Book Review: Blood of an Exile by Brian Naslund
I loved Blood of an Exile by Brian Naslund. He is a new author and this is the start of a great new world in fantasy. His new series is called The Dragons of Terra. This is important not because dragons figure prominently in his new book (although they do) but because of what kind of dragons they are.
They are real dragons which are part of a real ecosystem. They’re apex predators. Everything they do affects their world down to the proliferation of poisonous snails in local riverbeds when the local population of dragons gets exterminated. They are not sapient, they are not sages and mages, they are not humans in disguise, nor do they make fantastic lovers with whom normal men can never compete. They are animals with a specific set of niches in the food-web.
In addition to being apex predators, they are also very valuable animals because their fat, when melted down, makes the best fuel ever. If you’re familiar with the whaling industry, you already know where this is going. If you’re not, you’ll find out.
There are people too, starting with our hero, Silas Bershad, aka The Flawless Bershad. As the tagline says (and what a great cover! Yum yum yum) he’s sentenced to die and impossible to kill. He really is too and he starts finding out why at the end of this book.
The world of Terra is complex, with kings and queens and peasants and alchemists. They jockey for power, status, and position, just as you would expect them to. They don’t hold hands and sing songs and work together as a team. It’s a dangerous, violent world, very similar to our own.
Brian Naslund doesn’t shy away from how nasty people can be so be forewarned. There are some very violent passages. Unlike in the movies, real fighting is painful, messy, and bloody. It is here too.
I’ll warn you now. The book ends on a cliffhanger.
Sadly, we’ll have to wait until August 2020 for the sequel, Sorcery of a Queen. Macmillan, owners of Tor Books, has decided that the best way to market a huge, complex fantasy is to release the huge, complex books one per year. What great marketing. Why not let your readers completely forget you exist while they read everything else out there? Or maybe they’re gauging public interest. If Blood of an Exile doesn’t sell well enough, we won’t ever see Sorcery of a Queen. If that turns out to be true, we’ll have to hope that Brian Naslund held onto enough of his rights to self-publish the sequels.
I hope there are a lot of them. I’d like to see a lot more of this world and these people.
I really liked the book and I can’t say that as often as I would like.
But it does have some flaws.
First is his ecology building. It’s unusual for a fantasy author to pay much attention to the underpinnings of the world; the complex web that binds every living thing to every other living thing. Yet Brian Naslund has. However, he seems to think that removing an apex predator leaves a huge, unfillable hole. This isn’t true. Ecosystems can and do recover because other critters step into that empty niche. Thus, since wolves have essentially been exterminated east of the Mississippi, we now see coyotes stepping into the niche the wolves left behind. They’re getting bigger. They’ve even been seen in Central Park in New York City. Think about that for a moment.
Removing the dragons will launch a cascade of changes but eventually, everything settles out. It doesn’t happen fast, but it does happen. But this isn’t an ecology textbook and his characters aren’t worried about the passage of eons. They’re worried about now.
I didn’t like how he handled the peasants and their struggles. The book opens with an apprentice alchemist getting ready to see the Flawless Bershad come to the village to kill a dragon. The peasants complained to their local lord and their local lord responded as was his duty and obligation. One of the reasons the peasants complained was that the dragon killed and ate about a hundred sheep.
Our queen, Ashlyn Malgrave, doesn’t want dragons killed because they are so important to the ecosystem. However, losing one hundred sheep at once means famine for those peasants. Their ruling lord isn’t going to cut their taxes. He won’t make up for the loss of the wool, meat, milk, or lambs. It takes time for a herd of any kind of animal to regrow back to its original size. That herd was probably what was successfully wintered over. With it gone, the owners are destitute.
They won’t recover, but who cares? They’re peasants! Certainly not our queen, Ashlyn Malgrave, or Lord Nimbu, to whom those unfortunate peasants belong.
Remember that the dragons of Terra are apex predators. They do not limit their appetites to woodland rodents and sheep. Some species are not fussy at all. Apex predators generally eat any animal that is smaller than they are. They can work as a unit (wolf pack) to eat animals bigger than they are. Some of those dragons get pretty big. Do the dragons of Terra eat people if given the chance? You bet they do.
As a peasant, I would object strenuously if a dragon came to my village and ate my sheep. I would object even more strenuously if a dragon gobbled up my children. Or my elderly mother who can’t run away fast enough.
This concern on the behalf of the peasants is elided over, since, as I mentioned, the dragons are so very, very important to the ecosystem. For the peasants, the ecosystem’s long-term health doesn’t matter very much compared to keeping their kids and livestock alive and healthy today. I suppose it matters where you are in the food chain. If you’re the queen and on top, what’s a few peasant children? It’s like losing a few hundred sheep. It’s meaningless compared to the big picture.
I didn’t like how he handled religion. The residents of Almira, the country where much of the action takes place, believe in a host of localized spirits. They make mud totems on a near-daily basis to do the usual things prayers do: help me, guide me, praise to you, forgive me, wow, and thank you.
Again, most fantasy writers don’t even bother to mention that their people have religious beliefs. Yet every culture does. What bothered me was Mr. Naslund’s main characters (and his own authorial voice) denigrated the citizens of Almira for believing such silly superstitions. Sensible, worldly people like our hero and our queen would never do anything so useless. They rely on alchemical potions and not prayer.
Brian Naslund also has an odd writing tic whereby he uses sentence fragments. A lot. I kept stopping to parse out the missing words. Here’s a sample from opening the book at random. This one is from page 127, near the top.
Probably been hung there for two or three days.
He does this throughout the book, omitting filler words like “it had.” Maybe dragons devoured those filler words like sheep. This may not bother you, but I noticed every single one of those fragments. Since Blood of an Exile is published by Tor Books (owned by Macmillan), I will assume this is a style choice and not due to lack of editors.
If you like high fantasy that feels realistic, give Blood of an Exile a try. It’s well worth your time.