Hugo Awards: Warbound

Warbound is the third book in Larry Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles, and (finally) the one that was nominated for this year’s best novel Hugo. Because I tend to take a completist view of this sort of thing, I read the first two novels in the series, Hard Magic and Spellbound, and generally enjoyed them. Correia has mashed up a number of genres – action, noir, fantasy, even a little steampunk, etc… – and made it work. This is no small feat, and I suspect many attempts at this sort of thing do not work anywhere near as well. And Correia is a telented storyteller as well. There are things set up in the first two books that pay off here, indicating a thoughtful approach. Plus, it’s just fun. This is a quality that I suspect is lost on a lot of people, but not on me! Even though this particular genre mashup is not exactly in my wheelhouse, I appreciated the series as a whole.

So I basically knew what I was in for in this book, and it delivered on all the promises made by the first two installments. As an individual entry in the series, I’d say it’s about on par with the rest of it (perhaps better than the second installment, but only because middle stories in a trilogy tend to be incomplete).

The story picks up right where Spellbound left off. Heavy Jake Sullivan is trying to mobilize a force to face the Pathfinder, a scout for the great Enemy that will devour the world if the Pathfinder is successful. Meanwhile, Faye Vierra is coming to terms with being the spellbound and must seek out help to ensure that she is not corrupted by the power that “curse” has granted her. When Sullivan and Faye find out that the Pathfinder has been more successful than it seemed, the planet is about to be plunged into a great battle against the Enemy. You might even say that Earth was warbound. Heh.

The plot is a bit broken up here, with Faye’s story almost completely isolated from Sullivan’s, and with some prominent characters from the first two books making an appearance, but otherwise sidelined for most of the book. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s another indication of how loose the series has been. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and it’s clearly not as bloated or flabby as something like The Wheel of Time books that I’ve read so far, but I do find myself thinking that these books could stand to be a bit shorter.

As per usual, Sullivan and Faye take the brunt of character work, and they’re both likable protagonists. Toru is also the type of character that grew on me as time went on. As always, there’s a colorful cast of supporting characters, including some new faces (I was a fan of Wells, the alienist – a slightly less creepy version of Hannibal Lecter).

As I mentioned in the previous two reviews, one of my problems with stories about magic is how overpowered the magic becomes as the story progresses. The stakes are continually rising, and because it’s magic, it’s tempting to just keep making the magic more powerful. For the most part, Correia has pulled it off in this series. In part, this is because he set up some very clear rules, and used logical extensions of those rules to find new powers. By the end of this book, things were getting a bit too overpowered, but then, this is also the last book, so I think some leeway is required. I’m pretty impressed that Correia was able to balance everything out this well.

I guess this is a spoiler, but not really – Faye saves the world (as she did in the first two books), but on a larger scale. Faye is basically the main protagonist, and she’s a bit terrifying. This is partly because she is so powerful, but also because she seemingly kills hundreds if not thousands of people throughout the series, but feels not a single pang of guilt towards it. For that matter, Sullivan and the rest of the Grimnoir are similar in that way, so perhaps that’s a Correia thing. But in this book, there is at least an acknowledgement that such wanton bloodlust will lead to disaster. Faye is the spellbound, which means that she can absorb the power of magical actives when they die. This is why she is so powerful. But such power can also corrupt, and the previous spellbound became consumed by his quest for power and became a mindless killing machine (basically driving this alternate history’s version of WWI) Faye spends a good portion of the novel trying to come to terms with the fact that she could easily be corrupted in that way, and she catches herself thinking things that would lead down that path. I was glad to see this tacit acknowledgement that all this death and destruction wasn’t really a desirable thing, even if Correia seems to revel in the violence and action of it all.

And finally, a word on the audiobooks. Even though Baen very thoughtfully included all three novels in the Hugo Voter’s Packet, I listened to the audiobook for all of them. As it turns out, the book is read by Bronson Pinchot. Yes, that Bronson Pinchot. And he’s really fantastic (supposedly, these books have won him awards), seemingly able to handle a multitude of accents and vocal registers (given the worldwide scope of these stories, there are a lot of foreign accents required). From Audible, it seems he has 144 titles available, which is a pretty impressive body of work.

This wraps up all of the fiction awards that I’m voting for. My ballot for best novel is basically as predicted, with this one falling right smack in the middle, behind Neptune’s Brood and Ancillary Justice, but ahead of Parasite (that ending has really curdled in my mind as time goes on) and The Wheel of Time. In the end, I probably wouldn’t have read all three of these books if left to my druthers, but I have had no real issue with them either. They’re a ton of fun, and I may even be tempted to check out some of Correia’s Monster Hunter books if I get in the mood for something like that.

Obligatory note of all the controversy surrounding the nomination of this book. I’ve already (briefly) discussed it elsewhere, but I tended to concentrate more on reading all the nominees. Now that I’ve read all of Correia’s “Sad Puppy” slate of nominees, I’d say it was a pretty mixed bag in terms of quality. Then again, so were a lot of the nominees overall, but that’s just the way of populist awards. I appreciate reading some things outside of my comfort zone, and this was a good way to accomplish that. I get the consternation around this, but I was ultimately pretty happy with this whole experience.

From your perspective, only a few more Hugo posts to go. I am reading The Great Hunt (the second book in the Wheel of Time series), so I’ll probably review that when I finish (short story here is that I like this better than the first book, but it’s still ridiculous that this series got nominated as a whole. I’m reading this book because Tor very thoughtfully included the entire damn thing in the voter’s packet. But according to my kindle, I have about 266 more hours of reading to go before I finish the series, which ain’t going to happen by the end of the month). There are definitely some awards that I won’t be voting for (how am I supposed to vote for Editors?), and I have some other assorted thoughts about the whole process as well. I’ll post my final ballot when I get the chance as well. Then I’ll have to find something else to write about, because I’m sure my readers (all three of you!) are getting pretty sick of this Hugo stuff.

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