That's right, while no one was looking, Christopher Paolini - the man, the myth, the legend - released a new entry in his Inheritance Cycle (formally known as the Inheritance Trilogy, better known as "those Eragon books with the ant dragon on the cover") right as 2018 ended. The last book came out in 2011, and Paolini has mainly been talking about his new Sci-fi novel that he's writing, so no one was really expecting this to come out.
Alright, I'm going to preface this right here and now: I don't like Eragon or any of the Inheritance books. I want to be upfront about that in case anyone reading it is a fan, just so you don't mistake my enthusiasm for the book coming out as too positive, because then the rest of this thread might disappoint you. I'm pretty critical of it for a number of reasons.
And if you're someone whose never heard of Paolini, Eragon, or the Inheritance Cycle, then the basic rundown of the main series is a boy (Eragon, the main character) finds a giant egg, it hatches into a baby dragon, which grants him magic, and he and the dragon go out to explore a Tolkienesque world and defeat the evil king Galbatorix. The series is kind of known as the Twilight Saga of high fantasy books. Criticisms of them range from being generic and cliche to the point of questions about plagerism at one point to having endless amounts filler and nothing happening as Eragon meanders around doing random things with the plot never progressing. Similarly, the characterization in the series ranges from generic to either wierd or nonsensical.
So for those reasons, I was really, really excited about The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm and hoped it would be good.
It's uh...not exactly, but...okay, lets just get into it. The book is divided into 3 parts, with each part divided into 3 chapters.
Part 1: The Fork
Alright, so just to be clear, I haven't read the series in years and don't remember too much of it. I recently reread the first book of the main series, but not the rest, and my main criticism of it was that it relied on tropes and cliches as it's storytelling mechanics that there was sense of artificiality to the writing. In the rest of the series, this would go away to be instead replaced by meandering nonsense and wierdness. It's hard to describe what this artificiality is exactly, but it's like someone understands human behavior in terms of the physical things people do, but is off by a bit. And that hasn't gone away here.
For example, imagine an angry person that isn't verbalizing their anger. How would you imagine they'd act? Well, one common way is that they often act more aggressively in whatever they're doing, right? If they're walking while angry, they aren't merely walking, but stomping forward with forceful strides. If they're typing, they might be smashing their keyboard instead of just tapping the keys like normal. And if they're eating, you can imagine them just being more aggressive with their food, right? Okay, so with that in mind, look at this scene.
This is the most straightforward example I can use to she the artificiality. People who eat while angry tend to eat their food aggressively, yes....but the wording of this is framing her as imagining her being able to literally cannibalize popular girl here. And you might think it's a small wording issue that even good books are guilty of occasionally, but it's sort of a consistent thing where the characters don't QUITE act like real people. Especially the ending to this story. I've described the plot above, but not quite the emotional state that Essie goes through. She goes from feeling shame, humiliation and guilt at pranking her friend at popular girl's behest, to opening up to a stranger at the bar, to being witness to not just a brutal display of violence (which she is briefly involved with as a hostage) that the text explicitely states horrifies her more than any other point in her life where she witnesses not just the deaths of several men, to finally ending with.....this....
I'd like to point out that fork was in the back of a dude's head after having been thrown across the room a few paragraphs ago. FUN TIMES! And no, of course disregarding the lives of thugs is par for course for many fantasy series and pulp series in general. There are ways where one could write a darkly lighthearted tone into it. It's just that it's wierd to have that mere paragraphs after WHOA THIS IS SERIOUS, TRAUMATIZING DANGER. Mister Stabby....
And, of course, the end of it has Eragon saying he learned to face his problems instead of running away, which is just...what...
Okay, lets lay this out again: Eragon is overworked and tired from trying to run his dragon bureaucracy, right? So he's made to chill out by taking a psychic trip to his home continent to check up on his brother, from the perspective of this little girl. His brother lectures her about not running away, then kills a bunch of dudes, and all while Essie does nothing to contribute to the fight. Which this somehow teaches her to face her problems, which teaches Eragon to do the same.
