Review: Shattered Pillars, by Elizabeth Bear

[Russ Allbery]

Shattered Pillars
by Elizabeth Bear

Series:    Eternal Sky #2
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: March 2013
ISBN:      0-7653-2755-4
Format:    Hardcover
Pages:     333

Shattered Pillars is the second book in the Eternal Sky series, which
begins with Range of Ghosts. You should read them in order, and ideally
close together, since they (along with the next book) form a single
continuous story.

I made the horrible mistake of reading the first book of an Elizabeth
Bear series and then letting four years go by before reading the second
one. Bear's trademark style is to underexplain things to the point that
it can be hard to follow the plot when you remember it, let alone after
more than sufficient time to forget even the general shape of the plot.
I therefore spent most of this book (and a bit of Internet searching)
trying to dig up pieces of my memory and reconstruct the story. Learn
from my error and read the trilogy as one novel if you're going to read
it.

Please, authors and publishers, put a short plot synopsis at the start
of series books. No, your hints about what happened previously that you
weave into the first two chapters are not as good as a one-page plot
synopsis. No, I don't want to have to re-read the first book; do you
have any idea how many books I own but haven't read? No, the Internet
doesn't provide plot synopses for every book. Give me a couple of
paragraphs and help me enjoy your fiction! Argh.

Possible spoiler warnings for the first book are in order because I
don't remember the first book well enough to remember what plot details
might be a spoiler.

As Shattered Pillars opens, Temur, Samarkar, and their companions have
reached the western city of Asitaneh, seeking help from Temur's
grandfather to rescue Edene from the Nameless. This will require
breaching the Nameless fortress of Ala-Din. That, in turn, will
entangle Temur and Samarkar in the politics of the western caliphate,
where al-Sepehr of the Nameless is also meddling. Far to the east, from
where Samarkar came, a deadly plague breaks out in the city of
Tsarepheth, one that follows an eerily reliable progression and is even
more sinister than it may first appear. Al-Sepehr's plans to sow chaos
and war using ancient evil magic and bend the results to his favor
continue apace. But one of the chess pieces he thought he controlled
has partly escaped his grasp.

Behind all of this lurks the powers of Erem and its scorching,
blinding, multi-sunned sky. Al-Sepehr believes he understands those
powers well enough to use them. He may be wrong.

This is entirely the middle book of a trilogy, in that essentially
nothing is resolved here. All the pieces in motion at the start of this
book are still in motion at the end of this book. We learn a lot more
about the characters, get some tantalizing and obscure glances at Erem,
and end the book with a firmer idea of the potential sides and powers
in play, but there is barely any plot resolution and no proper
intermediate climax. This is a book to read as part of a series, not on
its own.

That said, I enjoyed this book considerably more than I would have
expected given how little is resolved. Bear's writing is vivid and
engrossing and made me feel like I was present in this world even when
nothing apparently significant was happening. And, as usual, her
world-building is excellent if you like puzzles, stray hints, and
complicated, multi-faceted mythology. This is a world in which the sky
literally changes depending on which magical or mythological system
reigns supreme in a given area, which in the Erem sections give it a
science fiction flavor. If someone told me Bear could merge Silk Road
historical fantasy with some of the feel of planetary romance (but far
more sophisticated writing), I would have been dubious, but it works.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is that all of the characters
feel like adults. They make complex, nuanced decisions in pursuit of
their goals, thoughtfully adjust to events, rarely make obviously
stupid decisions, and generally act like the intelligent and
experienced people that they are. This is refreshing in epic fantasy,
where the plot tends to steamroll the characters and where often
there's a young chosen one at the center of the plot whose courage and
raw power overcomes repeated emotional stupidity. Shattered Pillars is
careful, precise, and understated where epic fantasy is often brash,
reckless, and over-explained. That plus the subtle and deep
world-building makes this world feel older and more complex than most
series of this sort.

There's also a magical horse, who is delightfully uninterested in
revealing anything about where it came from or why it's magical, and
who was probably my favorite character of the book. Hrahima, the giant
tiger-woman, is a close second. I was intrigued to learn more about her
complicated relationship with her entirely separate mythology, and hope
there's more about that the third book.

The villain is still hissable, but a bit less blatantly so on camera.
It helps that the scenes from the villains' perspective primarily focus
on his more interesting servants. One of the problems with this book,
and I think one of the reasons why it feels so transitional and
intermediate, is that there are a lot of viewpoint characters and a lot
of scene-switching. We're kept up-to-date with four separate threads of
events, generally with more than one viewpoint character in each of
those threads, and at times (particularly with the wizards of
Tsarepheth) I had trouble keeping all the supporting characters
straight. Hopefully the third book will quickly merge plot lines and
bring some of this complexity together.

I wish I'd read this more closely to Range of Ghosts. Either that or a
plot synopsis would have helped me enjoy it more. But this is solid
epic fantasy by one of SFF's better writers, and now I'm invested in
the series again. Some unfortunate logistics are currently between me
and the third book, but it won't be four years before I finish the
series.

Followed by Steles of the Sky.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-12-24

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-2755-4.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>