Dragons of a Fallen Sun by Margaret Weis
By mrs. kirk - Thursday, September 21st, 2006
I began with Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles long after their glory had been established. The original series, Chronicles, was published in 1986, the year I graduated high school. At the time, although I was an avid Dungeons & Dragons fan, I was more interested in the Forgotten Realms and had been playing that and reading those books instead. Thus the world of Dragonlance did not come to me until 20 years later.
I devoured the first three books in the series, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning. I was immediately drawn into the fascinating world of Krynn and compelled by the richly crafted characters and the swiftly moving story line.
It was not the best writing in the fantasy fiction world, but it was highly addictive and the entire series was a masterful page-turner.
I was loathe to finish the series, sad to let go of characters I had grown to love and adore. I was thrilled to discover then that there was a second trilogy, called Legends (Time of the Twins, War of the Twins and Test of the Twins) that focused entirely on my favorite characters, Raistlin Majere, the dark mage and his warrior twin brother Caramon.
This series outclassed the first in its focused depth. There was real human anguish here and so much of it was about love and the pain that it can bring. While it dealt with some larger themes, in the end it was the story of twin brothers; one fighting to become something he could never be and the other fighting to save him from himself.
I loved the characters and read every word, hating that it would soon end.
In 2001, Weis & Hickman came back to Dragonlance and began a new series that takes place 50 years after the end of Test of the Twins finale.
I was immediately confused. Although I had stuck to the Weis & Hickman novels, there had apparently been many written in between by other authors that had taken the saga in unheard-of directions. I began this new series as a stranger to Krynn even though there was prodigious use of characters from the previous series.
The new characters were flat and lifeless, with no spark in them, no dimension whatsoever. They were all one-note wonders and the now ancient characters from the previous series were used primarily as window dressing. They too became sad paeans to their former glory.
In this book, Dragons of a Fallen Sun, we are introduced to the characters who will be central to the three novels (though some do not live through it). None of them are interesting or complex. The two who might have been are left with nothing much to do except repetitively echo the same sentiments over and over again.
As I said, I never read these books for the great writing. For the most part, I found the writing to be on a high school level, not particularly elegant or interesting. Definitely not lyrical or evocative. These books are written with a glancing blow to language. They get the job done and use as few five-dollar words as possible, lest anyone become caught up in the actual wording rather than the story. These books are written for young people who just want to get to the good stuff – the action, the dragons, and the battles.
In Dragons of a Fallen Sun, Weis & Hickman have lazily given up on conventions most decent books heed, like continuity, structure, and character depth. It seems exactly as if they are making it up as they go along. Entire scenes are misplaced and useless. Characters come and go so quickly and with little meaning to entrances and exits that further on in the series, two of the main characters appear through the final book as zombies!
This should be shocking, but considering that everyone else is a zombie, too (by virtue of the fact that they are just puppets who serve no purpose in the story), you barely notice.
What Weis & Hickman have done however is create the single most annoying character I have ever come across in any book: Mina.
Just Mina.
She is a seventeen-year old girl who brings the power of what she calls “The One God” to Krynn, as apparently all the Gods have deserted Krynn following the War of Chaos (I have no idea what these stories were about , though they are somewhat re-hashed here and I believe it was chronicled in the equally horrible Dragons of a Summer Flame, which I did not read but skimmed through and had no clue who anyone was.)
SPOILER WARNING
I had a feeling the One God would be Takhisis (the evil Goddess from the first trilogy who tried to take over the world but was thwarted by the heroes of that series), because, at that point, I expected nothing but the least imaginative course. Of course, the evil Goddess does return and Mina serves her evil purposes willingly, never doubting, and never straying.
END SPOILER
Mina. The name just makes me shudder to see in print, as does the phrase “The One God.” They are repeated to such a degree that I daresay there must have been tens of thousands of these references in the series. In the third book, except for a few other words, it is mostly Mina and “The One God,” ad nauseam.
I can tell you that I immediately did not like Mina. She was one-dimensional and stupid and that is not the kind of character you want to carry through an entire series, especially one longer than any written previously by Weis & Hickman. 500 pages of Mina. Then 600 pages. Then 600 more pages. 1,700 pages of Mina. Mina. Mina. Mina. The One God. The One God. The One God. Oh, God – any God – make it stop!
Like some kind of supreme torture, it never ends. How everyone loves Mina. How they do it all for Mina. MINI-SPOILER: How the Elven king loves and then dies for Mina. How everyone is affected by Mina; entire nations and races of people. All for Mina.
How dumb are these people? No one can see the writing on the wall even after dealing with all this God-crap before, only 50 years earlier? The elves live forever and they seem more idiotic than anyone!
I mean c’mon, there was not one character who could not immediately sniff out how evil Mina was? I knew it. And I really didn’t feel like spending the next 1,700 pages dealing with how obtuse everyone on this entire planet had become.
Mina is nothing more than a slave to this One God. Nothing more than a device and a servant. She is nothing. She does not fear. She does not love. She does not really have any emotions at all. YAWN. Wake me when it’s over.
Ultimately, before the book was even finished, I wanted her to die. I wanted to be rid of Mina and have them focus on another character, someone with a little …something! Anything! An in-grown toenail! Whatever it takes so I was not falling asleep. Someone who was not a boring, soul-less character who made me skip entire passages out of utter boredom.
The book ends on a cliffhanger, making me thankful that I did not read these when they were published in 2001. Waiting for the next crappy book would have added insult to injury. At least now I could go on to the next and flip through it and try to get out of the Mina-hell faster.
Weis & Hickman bring back Tasselhoff Burrfoot and the Device of Time Traveling (which was used well in the Legends Trilogy but is absurd here) and they do more than just murder Tas a second time (he died in the War of Chaos). They make him unlikable. They make him pestering and benign. They made me want to see him squashed like a bug beneath the foot of giant.
Likewise they do the same for an ancient Goldmoon and Laurana (who has not aged as she is elven) and even the minor character in Chronicles, Alhana Starbreeze. There are a whole bunch of children of the various now-dead heroes (all middle-aged in their fifties) and none of them are remotely compelling.
One of the new characters Gerard, a Solamnic Knight, is so dull that I can’t even recall what he was actually doing in the series at all, yet he appears on the covers of the last two books as if he is somehow central and important to the plot, which he is not.
If by some miracle you decide to forego my warning against this sad money-maker trilogy, you must read the first two trilogies and Dragons of a Summer Flame to have any clue whatsoever what is going on. Even then you will be confused and bewildered as I was for the entire thing.
And I do not envy your descent into Mina-hell, one bit.