I...don't understand. Eragon's problem in the start of the story is that he was overworked from facing his problems too much and was forced to avoid them as a way of rest. And while I get how Essie needed to learn to face her incredibly mundane issue of feeling awkward for pranking her friend, it's undercut by the fact that she doesn't do anything in the main conflict of the story she's a part of. Her only agency in the story is that she decides to go talk to Tornaq disguised as Murtagh in the first place and open up to him. Once the fight starts, she's either a hostage or she's sitting there freighted. And the story just ends with her being given a magical super fork to turn on her bully. I...what?
Also, this is a minor point, but I just it noted that the actual fight happened for no reason. It's never really established why Baddy McThugFace didn't want to give Murtagh the location of where he found the burnt rocks if he was willing to give him the rock itself. It's implied by the end that he's being mind controlled somehow, but that's not clear, so it makes it seem just kind of arbitrary. It's a lesser complaint in the grand scheme of things, but since I noticed it, might as well include it.
Part 2: The Witch
Okay, this is the story I was most looking forward to actually when I heard it announced because it would serve as a contrast between two author's writing styles. Unfortunately, it didn't amount to much. There is a slight difference in voice, but that's mostly attributable to Angela just being the wackiest character in the franchise. If I hadn't known ahead of time that it was written by someone else, I wouldn't have noticed anything different. Either his sister has the exact same writing style or else he edited her work so closely that it may as well have been written by him.
There really isn't much to talk about, because the entire thing can be summed up with "And here Angela does stuff in her silly way". Angela in the series is kind of a cross between Mad Scientist and Crazy Cat Lady and none of her actions are ever really explained in a way that make sense. Look, Eccentric Characters are basically a genre staple of fantasy, so that's why she exists as a character, but in most other books, there is a method to the madness that you eventually learn to feel for. Yoda is weird because he likes to troll, Gandalf is only silly when he's goofing off with hobbits on his off hours, and Dumbledore uses his silliness as deflection. With Angela, she's just weird and her motives aren't explained and to this day we don't even really know what she wants or what she's doing in a broader sense. She's an ally, but other than that....
This means the relationship is actually kinda cold between them. Eragon regards her wearily and as a potential danger instead of a friend even though she's one of the most recurring figures in his life and apparently traveled all this way to give him her autobiography so he could take some kind of lesson from it. I feel like these characters SHOULD be friends and even the characters seem to act as if they think that, but Eragon thinks one slip up of the tongue would make her want to kill him. And just to take this to the paratext for a moment, Eragon was originally based off Christopher Paolini (he claims Eragon grew into his own character, which is fair enough, but he started as a self insert) and Angela is his sister insert. So, just from that, you'd think these two would have a warmer relationship in the text, since I feel they obviously have a good relationship in life.
But the real meat is the autobiography itself which is...basically nonsensical other than the part about Elva. And the dialogue between them is probably the worst part of the book. It has the artificiality problems mentioned before, but even more stilted. And that's all there is to the Witch chapter, which makes it the most threadbare part of the entire book. And since the previous chapter and the after chapter are about learning some kind of lesson, and Angela specifically writes out that she gave Eragon the autobiography to give him some kind of lesson, but it's not actually stated wtf it is. I guess she was saying he should take Elva off her hands, but I don't see how "I'm tired of taking care of this kid, you wanna do it for me a little" is a lesson (and just so we're clear, I'm only slightly exaggering that wording. She basically says she could take care of Elva by herself, but it's a hassle and is asking Eragon to do her a solid. And it doesn't really explain why she included the part where she trips balls and or the library of the Keeper (who she refuses to talk about when Eragon asks her about him))
Part 3: The Worm
Of the 3, this is definitely the best story of the lot, even though it's overly long and really boring in a lot of places as well. If nothing else, it's moral actually makes sense and connects to the problem Eragon has in the framing device beforehand. He's sad he can't save everyone, and the answer is "Yeah, it sucks, but there's always something that'll be out of your power to help. Shit happens."
