Review: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



This is pretty bad.

I'm sorry to all of you folks for whom it's a nostalgic romp through your childhood, but I read this for the first time as an adult, and it is not good. The characters are a series of not-even-two-dimensional cardboard cutouts that are caricatures of themselves:

Grumpy Dwarf
Mischievous Rogue
Angsty(Half-)Elf
Evil Wizard
Gentle Giant
Grim Paladin
Barbarian Princess
Noble Savage

That's all you need to know about them; and indeed, all you seem to find out about most of them. There are two many of them, and most are entirely unnecessary to the story; it's like reading a phone book. They're presumably all here because they were present in the original role-playing game this was all based on, because you can hear the dice rolling behind most of these pages. They're mostly all just dumped on the reader as "old friends reuniting", but their shared history doesn't have any depth or weight to it. The elf is there to provide brooding angst; the other non-humans are strictly lame slapstick comic relief.

The setting is a typical fantasy tourguide listing of the Environments section of the Dungeon Master's manual: tree village, mountain, forest, swamp, underground lost city, elven city. We get as little detail about most of it as we get about the characters moving through it. The enemies are over-the-top, mustache-twirling, puppy-kicking evildoers who are stupid and easily-tricked; our heroes defeat them by dumb luck most of the time anyways. I've noted the inherent racism in epic fantasy before, but it's particularly strong here: murdering sentient goblins who are unaware of your presence is considered good fun and good riddance, and everything non-human besides the noble and wistfully-romantic elves is comically stupid.

The plot seems to center around one of the characters having stolen something off-camera, in a dream, before the book even started, and the efforts to get it back from them. Various powerful beings - including a few gods - tell our heroes where to go and what else to steal, and then they just do it. But it's all ok! Because the people telling _us_ what to do are shiny and bright! And the people telling those guys what to do are stinky and dark! Get em!

I have to admit to not finishing this - I seem to have lost the thing 3/4 of the way through - but I think I'm fine with that; it didn't seem to be getting any better.

(Favorite moment of Fantasy Physics: Two giant buckets connected by a pulley. Caradmon holds down the lighter of the two with all his strength, mighty thews straining, then jumps in the bucket along with another large heavily-armoured man, and the bucket shoots upwards, freed from his immense gravity-defying power!)



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