The Steel Remains (2010) by Richard K. Morgan is very much a 21st century book, but for all the commentary about how it turns the genre on its head, it is actually a very traditional fantasy novel–especially as an initial foray into a world designed to hold sequels. Yes, the characters curse a lot and, yes, the protagonist is unabashedly and explicitly gay. But aside from that, what is best about the book is the competence and creativity with which familiar genre terrain is navigated.
Our hero is past his peak: several years ago he won the day at a famous battle, turning the tide of the most recent great war, but he now lives off his reputation, and has grown a little thicker around the middle, a little slower with the blade. When his mother summons him to find a relative of the family who has been sold into slavery, he answers, and the game is on!
There are two other story lines that merge with his, both centering on people he knew before, one a warlord from the northern wastes, the other the only (perhaps) remaining member of her race on this planet. The latter opens up some interesting dynamics: the world is set to hold both magic and science, and contains people at very different points of understanding and interpretation, from an institutionalized church that is turning towards hard-line orthodoxy to a race that is able to move in and out of spacetime at will (they cannot go backwards in time, but they can enter a place where it moves so slowly as to be as good as standing still).
It’s sword and sorcery with a little science, and if it feels at times like a novelization of a Fall From Heaven game gone out of control, that is, actually, a good thing (FFH is a great dark fantasy game based on the Civilization series). The three main characters are all deftly sketched and differentiated, and are all sympathetic enough that different readers will have different favorites, with good reasons for each.
The book quickly settles into a nice rhythm, alternating among the storylines until the very end, and I kept caring whether characters thrived or not, and kept turning the pages to find out. It’s a better book than that, even: of all the first novels in a series I’ve written about over the past year or so, it is the only one where I immediately ordered volume two.
#WhatIWishedICouldDo
Morgan does a very good job at dropping us into a thickly considered world. There is a history here, mostly political and/or warfare related, and that poses a challenge: how do you realize that history without lecturing? How do you have characters reference a massive conflict without diving deeply into it? Morgan does this very well, enriching the current story and whetting the readers appetite for both what is to come in this world as well as what precedes these events.