But I'm glad we're here now because there is a key identifying problem between all 3 stories that make them really boring to read: The protagonists are all incredibly passive. In each case, Eragon is basically ordered to listen to someone give him an aesop, and in the stories, the characters have no agency. Essie didn't do anything about the thugs that came to her bar, that was all Murtagh, who doesn't get a pov until the fights over. In 2 of the 3 of Angela's stories, she's just kind of having things happen to her, though I will admit that she does take action by convincing Elva to become her apprentice. Then, in the third story, it may sound like Ilgra did a lot, but 70% of the story was "And then she bided her time". She first spends her time training to go jab it's eye out and when that doesn't work, she spends her time practicing magic and planning the dam plan. There's just a lot of things TO characters, but little of characters just doing things.
And often when characters do do things, they are glossed over. Like, look at this. When the 2nd Urgal Wizard comes to town, she needs to convince him to teach her. I want to make it clear that this is probably the most plot critical event in the story. The "Stab him while he sleeps" plan failed and now she's crippled, so if she wants another chnace at the dragon, she NEEDS to learn magic, and besides that she needs a job in the village since she was a warrior beforehand. Now, the urgal wizard coming to town is lucky for her, but he doesn't want to teach her, so they agree to play board games for it. She has to beat him in this game, or she is fucked and her life is over. So, I say again, this is the most important turning point of the story. Without it, she can't make the dam trap, she can't save her town at the end.
It's resolved in a single paragraphs of non-information
I...wait, what? Whats Beater and Biter? Why did Ilgra not expect to win Biter? Does she suffer any social ramifications for fleeing during breaker or is it just that Qarzhad was too stupid to make the right move? This is a major tension point of the story and it's just skimmed over! What the hell?
Also, while I pointed out Paolini's weakness in terms of describing human behavior in part 1 and talked about his weakness in writing dialogue in part 2 (though in fairness, his sister could have written the Angela-Elva dialogue), I have to point out that just Paolini's use of language is bad. "Purple prose" is a really weak criticism that tries to hate on things just for trying to sound elegant when sometimes it totally works, but when it fails, it's often a reader issue for many reasons...but this one is probably the funniest example of it in the book, so enjoy the image of a pregnant dragon
In Conclusion
I wish I could tell you if Paolini has improved as a writer since the Inheritance Cycle's conclusion, but as I said, I barely remember the later books. I read up about them in preparation, so I know plot details (And BOY, are some of the conclusions that series reached wierd), but I would need to reread the rest of the series to get a real feel for that. And I...just don't want to? I'm already rereading Harry Potter and I enjoy those books, and it seems like a waste of time to do that when there are so many good books out there. And given these short stories, yeah, I don't think it's too much to assume the series is bad, even if a lot of the complaints made about it back in the day are bullshit.
That said....yeah, this isn't very good. And I wasn't trying to be overly harsh, but the first two stories are kinda broken in various ways. The first one is just nonsense in terms of the moral it's trying to teach and a huge bore through most of it, with the fight using the fork being the closest it comes to being entertaining. The Angela one is just gibberish for most of it except the part with Elva, which might be coherent but is also the most stilted conversation in the entire book. The third one is the only one that comes together in any sort of fashion with a passably cool ending, but has issues itself. Whether Paolini has gotten better since his Inheritance Cycle days is almost moot when he's clearly still not up to snuff.
Hopefully he will do better with his sci-fi book that's coming out god knows when.
Alright, I'm going to preface this right here and now: I don't like Eragon or any of the Inheritance books. I want to be upfront about that in case anyone reading it is a fan, just so you don't mistake my enthusiasm for the book coming out as too positive, because then the rest of this thread might disappoint you. I'm pretty critical of it for a number of reasons.
And if you're someone whose never heard of Paolini, Eragon, or the Inheritance Cycle, then the basic rundown of the main series is a boy (Eragon, the main character) finds a giant egg, it hatches into a baby dragon, which grants him magic, and he and the dragon go out to explore a Tolkienesque world and defeat the evil king Galbatorix. The series is kind of known as the Twilight Saga of high fantasy books. Criticisms of them range from being generic and cliche to the point of questions about plagerism at one point to having endless amounts filler and nothing happening as Eragon meanders around doing random things with the plot never progressing. Similarly, the characterization in the series ranges from generic to either wierd or nonsensical.
