Skip to main content

The Codex Alera Series by Jim Butcher

First Lord's Fury, the last entry in the Codex Alera series was recently released. I've completed it now, and here are my thoughts on the series. My first exposure to Jim Butcher's work was with the Dresden Files, a series of urban fantasy novels starring the titular Harry Dresden, Chicago's only wizard listed in the Yellow Pages.

In contrast, the Codex Alera series is a much more traditional fantasy world. The country of Alera exists on a fictional continent where humans are able to control the elements through what they call furycraft. Every human is able furycraft at at least some level, and it has shaped society, all lamps are fury lamps, and need to be lit through the use of a small amount of fire crafting, healing is all performed in tubs of water by watercrafters, messengers are all windcrafters, who fly through the skies. Blacksmith's are all metalcrafters who are able to sense just the right conditions for forging the metal.

Not all furycrafters are created equal however, most people are only adept in one or two elements, those who can control all of the elements to a great degree make up the aristocracy of Alera.

It's strongly hinted that the first humans of Alera were a Roman legion that somehow ended up on a mysterious new continent, along with their hangers on. I don't know enough of Roman history to identify many of the elements that are influenced by it, although clearly the arms and military structure is very similar.

Our hero for this story is a young boy named Tavi, who's father was lost in a recent war, and who is something of a freak in that he possesses not the slightest inkling of furycraft. Obviously he is the subject of much ridicule, pity, and bullying, but he's clever, and has managed to get by in spite of his disability.

The first two books in the series deal mostly with political scheming and backstabbing, which progresses slowly into a more traditionally fantastic overwhelming foreign invaders storyline. Over the many books, we get to see Tavi frequently strive in the face of impossible situations, and eventually become a beloved leader, and fearsome strategist.

One of my favorite things about this series was the ingenious ways that Tavi would think of to combat furycrafting with simple mechanical know how, and eventually be able to instruct others on how to combine furycrafting and more traditional engineering to create wondrous feats.

At first I found it hard to get into the series, just because I was expecting something more along the lines of the Dresden Files, but then I came to love the politics and scheming for what it was. I'd highly recommend checking this series out if you're interested in a fantasy story that approaches the genre from a slightly different angle.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but...
Post a Comment
Read more

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...
2 comments
Read more

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...
2 comments
Read more