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Hedrigall posted:Yeah, all of it is almost as unbelievable as what happened in our world history. In reality. I just finished the book last night so I'm still processing it (in general it was excellent). I find myself agreeing to a certain extent with that critique. I do recognize that many of the tools of conquest used by the Masquerade are drawn from real life examples. However, the Masquerade is a composite of the evil features of many different empires -- it combines native schooling/talent skimming with eugenics with the purposeful use of disease as a tool of conquest with violent and repressive homophobia with a secret police with Clockwork Orange style brainwashing, etc etc. It's not so much that any one feature is realistic as it is the fact that they're all found present here, together, and that all of the Falcresti we meet appear to be gung ho for the Empire. Certainly empires like the Spanish in North America were not free of dissent within or without -- a large reason the Spanish get such a bad rap today is a longstanding and extensive propaganda campaign in Northern Europe against the atrocities committed by Spain. I would expect a world like this would have a very strong anti-Falcresti publicity campaign waged by rival empires. I'd also expect there to be a fairly significant current of resistance within Falcrest itself. That said, a book with a tight focus like this one might not benefit from this kind of scope widening. I can believe that Baru would not be aware of elements within Falcrest. I thought the solo POV and focus on our main character was a refreshing change from the usual fantasy bloat and I hope any subsequent books in this series keep this focus. There's always short stories and follow up series to expand the world... Edit: added spoiler tags just in case uberkeyzer fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Oct 12, 2015 |
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Oct 12, 2015 13:52
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 22:02 |
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