So with that in mind, you might be thinking "Veelk, why are you even reading it if it's such a piece of crap then?" Well, several reasons. For one, regardless of it's quality, Eragon was kind of formative of my childhood in terms of how I read fiction second only to Harry Potter. Not because it was good, but because it wasn't. I read it, and something about it felt...off, in a way that reading Harry Potter and other stories didn't. So I went online to find what people thought about it and I found a lot of anti-fan sites that were basically dedicated to ripping it apart the way you might have seen done to Stephanie Meyer's work or Terry Goodkind's. I write a lot about stories, and if you ever read any of my threads talking about stories, then you should know that the birth of my criticism basically started with me learning to interpret storylines via Eragon. And then I applied what I learned to other stories and I refined my critical analysis for years and years and...here I am, with a new Eragon book. It feels like meeting someone from your childhood years after your grown up. Which actually leads me to the next reason....
I feel guilty. While I maintain that the Eragon books are really, really bad with many flaws worth pointing out, I was unnecessarily nasty towards them and had a lot of flame wars over them. It took me a long time to learn that just because you had a point was no reason to be a dick about it, especially fiction, and Eragon was basically my start with that. Besides that, for all the valid criticism back in those days, there was a lot of it that was not so much. Like, some of them were just stupid, pointless plot dismantling that doesn't actually mean anything. Think of it like a very early, literary version of Cinema Sins. Yeah, that bad. Like, early on in the first book, Eragon is training with a sword with Brom while they're traveling several miles a day, and someone analyzed how many calories a training session would take and pointed out that the food they have would not be able to match their calorie expendature and even then I was like "Who the fuck cares? When did anyone ever calorie count anyone in any other story?" Another time, Christopher Paolini reviewed Rowlings 5th or 6th HP book, and left a compliment like "She has really spread her wings here", and people got offended because they took that to mean he was subliminally suggesting that he could had authority to tell when an author was getting better, so he was in effect saying he was better than Rowling, and that was a whole stupid thing in itself.
And lastly, It is my genuine hope that Christopher Paolini has improved as writer. I'm not kidding here either, because I have this small collection of writers whose works I like but don't love, but support despite that because I want to see them improve their craft to the point where it's good, and Paolini has always been the one I would see improvement in the most. Just to be clear, he's aware of the criticism that has been thrown his way and he has struggled to improve on my many fronts even before this. The Urgals were straight up Orcs in the original book, and when it was pointed out how transparently similar they were to Tolkien's, he basically turned them completely around in to a different culture (while still justifying their original depiction) that was actually on the side of the good guys. Again, has it's own problems, but it shows that Paolini is striving for improvement and I am a fan of that. Besides that, I also am cognizant of the idea that something doesn't have to be good itself to inspire good. For example, I HATE the Wheel of Time series, but I'm a huge fan of Brandon Sanderson's work, who is an author that clearly took a lot of inspiration from WoT which he was a massive fan of. And I know of atleast book series I'm interested in reading that was inspired by the Inheritance Cycle. So, yeah, I'm enthusiastic about writers like Paolini even when I don't like the product itself.
I feel guilty. While I maintain that the Eragon books are really, really bad with many flaws worth pointing out, I was unnecessarily nasty towards them and had a lot of flame wars over them. It took me a long time to learn that just because you had a point was no reason to be a dick about it, especially fiction, and Eragon was basically my start with that. Besides that, for all the valid criticism back in those days, there was a lot of it that was not so much. Like, some of them were just stupid, pointless plot dismantling that doesn't actually mean anything. Think of it like a very early, literary version of Cinema Sins. Yeah, that bad. Like, early on in the first book, Eragon is training with a sword with Brom while they're traveling several miles a day, and someone analyzed how many calories a training session would take and pointed out that the food they have would not be able to match their calorie expendature and even then I was like "Who the fuck cares? When did anyone ever calorie count anyone in any other story?" Another time, Christopher Paolini reviewed Rowlings 5th or 6th HP book, and left a compliment like "She has really spread her wings here", and people got offended because they took that to mean he was subliminally suggesting that he could had authority to tell when an author was getting better, so he was in effect saying he was better than Rowling, and that was a whole stupid thing in itself.
