate", is my favorite of any author's, and I've read A LOT.

Cherryh's style is clean and dry, but at the same time very intense and passionate. Instead of using flowery words and melodrama to spoon-feed emotion to the reader, she uses common words and short, almost aggressive phrasing. The tension and passion and danger are drawn with a sharpness and clarity that is almost painful. A deceptively simple word or glance between these characters, whether friends or enemies, will at times bring that tension to a breathless peak, but without the expected release afterwards.

This is not an easy, exciting Harlequin-esque roller-coaster of peaks and valleys. This is a sharp ridge on a bare mountain with an occasional rock slide.

This is not a graceful Puccini aria that makes you want to weep and feel melancholy. This is avant-garde jazz where a single painfully high note is drawn out in the background for so long that you find yourself begging for a release that you fear may never come but then again do you really want it to?

It's exhausting, but in the best sense.

And about the 4th time I read the series, I found that it was funny too! It is, of course, a very dry humor, but it's there. And not a joke or eccentric comedic bit player to be seen.

It's easy to fall in love with these characters. They're very different from each other, but they're both excruciatingly familiar!

Cherryh creates the perfect male characters for a straight female audience. Cherryh's men are the kind many of us would create for ourselves. (Which is very different from the men male writers create.) Cherryh's men are capable of great valor and honor, but also of very deep emotion and affection, and self-reflection.

Also, her men often feel strong love and affection and respect for other men, without there being any sexual element to it. This is not only unique, but very difficult. The ability to create tension between male characters who love each other without it reading like sexual tension or a Sunday night "family drama" is something I rarely see. I appreciate it when I do.

My circle of friends has a shorthand way of expressing our reaction to this exhausting mix of physical danger and emotional tension, just by groaning "AAAAAHHHHGHHHHGHGHHHHHG!!!". If one of us starts off a conversation this way, another might say "Are you dying, or did you just finish a Cherryh?"

Wow -- what a climax! The final extended battle scene in this third volume of the trilogy, the summing up of all the threads of plot and character that began in Andur-Kursh months ago -- or maybe thousands of years ago -- all are brought together here. And Cherryh's skill in laying out the scene is such that you don't know what's going to happen until it does. Where the first volume was set in a land of mountains and crags, and the second in a drowning, swampy world, Azeroth is a land of vast forest and vaster plains. The qhal in this world have become the best they could be over the centuries, guarding the forests and the villages of men, laying down laws that ensure peace, and protecting the Gates of their world. Unfortunately, this also makes them difficult to persuade of the need for violence to deal with the scores of thousands of invaders from Hiuaj and Shiun who came through the Gate from their dying home world at the end of the last volume. Vanye is separated again from Morgaine, to whom he is bound by an unbreakable oath, though it's clear now that his regard for his mistress is far stronger than any oath he could take. The character of Roh, Vanye's cousin, inhabited now by an ancient, shape-changing qhal, is also developed with great adeptness and considerable sympathy. Finally, the crescendo of the final chapters is nearly unmatched in fantasy or science fiction, even in Cherryh's other works.

Good science fiction book that supposedly has ties to the creation of the WarCraft Gaming series.

I'm the guy who wrote reviews more or less trashing the first two books of the series, largely because of the repetitive quality of the narrative. The first book does set up the characters and plot, but still dwelled on campires and cold food and finding shelter all too much. The second book continued that trend, but in some ways was worse: e.g. it spent the first few chapters on a character whom the writer just gives up on soon thereafter, and it was repetitious thematically in addition to narratively. The little bit of action suffered from Cherryh's penchant for being cryptic at the crucial moments of confrontation. "Fires of Azeroth" stands in sharp contrast to both, and it rewards the reader who decides to keep reading. The book flies by with fascinating, unique creatures, deep, complex, and fleshed-out characters of all kinds, towns (instead of just wilderness hacking), confrontations, plausible character development and transformation, a very delicate authorial touch on the subtle romantic tension between the two main characters, and action more gripping than I've read in ages. Cherryh still suffers from a tendency to write a bit cryptically during the action scenes, but these make sense (compared to "Wells" the action of which I thought was pretty close to incomprehensible to the reader) here, and are engaging. That's to be preferred, perhaps, to writers who merely dictate the action, or, like Tolkein, keep deferring it (in my opinion). A huge surprise, this is one of the best fantasy books I have ever read. I'd read the first book at a good pace, really blow through the second book, and then savor this one, the third.

If you can only read one of the Morgaine trilogy, let it be this one. As with "Well Of Shiuan", this book presents important moral questions to Nhi Vanye and to the reader. But unlike "Well..." this one is far less dark, and not all the characters Vanye and Morgaine encounter are quite as ruthless and self-serving as most of the characters in the previous novel in the series. The dealings of Morgaine and Vanye with the peace-loving humans and qhal of the forest adds a Tolkien-esque air to this particular installment. All this coupled with the development of Roh's character, and Vanye's developing relationship with him, makes for superb reading.

This is One Of The Best Fantasy Books I've Ever Read.