nationalmissiledefense asked:
hi frank! im reading The Northern Caves for the first time and im really enjoying it so far. do you have any insight or thoughts about The Northern Caves, now that its been eight years since its completion?
Hi!
(And thanks – I’ve gotten a few new followers since I posted an ask like this a while ago so I’ll try to get back to answering asks)
In my opinion, The Northern Caves is pretty darn great. The whole series (which is the first in a very long time to get published) is very good. The Northern Caves itself is my favorite of the books, although even then it’s a close call. Even The Southern Caves has its moments. (For the uninitiated, “The Southern Caves” is my personal name for the series – I’m really embarrassed to have forgotten that for the duration of the hiatus. That said, I think it was a mistake, because The Southern Caves would be an amazing series title, and there’s a reason that I have used it for the titles of three different books)
Anyway, it’s great. I have a lot of thoughts on it, but I don’t know if they’d be worth posting on tumblr. This is a long post – it starts with a quick summary of the book series and then covers The Northern Caves in more detail, but the main points are:
1. If you liked ASoIaF, you’ll like these books. The worldbuilding is better in these books, and the political machinations better. It has a lot more to offer if you enjoy that sort of thing than the ASOIAF series did. On a practical level, in these books the author does a good job of writing non-ASOIAF material without making it clunky. The story isn’t particularly compelling (it’s much better when you’re reading the whole series – I can’t recommend it without spoilers), but that doesn’t stop it from being a pleasure to read, because it’s actually good fun.
2. If you’re looking for a “big book” to binge, these might be the right things for you. The books are over 700 pages and each is divided into two parts, which are mostly standalone stories. You can read them in any order. I recommend starting at the beginning – you will definitely need to go all the way through the books before reading them, even if you stop and start and start again and read some more, because the books are very dense and it will take a while to figure out all the plot connections.
It takes a long time because the stories are very dense, but I feel like the stories really need to be read from beginning to end. If you don’t care about all the connections – which is fine if you don’t and this isn’t a book series that you plan to spend much time with, but it’s also fine if you aren’t a huge fan and this is what the author wrote when they weren’t feeling quite good enough to write better – the stories have to be read all the way through. So I recommend reading the books in that spirit, even if you could probably skip some of them.
If you want the full experience, read the whole thing. If you can’t do that, read it all the way through before reading the other books in the series.
3. I really liked The Northern Caves as I mentioned before. It’s got very long, very “dense” episodes, with the characters mostly being introduced in one episode and then being much less relevant the next episode, often for years. This isn’t just the case for a few characters – it’s a very common plot element of the series. The author seems to be a real stickler for how much plot he can get into per story, with the stories themselves getting “spun out” and “filled in” as they go along. It’s very “the worldbuilding is here to help” about it, and a lot of the story does feel like it’s a necessary part of the worldbuilding (the “history of civilization” bit is a big part of this). But if you have a lot of free time and a lot of patience, you can read these books in their entirety as they were written. Or, if you are very impatient, you can read them in bite-sized pieces (I do this for example). (I’ve actually posted an ask here about a similar problem I had with another series a while ago – I would get to the end of a story and then realize that there was more story that I hadn’t gotten to, and it was much better, and it would just be fun to go back and read the previous chapter in detail, even if it meant going back to the start and “starting over” – The Northern Caves is great for this because it has these very lengthy, densely plotted “episodes,” so reading some parts in depth really is the best way to go).
Again, my personal opinion. You might like the books less if you read them “chronologically,” but I think the worldbuilding is really strong and makes these books worth reading at all – for me, it outweighs the somewhat awkward pacing.
4. I mentioned that the author writes a very long series of “episodes,” but I haven’t mentioned how long the episodes are until now, and I have to admit that it is a bit of a tease. The Northern Caves has some episodes that are shorter than others and a couple of longer ones. The Northern Caves as a whole is about 1.7 million words. I think the average length of episodes is about 35,000 words or so, so that is about 45 short books (not counting the “books 1” or the prologue).
The average length of these episodes is not very long at all, in comparison to some published novels, but the series is dense enough that it takes a long time to read.
5. I read The Northern Caves in one big swoop. It was one of the big things that got me interested in this series and made me like it, so I’m sort of biased, I guess. But my impression is that many other people read it in sections – in the “normal” way, the way where you read them in “the order they were published,” and in a way that involves skipping a lot of things, because there is a lot of stuff. I read The Northern Caves straight through in about 10 days, when I got really into it, and I got a lot out of it. I would read it again, but slower (which is normal for me, because I’m usually in a much more relaxed reading state after a long hiatus than when I’m reading it for the first time).
(I am reading The Southern Caves right now; it’s been about a week and a half for me. It’s slower going for me at this point. I probably won’t finish this series anytime soon)
So anyway, I hope this gives you an idea of what to expect! If you like any of these things, chances are it is a good bet that you’ll like these books. It’s worth checking out if you don’t know much about the author and are thinking about it. (That is, I’m not going to make you promise you have enough patience/time/etc. to read this, but I feel like I should say some good things.)