And lastly, It is my genuine hope that Christopher Paolini has improved as writer. I'm not kidding here either, because I have this small collection of writers whose works I like but don't love, but support despite that because I want to see them improve their craft to the point where it's good, and Paolini has always been the one I would see improvement in the most. Just to be clear, he's aware of the criticism that has been thrown his way and he has struggled to improve on my many fronts even before this. The Urgals were straight up Orcs in the original book, and when it was pointed out how transparently similar they were to Tolkien's, he basically turned them completely around in to a different culture (while still justifying their original depiction) that was actually on the side of the good guys. Again, has it's own problems, but it shows that Paolini is striving for improvement and I am a fan of that. Besides that, I also am cognizant of the idea that something doesn't have to be good itself to inspire good. For example, I HATE the Wheel of Time series, but I'm a huge fan of Brandon Sanderson's work, who is an author that clearly took a lot of inspiration from WoT which he was a massive fan of. And I know of atleast book series I'm interested in reading that was inspired by the Inheritance Cycle. So, yeah, I'm enthusiastic about writers like Paolini even when I don't like the product itself.
So for those reasons, I was really, really excited about The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm and hoped it would be good.
It's uh...not exactly, but...okay, lets just get into it. The book is divided into 3 parts, with each part divided into 3 chapters.
Part 1: The Fork
So the first story starts off with Eragon, after having defeated Galbatorix at the end of the main series, basically left Alagaesia, the continent where the main series took place, with a small group of all the races in the story so he could raise a new order of Dragon Riders, and now he's waiting for the dragons to hatch. The opening spends a lot of time explaining the bureaucracy he has to manage before his dragon basically tells him he needs to take a break. So he goes to the room holding a bunch of dragon souls in gems (it's a thing from the main series) and they offer to show him a psychic glimpse of a vision of something happening in Alagaesia.
So the story then changes to the perspective of Essie, whose the daughter of a bartender. She did a kind of shitty thing to a friend of hers because the popular girl in town told her to, and now she regrets it. She really hates the popular girl and feels guilty, so shes planning to run away from home. A guy (Tornaq) walks in the bar and sits down, and Essie decides to strike up a conversation about him out of boredom. This goes on for a while, but the basic gist of it is that he is mysterious and cryptic and she opens up to him about her plans of running away and he talks to her about facing her problems instead of running away. Eventually, another stranger enters the bar, who is the person that the Tornaq was waiting for. The guy demands money, which Tornaq gives him half, which in turn he presents him with a burned rock. Tornaq says he will give him the rest of the money for the location of where he found it, but at that point the guy decides he'd rather just mug him and has 5 other guys in the bar with him. A fight ensues and Tornaq can't use magic against the stranger so instead he enchants the fork he was eating with and uses it as a weapon to fight them off. Essie basically does nothing. The fight ends with the guy rambling about Dreamers and some other stuff (this short story has a LOOOOOOT of sequel hooks like this) and then dies.
Tornaq repeats his advice to Essie about not running away from your problems and instead facing them, which is a lesson she somehow learned by watching him fight off the dudes. He heals her scar (I know I didn't mention it, but because it's really mundane. She has a burn scar on her wrist from where a hot pot of water fell on her, which she's self conscious about, but it's not like it's disfiguring or even meaningful, it's just a scar she got my accident a while back while working in the kitchen and him healing it is written as super meaningful but....it's just an ordinary scar...), gives her the magic fork as a keepsake which she says she is (which she says she's gonna use on the popular girl she hates) and then Tornaq is revealed to be Murtagh (Eragon's half brother from the main series), who is gonna go on to investigate the burnt rocks.
The scene jumps back to Eragon, who thanks the dragons for showing him this vision and says he learned a valuable lesson of not running away, because if Essie can face her schoolyard rival, maybe he can revive an extinct species of magical creatures and police force combination too.....yeah, I know, I'll talk about this in a bit.
