F/SF

Nowhere near as good as the first novel; too much like Dungeons & Dragons; actually boring in many places; hard to believe it was written by the same author as The First Book of Swords. ( )

So this is a bit of a new one: A heist-flick-as-fantasy-novel.

Considering the saga of the Swords universe, there are three religious edifices that are truly global:

The White Temple, revering ARDNEH (Remember him from Empire of the East) and dedicated to healing

The Red Temple, dedicated to vice and pleasure in all its forms. Like Vegas but without rules.

And the Blue Temple, which worships wealth and acts as the world bank.

Ben of Purkinje has found the location of the Blue Temple's Top Secret Treasure Vault, and plans a heist with his now-grown friend Mark, who wishes to bring treasure to aid Sir Andrew's resistance army. Meanwhile, totally-not-Sean-Connery-or-Michael-Caine, equipped with Wayfinder, is gathering a team for the same purpose.

This is a romp of a book. It adds, but very little, to the overall Swords universe, but it doesn't ever present itself as anything but a good time dungeon crawl. Recommended as an installment in the series but not a first entry. ( )

So I never read a dungeon crawl before.

Certainly not what I was expecting -- not from something written in 1984 (I thought fantasy authors were better than that) -- but it's the best way to describe it. It's straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. The main characters start by going to a town. They meet some supporting cast who are on their way to a quest. There's negotiations and debates and arbitrary motivations. One of the characters drops out and is never seen again, like she stopped coming to the meetings. And then they break into this vault guarded by a dragon, and descend one floor at a time to get the priceless treasure, ending with a confrontation with a hell-demon and a god. That's the whole book. And it's not really thrilling. Just a paint-by-numbers.

You'd think the second book of a trilogy would focus more on bridging the first book and the second. Nope -- here we're just getting more swords. Adventuring in a hole while exploring nooks and crannies, occasionally losing redshirts. There isn't any greater sense of what's at stake. No new character development. No changes to the world. In fact, it seemed the whole purpose was to warp the characters closer to collecting all the swords (although who knows what happens when they do that). If this is supposed to be the "defining moment" for the character, it's not a very explicit one. Everyone's still bland, and worse, there is zero female presence. It's no wonder I stopped reading here years ago. ( )

The Second... remains one of my favorite books ever. It's a heist novel, mostly - it draws characters and some of their larger motivations from The First... but for the most part it's just the story of a well-executed raid on a fabulous dungeon full of more treasure than anyone could reasonably steal. It's vivid, well-paced, and a great deal of fun. Saberhagen provides us with another reasonably strong female character (albeit again only one) who is, quite literally, a self-rescuing princess.

It's in many ways a very odd choice as the second book of a trilogy - it really doesn't develop the overall plot much at all, except for one scene and the distribution of a few Swords whose location we never knew about anyway. But it's such a damned fun book I almost prefer it this way, because I can reread it independent of the other two and not miss out on anything. ( )