#demonwar

I think my main issue here is that these two books really should have been one. It feels like in a lot of ways, this duology wanted to be in a similar kind of space as the Krondor's Sons duology early on in the saga: they add a bit to the world, but they aren't necessarily the most important to the series as a whole.

Unfortunately, I think the fantasy genre had changed a fair bit between the late '80s and early '90s, when the Krondor's Sons books were coming out, and the late '00s, when these two books were coming out. In the twenty or so intervening years, it feels like the assumption had increasingly been that any fantasy book coming out would be a part of this larger, ongoing series, so even stories that would have been fine as standalones got padded out into trilogies.

This duology was one of the clear losers of this assumption. Even though it would have been fine to turn around and say, "Hey, this is already a part of quite a long storyline, releasing it as a one and done will be fine," the publishers probably didn't want to hear that.

The other issue I have with this duology is that it's basically just a rehash of the Darkwar trilogy. Like, Pug and co. go into the fifth circle to deal with the new demon threat, there's a new breed of elf introduced that's meant to be super duper important but then turns out to just be there, and a legacy character gets killed off. Some new characters are introduced, but you sorta know that they're going to fade into the background after this.

I'm near certain that this is the entire reason I don't remember reading these two books at all. I'm almost certain that I did when I was first reading through the series in 2008-2010, because these two were the newest two out at that point. I forget if I reread them in late 2013/early 2014 though, because I know this or the previous trilogy is about where I stopped during that readthrough. (I got caught up with some uni-related stuff at the time.)

This is as far as I've ever gotten in the saga, though. The next trilogy in this saga, the Chaoswar trilogy, hadn't been released yet when I was first reading through these books. The final book had only just recently come out the second time and I stopped before I got to it.

Reading through these two books, I get why a lot of people feel the writing got worse as the books progressed. This has been an issue to some extent for a while, but prior to the Darkwar and Demonwar series, it was largely a matter of opinion if it was actually that much worse or if you were coming from a place of hardcore nostalgia from the earlier books. Here, it's definitely a matter of these books having worse writing in a lot of ways.

I think this is unfortunate, because in some ways, these two series had the most complicated plots. Instead of it just being an A plot, a minor B plot, and maybe a very marginal C plot, these books had four or five plotlines going at once. I think the actual problem Feist was running up against here is that this is the kind of plot structure that would have worked really well if he'd built up the lore a bit more early on, but at this point he's working with a very bare bones lore (for a series this long) and a series that he knows is winding down for good.

The other part of this is that traditionally, the Riftwar formula is that the A plot is either the new war between nations or the buildup to it, and the B plot might be Pug's magic shenanigans. This ties into the worldbuilding problem. Because the magic system hadn't really been built up beyond there being a Greater Path and a Lesser Path, except for when the distinction isn't there, most of the magic is basically "...and then Protagonist cast elemental spell, and Antagonist casts shield, but Protagonist put more energy into elemental."

Essentially, it's only two steps removed from some of the ki attack heavy fights you might have seen on Dragon Ball Z as a kid. This is unfortunate because now the series is at a point where it kinda does need a deeper magic system beyond it just being rule of cool stuff. Especially at the kind of levels Pug and co. are operating at, the plot would have benefited from there being some marginal rule of magic they could exploit to win the day against much more powerful enemies.

Usually I'm not the kind of person who thinks everything in a setting needs to be explained to the nth degree, but this is one of the places where having at least a few basic rules would have helped. This series is a really good example of things being a hindrance rather than a boon after a certain point.

A lot of my problems with this book stem from what happened with the star elves. It ended up being very little. Despite the fact that the previous book built them up to be this big new factor that could either be a complicating threat or a new ally against the ongoing demon problem, at the end they were mostly just there.

I'm not really sure if they needed to add a new kind of elf just for this purpose. They could have had the same kind of plotline almost beat for beat with the Brotherhood of the Dark Path, the elves from Novindus, or with the other elf village introduced in the Darkwar trilogy.

Really, this could have just been a second half of Rides a Dread Legion. Even if these two books were just the one volume, the length would have been pretty manageable. I mean, for a long time books in the Riftwar saga were usually between 500 and 700 pages long, so anyone who's this deep into the series isn't going to be put off by a longer novel. I think a lot of them probably would have been glad for a longer volume after a decade-long litany of relatively short ones.

There isn't really a lot to be said about this one beyond that. The good news is that at least it's short. I have my issues with how the later books of this saga tend to be a lot shorter than the earlier ones, but the trade off is that they are easy to get through if nothing else.

Out of all these books that I've read so far, this one is probably the most painfully average. There's nothing particularly offensive about it--it doesn't go down to the same lows as some of the early books in the series or anything like that, but by the same token, it doesn't really reach any of the same highs, either.

This isn't to say it's entirely without merit, though. In terms of plot structure, this is a much better representation of what I think the Darkwar trilogy should have been like than the actual Darkwar trilogy. Instead of introducing a couple of characters that despite being main characters in the first book, ultimately don't ever really contribute a lot to the story after that, every character here does get to do a plot relevant thing at some point.

Rides a Dread Legion also has a more complex plot structure than most of the previous books. Instead of it being just an A plot, or maybe an A plot with a very small B plot and a borderline irrelevant C plot, it starts with what are apparently four or five different plots and then slowly interweaves all of them into a single A plot.

I think in some ways, this makes this book one of the most effective books in terms of setting up a series. For the most part, the books before this duology worked as well as standalone works as they did as part of an overarching whole. This is to the extreme that I think there's times where you could pick up the second or third book in a Feist trilogy and more or less follow what's happening without ever having read any of his other books.

The flipside to this is that Rides a Dread Legion is one of the books that suffers the most from middle book syndrome. There isn't anything here that isn't just setting up what happens in the next book.

It's also the book that assumes the most prior knowledge of what's happened previously in the series. I think it was always going to be inevitable that there was some level of continuity lockout with these books--there's thirty of them, of course; at some point they would become inaccessible to a new reader. Really, the surprising part is that it didn't happen until this late in the series.

Much like the Darkwar trilogy, this book also introduces a new breed of elf. Fortunately, these elves aren't just a sideshow to the main plot; these ones actually are part of the main focus.

I think it is sorta interesting that as this series has gone along, it's more or less become to elves what the Dresden Files series is to vampires. Like, in The Dresden Files, they have the various different vampire courts, some of which get more development than others, and here in the Riftwar saga, there's now five or six different varieties of elf.

The difference is that I think overall, Jim Butcher does a better job at developing his vampire courts than Raymond E. Feist does at developing his various elf cultures. Some of this is just that I think Jim Butcher is better at world building in general. However, I think the other problem is that before now, the elves have never been the main focus of these books; usually either being relegated to being allies of the main cast or, in the case of the Dark Brotherhood, minor villains or pawns of the current Big Bad.