So the story then changes to the perspective of Essie, whose the daughter of a bartender. She did a kind of shitty thing to a friend of hers because the popular girl in town told her to, and now she regrets it. She really hates the popular girl and feels guilty, so shes planning to run away from home. A guy (Tornaq) walks in the bar and sits down, and Essie decides to strike up a conversation about him out of boredom. This goes on for a while, but the basic gist of it is that he is mysterious and cryptic and she opens up to him about her plans of running away and he talks to her about facing her problems instead of running away. Eventually, another stranger enters the bar, who is the person that the Tornaq was waiting for. The guy demands money, which Tornaq gives him half, which in turn he presents him with a burned rock. Tornaq says he will give him the rest of the money for the location of where he found it, but at that point the guy decides he'd rather just mug him and has 5 other guys in the bar with him. A fight ensues and Tornaq can't use magic against the stranger so instead he enchants the fork he was eating with and uses it as a weapon to fight them off. Essie basically does nothing. The fight ends with the guy rambling about Dreamers and some other stuff (this short story has a LOOOOOOT of sequel hooks like this) and then dies.
Tornaq repeats his advice to Essie about not running away from your problems and instead facing them, which is a lesson she somehow learned by watching him fight off the dudes. He heals her scar (I know I didn't mention it, but because it's really mundane. She has a burn scar on her wrist from where a hot pot of water fell on her, which she's self conscious about, but it's not like it's disfiguring or even meaningful, it's just a scar she got my accident a while back while working in the kitchen and him healing it is written as super meaningful but....it's just an ordinary scar...), gives her the magic fork as a keepsake which she says she is (which she says she's gonna use on the popular girl she hates) and then Tornaq is revealed to be Murtagh (Eragon's half brother from the main series), who is gonna go on to investigate the burnt rocks.
The scene jumps back to Eragon, who thanks the dragons for showing him this vision and says he learned a valuable lesson of not running away, because if Essie can face her schoolyard rival, maybe he can revive an extinct species of magical creatures and police force combination too.....yeah, I know, I'll talk about this in a bit.
Alright, so just to be clear, I haven't read the series in years and don't remember too much of it. I recently reread the first book of the main series, but not the rest, and my main criticism of it was that it relied on tropes and cliches as it's storytelling mechanics that there was sense of artificiality to the writing. In the rest of the series, this would go away to be instead replaced by meandering nonsense and wierdness. It's hard to describe what this artificiality is exactly, but it's like someone understands human behavior in terms of the physical things people do, but is off by a bit. And that hasn't gone away here.
For example, imagine an angry person that isn't verbalizing their anger. How would you imagine they'd act? Well, one common way is that they often act more aggressively in whatever they're doing, right? If they're walking while angry, they aren't merely walking, but stomping forward with forceful strides. If they're typing, they might be smashing their keyboard instead of just tapping the keys like normal. And if they're eating, you can imagine them just being more aggressive with their food, right? Okay, so with that in mind, look at this scene.
This is the most straightforward example I can use to she the artificiality. People who eat while angry tend to eat their food aggressively, yes....but the wording of this is framing her as imagining her being able to literally cannibalize popular girl here. And you might think it's a small wording issue that even good books are guilty of occasionally, but it's sort of a consistent thing where the characters don't QUITE act like real people. Especially the ending to this story. I've described the plot above, but not quite the emotional state that Essie goes through. She goes from feeling shame, humiliation and guilt at pranking her friend at popular girl's behest, to opening up to a stranger at the bar, to being witness to not just a brutal display of violence (which she is briefly involved with as a hostage) that the text explicitely states horrifies her more than any other point in her life where she witnesses not just the deaths of several men, to finally ending with.....this....
I'd like to point out that fork was in the back of a dude's head after having been thrown across the room a few paragraphs ago. FUN TIMES! And no, of course disregarding the lives of thugs is par for course for many fantasy series and pulp series in general. There are ways where one could write a darkly lighthearted tone into it. It's just that it's wierd to have that mere paragraphs after WHOA THIS IS SERIOUS, TRAUMATIZING DANGER. Mister Stabby....
