r/TadWilliams

I'm returning to Otherland, this time via Audiobook. The narrator is not the best I've ever heard in an Audiobook, but he's serviceable. Except for one thing.

He can't seem to settle on a pronunciation of my favorite character's name. I would understand if this was simply a reticence to recreate the bushman clicking sound. This would be a forgivable sin if the click sound at the beginning name were replaced with something else. As long as that something else was the same sound every time.

Instead, we get variations of "Habbu," "Gabbu," and "Kabbu," sometimes within the same paragraph!

Anyone else notice this? Anyone else listen to the Audiobook and can commiserate with my pain? Are there other idiosyncrasies with this performance that I can be looking forward to?

(Note: I'm coming off of a recent listen to MST, and that narrator was fantastic! Because of that performance, I had high hopes for reconnecting with Otherland's multinational cast of characters).

And I don't mean Hakatri and Ineluki's story. I mean Kes'.

He has no sense of self, and it reflects in everything he says and every choice he makes. His self was erased first through generational trauma and then by being selected and elevated by Hakatri, and untethered from his race and anything that was his. He never chooses himself. Even the life that he has at the end is given to him by the ocean throwing him off the ship.

I love how Tad treats the issues of servitude and the oppression of a race with so much subtlety. I find it so frustrating when books beat you over the head with how bad oppression is, and portray agonising after torturous scenes of violence to really drive the point home that these people are oppressed and oppression is BAD. But here, the weight of the devastation is delivered with two simple sentences. The first telling us that the Dwarrows or Delvers were bred by the Keida'ya, and the second that the witchwood blood lengthens the lives of the Keida'ya, and they don't allow the Vao to drink it.

The restraint in his writing was really similar to Ishiguro's, and I'd say Kes reminded me of both Klara from Klara and the Sun a Stevens from The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro.

Edited to fix typos.

Note: please don't mention any details about the Last King of Osten Ard series, as I have not read them.

After finishing MST and the Heart of What Was Lost, I started reading The Brothers of the Wind. I've just finished the part where >!Kes visits Ravensperch a second time to convince Xaniko to help Hakatri!< and basically realise that >!The Vao are immune to dragon blood, since Kes has healed from his burns!<

Anyway, I just realised that I am reading the books in the wrong order. Since The Brothers of the Wind was published after the first 2 LKoOA books.

So my question is: should I stop reading The Brothers of the Wind? Am I about to read spoilers about the LKoOA if I continue? Like about some secret history or knowledge that is supposed to be unknown in the first 2 LKoOA books?

I don't know if this is the right place to ask. I'm planning to start reading the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, and I noticed that there is a part 2 of To Green Angel Tower. I thought that the version that is already there was the complete book, and now it shows that there is a part that will be released on June 16, 2026. For those who have To Green Angel Tower on Kindle, is it the complete version?

FOR FANS OF COMPLEX WORLDBUILDING and fully-realized characters; readers of George R. R. Martin, John Gwynne, Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, and Brandon Sanderson will be thrilled

A QUEER ROBIN HOOD: One of the novel’s main characters is a steal-from-the-rich type bandit who is very handsome, very blond, and very romantically interested in other men

A BREEZE TO READ: Thanks to a fast-moving plot, lots of action, and a merry sense of humor, the pages of Tad Williams’s latest fly by

A STANDALONE ADVENTURE IN A BESTSELLING WORLD: Set in the same world as the bestselling Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, which included DAW's first book to hit the New York Times bestseller list

INSPIRED BESTSELLING FANTASY EPICS: Osten Ard has inspired authors including George R. R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, and Christopher Paolini

2.4 MILLION COPIES SOLD IN SERIES: The original Osten Ard trilogy has sold over 2,400,000 copies across all formats

I’ve been interested in reading Dragonbone Chair for a while. I’m interested in finding a fantasy series with a lot of depth (world building I mean not necessarily philosophical depth) that works for me. I began reading and was loving it at first. First few chapters I was locked in. I’m about 100 pages in and feeling like I’ve lost momentum. What is your advice: should I stick with it to a certain point, or should I be catching the bug at this point if I’m going to enjoy it long term?

I recently started listening to the Audiobook for The Dragonbone Chair as part of my audible monthly sub and have really been enjoying it. Hearing it read aloud has made the text even more evocative. Tad Williams makes excellent use of metaphors and similes to convey images and moods. At times the voice actor Andrew Wincott's character speech comes out different than I imagined it would be but it is still very enjoyable.

