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language: English
country: USA
year: 1997
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, science fiction
series: Darksword, #4
dates read: 10.4.25-12.4.25
Legacy of the Darksword is the sequel to the original Darksword trilogy, published a decade later. it is, in a word, awful.
the plot is so incoherent that Weis and Hickman decided to include an epilogue and an appendix explaining it to the reader. set twenty (Earth) years after the end of Triumph of the Darksword, the novel is narrated in first person by Reuven, a refugee from Thimhallan who is Saryon’s adopted son. due to an imminent invasion by an implacable alien species intent on wiping out all humans for reasons that are never explained (they never appear on the page in the novel, which I actually think is maybe the only moderately interesting narrative choice in the whole book), Reuven, Saryon, and Mosiah (who’s a magic cop now, somehow) travel back to Thimhallan to try to convince Joram to give them the new Darksword, which a new prophecy indicates is the only way to defeat the Hch’nyv, and also possibly the “Technomancers”, practitioners of evil magic who remained on Earth when the people of Thimhallan left centuries ago and have been plotting their revenge and rise to ultimate power ever since.
the process of getting to Thimhallan and talking to Joram takes up about the first half of the book. in the seccond half, Reuven, Joram’s daughter Eliza, Mosiah, the mysterious Scylla, and sometimes Simkin travel across Thimhallan to try to rescue Eliza’s parents and stop the Hch’nyv, somehow. some ill-conceived time stuff happens, and then the conclusion is a wild deus ex machina. Merlyn is there.
Reuven could have been an interesting narrator, not least because he is mute and communicates primarily through sign language and occasionally through writing. I’m not entirely sure why they made this choice, however, other than perhaps to ramp up the ~drama~ in some scenes, given that many people appear to be able to fluently understand his signing even without training (which mainly just suggests a profound misunderstanding of the nature of sign languages on Weis and Hickman’s part). it doesn’t seem like they were actually particularly interested in exploring his muteness as a disability, just as a narrative gimmick.
unfortunately, even beyond this, Reuven’s perspective suffers from being both self-consciously A Writer (the conceit is that he was the one who wrote the first three books, on Saryon’s behalf) and also deeply boring. his “characterization” mainly consists of a tedious, performative, and fundamentally lazy USAmerican anglophilia: he and Saryon live in Oxford, of course, drink tea and eat biscuits, listen to the BBC (more on this in a moment lmao), and so on — but, crucially, only as a thin veneer. his language, meanwhile is decidedly not English or British. he calls them “sweaters”, to pick one obvious example. he feels like a Doctor Who blogger from 2012.
not unrelated to Reuven, another key problem with Legacy of the Darksword is that it — perhaps as an overcorrection to the extremely homoerotic original trilogy? — it is absurdly and frankly offensively heterosexual. Reuven doesn’t technically fall in love with Eliza at first sight, but he does “fall in love with her” at approximatly fifth sight, after having known her for about three hours. Reuven’s pov makes a point to tell the reader that he has typically been ~unlucky in love~ by virtue of being repeatedly friendzoned (obviously not in so many words, since this is from 1997, but). since the book is in first person from Reuven’s perspective we don’t even get to see Eliza’s interiority at all, which would at least be a small consolation. fuck off.
another significant problem with Legacy of the Darksword is that its science-fictional world-building is incoherent. it presents us a future where long-distance space travel is trivial and the military uses “phasers” and “communicators” but also people are still mostly driving cars (explicitly described as driven by internal combustion), calling each other on what appear to be normal phones, and talking about the “World Wide Web” (capitalized, of course). the BBC still exists. perhaps most perplexingly, despite the existence of a unified “Earth Force” and the narration informing us that now-King Garald (apparently ruler of the Thimhallan refugees), now-General Boris (apparently head of the Earth Force), and Kevon Smythe (an evil “Technomancer” but also, like…prime minister of Earth or something? I guess?) are the three most powerful people in the world, individual national intelligence agencies including the CIA and “Her Majesty’s Secret Service” apparently still exist for some reason.
for context, we’re also told in this book that the people of Thimhallan left Earth in 1600 (much later than I’d thought, to be honest). we’re told in Forging the Darksword that Thimhallan’s Iron Wars were “centuries” ago, in subjective time, and we’re told in Triumph that approximately ten years passed on Earth for every one that passed in Thimhallan. this would suggest that the year on Earth should be at least, uh, several thousand years in the future.[*] and they’re still driving fucking cars? hello? it is profoundly incoherent, lazy world-building.
Legacy of the Darksword’s greatest flaw, however, is simply this: written ten years after the conclusion of the series, apparently to please “our readers who keep asking us, ‘And then what happens?’”, it has altogether surrendered to nostalgia. to be sure, Saryon and Joram continue to insist that Joram made the correct choice at the end of Triumph of the Darksword, and even Garald now admits that Thimhallan would have collapsed in on itself eventually, but Legacy nonetheless backtracks on several key points, most crucially the recognition in the original trilogy that the problem with Thimhallan was not simply its profoundly unjust economic and political structure but its existence in the first place, as the enclosure of all magic in the universe. though its final (re)instantiation is notionally different from the original trilogy, it is clear from his narration that Reuven longs for the Thimhallan he imagines (we might say: the fake, good version of Thimhallan that lives in his head) and signals to the reader that this superficially Thimhallan, complete with a queen regnant in Merilon and a restless peasantry prepared to revolt (obviously at the evil Technomancers’ instigation) against Emperor Garald, is something desirable, something to be longed for. at the end of the book, humans have simply fled the Hch’nyv to another, distant world where magic is once again abundant. everyone is happily, heterosexually paired off. Joram is at peace.
“what if,” Legacy asks, “we all just went back to sleep again? wouldn’t that be nice?”
moods: dark, wacky
[*] in fact, based on the precise timeline given in Darksword Adventures (the 1988 ttrpg) approximately 8300 years should have passed. sorry, Margaret and Tracy, but the setting you're describing is NOT the year 9900.