I recently picked up the (commercial; I understand there are fan translations in the wild) English translations of the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski as airplane reading, partly because I found the games interesting but poor at explaining background but mostly because I’d woken up at 5 AM to catch my flight and didn’t have the bandwidth to keep slogging through the dense mock-Elizabethan prose of The Worm Ouroboros.
The series is subversive fantasy with a heavy dose of folktale influence, somewhere between Gregory Macguire’s books and A Song of Ice and Fire in tone, and while it doesn’t add much to that subgenre that I haven’t seen before, it does pull it off competently and from a perspective I’m not used to. (I suspect this latter has something to do with its Polish origins.) It does hew a little too close to genre convention in places; there are good narrative reasons to have nonhumans running around, for example, but not to pull in the full D&D-style demihuman panoply. On the other hand, it’s unusually good at grounding its genre: nations fall and are created, for example, over periods of a few decades rather than staying static for Tolkienian centuries or millennia. Monsters are treated as rare and dangerous animals rather than unique aberrations. Individual martial skill is valuable but easily neutralized by luck or fatigue or weight of numbers. Magicians approach their craft more as scientists than as sages or superheroes. It’s a fairly refreshing take and I’d like to see more of it.
The weakest point’s probably the translations tapped for Kindle, which are noticeably inconsistent and pretty clunky in places. Characterization’s competent but nothing to write home about.
I recently picked up the (commercial; I understand there are fan translations in the wild) English translations of the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski as airplane reading, partly because I found the games interesting but poor at explaining background but mostly because I’d woken up at 5 AM to catch my flight and didn’t have the bandwidth to keep slogging through the dense mock-Elizabethan prose of The Worm Ouroboros.
The series is subversive fantasy with a heavy dose of folktale influence, somewhere between Gregory Macguire’s books and A Song of Ice and Fire in tone, and while it doesn’t add much to that subgenre that I haven’t seen before, it does pull it off competently and from a perspective I’m not used to. (I suspect this latter has something to do with its Polish origins.) It does hew a little too close to genre convention in places; there are good narrative reasons to have nonhumans running around, for example, but not to pull in the full D&D-style demihuman panoply. On the other hand, it’s unusually good at grounding its genre: nations fall and are created, for example, over periods of a few decades rather than staying static for Tolkienian centuries or millennia. Monsters are treated as rare and dangerous animals rather than unique aberrations. Individual martial skill is valuable but easily neutralized by luck or fatigue or weight of numbers. Magicians approach their craft more as scientists than as sages or superheroes. It’s a fairly refreshing take and I’d like to see more of it.
The weakest point’s probably the translations tapped for Kindle, which are noticeably inconsistent and pretty clunky in places. Characterization’s competent but nothing to write home about.