I haven't done a read-through of MST in probably 10+ years and had totally forgotten how prophetic Simon's dreams were. For some reason I had in my head that most of those visions were after being splashed by Igjarjuk's blood.

What have others discovered on a reread that you didn't notice in the first read through?

This book made me love Williams even more. Even though I think the longer books are more to his strength, but I just loved what he did here. 

I should admit that Isgrimnur and Gurtun were my two least favourite characters in MST, because of how closed minded they both are. There were parts of MST where I liked each, but my overall impression of them was very unfavourable. I am also quite biased in any conflict between humans and other species because of the way we sprawl and leave a path of destruction behind us.

So getting me to empathise with the Norns would not have been very difficult. Even when they show abhorrent behaviour, like wanting to execute the lower caste/slaves for not wanting to go into the Deep Darkness. Yeah, they're not great people, but no one gets to decide who is "good enough" to live in this world. Especially for an entire race. Especially if the people deciding are the ones who started the cycle of violence to begin with (or their ancestors did).

But I did not expect that the book would make me despise the rimmersmen. I felt my blood boil when I read some of Isgrimnur's chapters, where he talked about wanting to kill an entire race, or showed Brindur's bloodlust. So many people died, because Isgrimnur was grieving and didn't want let the Norns just live in hiding, or reach a peace treaty with them.

And it wasn't just Isgrimnur's PoV. Viyeki uses the same words to describe Floki as humans do to describe the giants. The book really portrayed the rimmersmen as barbaric and brutal. 

Interestingly, it was only the rimmersmen who were being portrayed like this. Porto and Endri both found the war pointless. The language used during their PoVs is much more grounded in the devastation of a continued war. Even though Endri died hallucinating and talking nonsense, I found him (and his single-minded obssession to go home) the sanest of all the humans in this story. It was that same single-minded obssession to go home that stopped zombie-Endri from marching into the camp to murder the living. The end of the book was devastating, but incredibly beautiful.

Other things I really enjoyed: 

1. I also loved the portrayal of how dangerous desperate people get. Especially people at the point of extinction. I really don't think the humans ever appreciated it. Isgrimnur did not seem to understand it even when Suno'ku told him.

2. It was interesting to me how different the Norns were to the Sitha. They have sch a respect for formality and hierarchy. While the Sitha have respect for their elders, it was made very clear in MST that the elders can't order the other Sitha to do anything. This is very different amongst the Norns, to the point that Viyeki is devasted to find out about his master's supposed betrayal, and wants to kill himself. I wondered whether Williams was linking their respect for hierarchy to their ruthlessness, or whether the respect for hierarchy is a product of the gruelling lives they had inside a mountain.

3. What it means to survive. For the Norns, it was initially to fight with tooth and nail, but then to surrender their most fierce fighter and seal themselves off from the world. And maybe choose to be builders. It will be interesting to see how the society will have changed by the time the Queen awakes and what her reaction will be. It was also interesting that Akhenabi decided to join this coalition. I liked that Williams did not portray him as simply an evil character. I hope we see more of him in the Last King of Osten Ard books. He would make for a complex and interesting villain.

4. Edited to add: the scene between Suno'ku and Isgrimnur. It was such a devastating scene. How Isgrimnur came to have respect for her, but even then he couldn't offer better terms. And her parting words "Then we have little reason to speak more" even though they both share the same pain and they want the same thing. They are the same people. But they couldn't find a common ground.

Two things I wished were a bit different:

1. I wish the Norns weren't so similar to humans. In MST we are told a lot that the humans can't decipher the Sitha, but in this book we're shown that the Norns have similar emotions and social structures as humans. I guess Williams wanted to de-dehumanise them. But I wonder if that would still have been possible if he maintained an element of alien-ness.

2. I wish the book leaned more into the pointlessness of blood feuds. We saw that some of the Norns understood it. But it seems like the humans (at least the decision-makers) didn't appreciate that they're sacrificing the lives of more people and bringing more misery by continuing this war. It isn't until Ayuminu tells Isgrimur that he decides to parley and even then he offers terms that are basically a joke. I thought the Brindur's first reaction to Floki's death would be a catalyst. But he only became more bloodthirsty after.

 

So what were your thoughts on this book? What did you like the most about it?