The Phoenix Guards Pt 1: In Which Your Author Writes an Introduction

The Phoenix Guards applies a fantasy bent to Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, and the first in a set of books called The Khaavren Romances.

If you’d care for a traditional book review, Jo Walton’s over at Tor is fine. If you’d care to cut straight to the TVTropes page, you can do that, too, though it’s all wrapped up under Dragera. While not as bad as, say, the TVTropes pages around the MCU, you won’t be able to filter down to just the examples in The Phoenix Guards.

That’s a shame because the Khaavren Romances are rich. Like, they’re dripping with character and detail, and I love it; if books are like food, the Khaavren Romances are like a plate of ribs; no matter how careful you are eating them, you’re going to need a trip to the sink to wash lest you get everything you touch sticky. You get a similar kind of richness from Tolkien (especially the Silmarillion) and a different kind of richness in The Dresden Files. Steven Brust’s Khaavren Romances closest counterpart among anything I’ve read is, really, Discworld, except where (GNU) Terry Pratchett writes a setting that deliberately challenges the reader’s expectations, Brust writes a setting that’s very nearly hard sci-fi with fantasy trappings.

I should explain that.

The Dragera setting, of which The Phoenix Guards and The Khaavren Romances are part, feels like it could be very real. Everything that seems mystical or supernatural is eventually explained with a consistently-applied mechanic. Whether it’s an energy model that applies to souls, the nature and existence of gods and multidimensional aliens, or the nature of magic itself, once it’s been explained, a reread of the entire series won’t find any inconsistencies. This is Magic A is Magic A, time and time again.

I had intended to convert a bunch of notes into a blog post, but I wound up writing an introduction instead. So, until next time.