To The Last Page

The first two volumes of the Great God's War have been, you could say, slow burners. Not that there was a lack of anything developing, but there was a sense that all the little details, the power plays and the ominous skirmish attacks were all signs of heading towards an event on an even bigger scale. If that scale can be measured by the length of time that it has taken to publish the concluding volume of the trilogy and by the page count, The Killing God is clearly aiming to meet those expectations. Well, it does and it doesn't. The scale of the war that has been anticipated when it hits the shores of Belleger is every bit as vast as expected, but unfortunately it doesn't leave room for much else. Given it has taken that long, you could be forgiven if you didn't remember the bigger picture never mind the finer details of the story. Stephen Donaldson manages to refresh your memory without seeming to need to do a standard recap. With a couple of incidents and assassina...

The first book in the latest Stephen Donaldson epic The Great God’s War played out along familiar fantasy fiction lines with little in the way of surprises, but there were signs – not least from the relative slimness of the book – that Seventh Decimate was just a prelude or pretext for a larger story to unfold. The War Within is indeed a rather more substantial book, or at least considerably longer than Seventh Decimate , and it does expand on there being more to this world than a long running war between the Amika and the Belleger, but it’s still very serious and slow moving and not in any real hurry to get to any major developments. In the first book, Seventh Decimate , the reason for the war between the Belleger and the Amika has long been forgotten or at least subject to very differing accounts. A crisis point however had been reached when the traditional means of sorcery or theurgy, the power of the Decimates used by Magisters to unleash lightning, earthquakes, famine etc. had m...

The reader is likely to have certain expectations when it comes to Stephen Donaldson embarking on a new fantasy series. Some of them are met in Seventh Decimate , the first book of The Great God’s War, and some are not. For others we’ll have to just have to wait until the series really gets going, because Seventh Decimate has all the appearances of an introduction to a fantasy world that is going to get a lot bigger with a lot more complex moral questions to be resolved. As an opening book, Seventh Decimate certainly starts off in a fairly straightforward and conventional manner, but a more expansive view is hinted at, and it might even be the whole purpose of the author’s latest reworking of fantasy genre. We begin in a familiar and basic warring kingdoms setting, where there are (initially at least) only two kingdoms in conflict; Belleger in the south and Amika to the north. An old enmity exists based on an ancient and unreliable legend, and the result has been endless battles, ski...