Swarmthief's Dance
Book 1 of The Swarmthief Trilogy
Deborah J. Miller
Tor UK, 314 pages
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Swarmthief’s Dance opens a new trilogy from Deborah J.
Miller.
Long ago, in punishment for the crime of offering immortality to a
human, Aria, one of the six spirits known as the Nulefi, was banished
to the underworld--the realm of the god Rann, whose passionate advances
Aria once spurned. But before Rann could do more than gloat, Aria’s
sisters did the unthinkable, and rose up to defend her. In wrath, the
gods’ leader, Herrukal, dispersed their spirits into the ether. But
gods are eternal and indestructible. Even scattered, the substance of
the Nulefi survived.
By tradition, the people of the world of Myr believe that the
Swarms--hordes of tiny insects that can be combined into a single,
giant dragonfly entity through the agency of a substance called kyermah--were
created by the goddess Oshi. Really, though, they’re a human artifice,
brought into being through a combination of magic, prayer, and alchemy.
Experimenting to improve the Swarms, their creator accidentally manages
to trap within them the dispersed spirits of the Nulefi. Unthinkably,
the Swarms begin to lay eggs, raising the possibility of new, natural
Swarms whose nature and powers are unknown. To the church, this is
heresy. Church officials race to obtain and destroy the eggs--and to
keep their existence hidden from the faithful.
But the first laying had a witness--Simeon, a boy of the temple city.
Branded a heretic when he confessed what he’d seen, his memory was
removed and he was banished half a world away, given a new family and a
new name: Vivreki. Desperate to learn about that first egg--which was
never found--the church dispatches a Bakkujasi Swarm rider, the cruel
and arrogant priest Cion Gezezi, to fetch Vivreki back. Viveki eludes
capture, and with his brother Steif becomes a fugitive. Cion is then
sent to investigate reports of a new egg; with him go his lover, Kilmer
Torroshi, and Kilmer’s wife-of-convenience, the Brengarmah warrior
Asoori Pikresh. Meanwhile, the gods pursue their own agendas: Herrukal,
angry at the weakening magical forces generated by worship in his
central temple, sends an evil star to menace the world of Myr, and
Rann, learning of the rebirth of the Nulefi, possesses the soul of the
powerful church official Achios, the better to meddle in worldly
affairs. As events and antagonists collide, a newborn Swarm--the
hatchling of that first egg--flies in search of Vivreki, her savior.
The elements of an enjoyable fantasy adventure are here: warring gods,
powerful magics, exotic locations, dangerous quests, a large and varied
cast of human and non-human characters--even a smooth prose style and a
knack for an evocative turn of phrase. Gods who meddle in human affairs
are hardly new to fantasy, but Miller imparts an interesting twist by
envisioning the gods not as world-creators but as somehow part of the
substance of the world--“Where the world begins,” Rann says, “we also
come into form, and none can truly say which blinks into existence
first”--and by making them, at least to some extent, dependent for
their power on the worship of their human charges.
Yet these elements fail to coalesce into a coherent story. There’s
action aplenty, but much of the logical underpinning and character
development needed to glue everything together--and to make the reader
care how it all comes out--is absent. Miller conjures some vivid images
of temples and towns and estates and deserts, but we find out almost
nothing about the religion that goes with the temples (we don’t even
learn the full pantheon--not good in a novel where the gods are major
players), or the culture that goes with the towns and estates, or even
the geography that goes with the deserts. The Swarms are an interesting
concept, but we aren’t told why they were created, or what purpose they
serve, other than ferrying the Bakkujasi around; it’s not even clear
why Vivreki’s story about the egg should have been considered heresy,
since apart from being the property of the church, the Swarms don’t
fulfill any obvious religious function. As for the characters, only
Asoori and Achios are developed enough to be sympathetic; other
characters are two-dimensional (especially Cion and Kilmer, who are
supposedly locked in an intense relationship yet hardly seem to be
aware of one another), behave in arbitrary ways dictated by the plot,
or don’t seem to have any particular reason to exist other than being
part of the motley crew. Occasional inexplicable shifts into present
tense, as well as the author’s habit of chopping scenes into short
segments--sometimes as brief as a single paragraph--are perhaps
intended to impart immediacy, but only serve to push the reader farther
out of the fictional frame.
It’s not often one wants a fantasy novel to be longer, but Swarmthief’s
Dance cries out for at least another hundred pages of world- and
character-building. With that, it might have been an engaging book. As
it is, the bones are there, but most of the flesh is missing.
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