Emberverse

The latest book in SM Stirling’s Change series, The Given Sacrifice concludes the war against the Church Universal and Triumphant with a certain sense of anticlimax. While none of the events quite surprised me, I was left with a sense – quite familiar to me from other recent books in this series – that the author had overstretched his ability to maintain dramatic tension and that the events that have occupied the past three or four books in this series would have been better served to all take place within a single book. Compressing the narrative, if not necessarily the time scale, would make it easier for the reader to preserve the sense of risk and danger that has been rather lacking since Rudi retrieved the Sword of the Lady.

The third volume in SM Stirling’s Dies the Fire series brings the conflict with the Protector to a head.

Nine years after Dies the Fire , an unsteady truce reigns over western Oregon. Mike Havel’s Bearkillers and Juniper Mackenzie’s Wiccan clans, along with some other loose federations, are strong enough to have prevented the despot Norman Arminger from overruning them - so far. Occupying the rich farmlands south of Portland, these groups have quickly adapted to life after the Change, and have thriving societies with bustling economies.

Their cultures are starting to take root, too - the younger generations know nothing of gunpowder, electricity, or gasoline beyond stories from the adults. Most members of the Mackenzies have converted to the Wiccan religion, even though tolerance is still upheld as valuable anywhere outside of the Protector’s territory. The Bearkillers are finding more and more of J.R.R. Tolkein’s fictional traditions woven into their lives, even the elven language itself, thanks to a couple of young die-hard fans.

A couple years ago, I started to have an idea for a novel. It wasn’t the first such idea; I have several kicking their way around my head. I don’t have time to write more than a chapter or two in brief spurts, but I let the ideas percolate and refine. Eventually, I will have that time, and hopefully the ideas will be timeless by then. Or something.

But at least one of those ideas is now out of the running, thanks to S. M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire; he has simply done it, and done it well enough that I doubt I will follow down that particular path.