Wednesday, October 3, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Born to the Blade (Season 1) by Michael Underwood, Malka Older, Cassandra Khaw, and Marie Brennan




Born to the Blade is one of the newer "serials" from Serial Box Publishing.  For those new to Serial Box, it is a publisher that, rather than publishing novels, publishes "seasons" of novelette length of stories written by a group of authors that combine to make one long story, as if each story is an "episode" of a TV Show, with new episodes coming out every week during a season.  I've really enjoyed one Serial Box series - Bookburners - and had mixed results with some of the other, so I was curious about Born to the Blade when I saw it was written by a bunch of writers I've enjoyed in other works.

And for the most part I enjoyed Born to the Blade, although the season ends just as it's getting really interesting and wasn't completely satisfying.  It creates a fantasy world where the world's powers live on islands in the sky and where magic is crafted by skilled wielders of blades who carve sigils to various effects and where diplomacy between the world's powers is ostensibly done by duels with such blades.  And it contains people whose birth place's provide magical birthrights that alter their very beings in different ways, adding even more variety to this world.  Add in some interesting characters, each with their own agendas and rarely fitting into categories of "good" or "evil" (although there are some clear good and bad guys), and you have a very interesting story that I look forward to reading more of in a second season.

Note:  With the exception of Bookburners Season 3, I've generally not read Serial Box seasons as intended, binging them as if they were novels instead of episodes of a TV show.  Same thing for me here, so keep that in mind: my experience may not be quite the intended one.     
----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
In a world where nations exist on Islands in the Sky, the six most powerful nations conduct diplomacy through the use of "Warders" sent to the neutral island of Twaa-Fei.  These warders conduct diplomacy through negotiation....and when that fails, through duels with their swords, using magical sigils carved with their blades to aid them in combat.  For years, the six nations have managed to exist in an unstable equilibrium - with the Nation of Mertika essentially controlling two of the other nations, the Nation of Quloo standing in strong opposition and the other two nations more tentatively balanced in a more neutral position.

But the balance of power is about to shift.  Quloo is facing its utter destruction due to overmining of the powerful mineral that keeps the island in the sky....and a war-hungry party is poised to take over its government.  The powerful lord of the nation of Kakute has escaped his imprisonment by Mertika and seeks to rescue from its subjugation as a puppet nation under Mertikan rule.  And Mertika isn't satisfied controlling merely three nations and is eager for more, especially under its extremely powerful and ambitious warder.

Into this come two newcomers.  Oda no Michiko comes to the island to become a junior warder of Kakute...but soon finds her understanding of her nation's subjugation under Mertika is far from complete.  And Kris Denn comes to Twaa-Fei hoping to win their nation of Rumika a seat at the bargaining table as the seventh great nation....but to do so Kris will have to win a gauntlet of duels against the other six nations' greatest duelists....and may destabilize the balance of power of all in the process.
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Born to the Blade has a lot going on, and most of it is pretty damn cool.  You have swords and blades being used to carve magical sigils to create magical effects!  You have duels being used to conduct diplomacy!  Islands in the Sky and airship battles!  And that's not going into the fact that each of the magical nations has a birthright ability that its citizens possess - one allows its people to commune with their ancestors, another allows them to remember their past lives, another allows them to transition between sexes, and I'm missing more than a few other things here.  It's a lot of really cool worldbuilding, and it mostly works.

Most of the characters are pretty well done too.  Kris' naivete is a bit annoying at first, but one can see how that comes about and they are a very easy person to root for.  Michiko's doubt and disturbed inner thoughts as she learns more about her people's subjugation leads to her becoming rather interesting and growing in interesting ways.  Ojo works as the beleaguered older warder with great skill but who is hamstrung by his government shifting to a more dangerous policy he doesn't support, despite his great loyalty.  And even the blatantly evil and powerful Lavinia of Mertika is fascinating, even if she's one of the few characters whose perspective on things we never really see (the story shifts repeatedly between the perspectives of characters involved, but never hers as far as I can recall).  And I'm missing a few others here.  The only weakness in this regard is that one of the nations (Tsukisen, and its warder Taro) is basically invisible and falls to the wayside, to the point where that nation popping up near the end made me confused as to who they were after all this time.

Still, Born to the Blade's first season has some flaws that make it not quite succeed as much as it could, unlike say Bookburners' first season (still the gold standard among Serial Box productions in my opinion).  It's not surprising that the season should end on a cliffhanger to an extent, but very little is wrapped up at all with so much hanging that it feels way too much like this story is a bit of a prologue - with one of the cliffhangers being an event that seems to have been coming for quite a while and being rather predictable.  The result is something not quite as satisfying as it could be, though the worldbuilding and characters are strong enough that I definitely am interested in season 2, which isn't always a given with these serials.

Worth a try.  If your library has a hoopla subscription, the full season can be borrowed at any time with a single borrow.  If not, the first season is available on amazon for $2.51 on Kindle, which is a decent price for 552 pages of story.
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