RULERS OF THE DARKNESS

Fourth outing, with a cliffhanger that promises more, in Turtledove’s tangled fantasy epic of empires fighting a pointless war in which magic kills just as horribly as TNT. It’s too late to say that others have done the sorcery-instead-of-science gimmick better and more elegantly. In his continuing effort to show that human history, even in a drably imagined world reminiscent of late–19th-century Europe, is pluralistic at every level, Turtledove (Through the Darkness, 2001, etc.) piles on subplots involving over a hundred characters in a story that’s too complicated to achieve any momentum. Under the possibly mad King Mezentio, the violent forces of Algrave try to conquer the no-less-aggressive Kingdom of Unkerlant, with the Algravians being a bit worse because they derive the source of their magical powers from murdering the Kuusamians, Turtledove’s vague stand-ins for Jews. With many other minority peoples involved, some willingly, some not, Turtledove has bleached his setting of the customary sense of wonder that magic fantasies can offer, substituting an oppressively gritty realism that comes off half-baked. Instead of telephones, soldiers communicate by magic crystals, shoot beams of fire from magic staffs, fly dragons that drop incendiary eggs, ride behemoths over land, go under the sea clinging to submersing leviathans, and move supplies on trains that run along ley lines. Meanwhile, in an attempt to oppose Algrave’s murderous sorcery, Mages are developing magic that can alter the flow of time, adding even more complexity to a story that desperately needs a sense of direction.

Though he brings a tender compassion to many of his characters, Turtledove is no Tolstoy. This vast portrait of nations in conflict makes War and Peace a breezy read.