Wednesday, January 25, 2006

A Quick Blurb about Sean McMullen

Nothing particularly interesting has happened today, so we dig back into the archives for the following paragraph, originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 1/10/05 in response to a question about McMullen's novel The Voyage of the Shadowmoon:

I'm not Joe, but, yes, there is a sequel, Glass Dragons, in which some of the same people do dissimilar things to stop a different kind of magical mega-death device. One of the things I liked about these books (along with the gleeful, exuberant joy in pure complication) was the way that the giant magical whatzises were perfectly logical, the kind of thing that, after the fact, I expected to remember from a dozen novels. Oh, I also liked the way the magicians were almost all power-hungry assholes, and, more importantly, realistic power-hungry assholes, of the kind we recognize instinctively.

This is 2006, again, saying that there's now a third book in the (very loose) series, Voidfarer, which is a retelling of Wells's War of the Worlds. There's yet more megadeath and mayhem, but the plot is more original (Glass Dragons is a lot of fun, but it's also a lot like a re-run of Shadowmoon), and the characters are very engaging (if completely neurotic in their own ways).

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