And, of course, the end of it has Eragon saying he learned to face his problems instead of running away, which is just...what...
Okay, lets lay this out again: Eragon is overworked and tired from trying to run his dragon bureaucracy, right? So he's made to chill out by taking a psychic trip to his home continent to check up on his brother, from the perspective of this little girl. His brother lectures her about not running away, then kills a bunch of dudes, and all while Essie does nothing to contribute to the fight. Which this somehow teaches her to face her problems, which teaches Eragon to do the same.
I...don't understand. Eragon's problem in the start of the story is that he was overworked from facing his problems too much and was forced to avoid them as a way of rest. And while I get how Essie needed to learn to face her incredibly mundane issue of feeling awkward for pranking her friend, it's undercut by the fact that she doesn't do anything in the main conflict of the story she's a part of. Her only agency in the story is that she decides to go talk to Tornaq disguised as Murtagh in the first place and open up to him. Once the fight starts, she's either a hostage or she's sitting there freighted. And the story just ends with her being given a magical super fork to turn on her bully. I...what?
Also, this is a minor point, but I just it noted that the actual fight happened for no reason. It's never really established why Baddy McThugFace didn't want to give Murtagh the location of where he found the burnt rocks if he was willing to give him the rock itself. It's implied by the end that he's being mind controlled somehow, but that's not clear, so it makes it seem just kind of arbitrary. It's a lesser complaint in the grand scheme of things, but since I noticed it, might as well include it.
Part 2: The Witch
This is the shortest of the section, and also the only one that actually contains writing that isn't by Christopher Paolini! That's right, his sister, Angela Paolini, actually wrote one of the 3 chapters here, the middle one that is her autobiography, since the character of Angela the Witch is based on her.
Okay, the basic gist is that Angela is visiting Eragon. They chitchat about stuff, most of it unimportant except Elva, who (strap in, long story) got accidentally cursed by Eragon as a baby because he misspoke a spell when he was told to bless a lady's baby (yes, seriously), and now grew up super fast (She's 4, looks 10) and had to protect others from misfortune, but also could foretell the future because of it...basically she just hates everyone because everytime shit goes down, she's forced into block it herself and she's just a kid despite the magic and just is kinda fucked up over it. At some point she became Angela's apprentice. Anyway, Angela is there to drop off her in-progress autobiography, which she is writing a random chapter at a time, and gives it to Eragon to get his feedback.
The next chapter is her autobiography. It basically includes the time she was an ordinary girl and thought the stars revolved around the earth, but one night where she was staring up at the sky, she had a spontaneous out of body experience (I don't know why. She says "Thinking of it now, it's obvious what natural processes were affecting my body", but unless she injested psychodelics offscreen, I have no idea wtf she's talking about) that showed her the universe and planets and shit. Then she talks about her apprentice ship to someone called "The Keeper of the Tower" who was not teaching her enough so she was going to steal from his library but something went wrong and "the library shifted" and the chapter ends there. After that, is the most lengthy chapter by far where she convinces Elva to be her apprentice.
Then the next chapter is Eragon asking "what the fuck was that" and then somehow ends with Angela handing off apprentice ship of Elva to Eragon, which he accepts since he still feels guilty over fucking up the wording of his blessing on her.
Okay, the basic gist is that Angela is visiting Eragon. They chitchat about stuff, most of it unimportant except Elva, who (strap in, long story) got accidentally cursed by Eragon as a baby because he misspoke a spell when he was told to bless a lady's baby (yes, seriously), and now grew up super fast (She's 4, looks 10) and had to protect others from misfortune, but also could foretell the future because of it...basically she just hates everyone because everytime shit goes down, she's forced into block it herself and she's just a kid despite the magic and just is kinda fucked up over it. At some point she became Angela's apprentice. Anyway, Angela is there to drop off her in-progress autobiography, which she is writing a random chapter at a time, and gives it to Eragon to get his feedback.
The next chapter is her autobiography. It basically includes the time she was an ordinary girl and thought the stars revolved around the earth, but one night where she was staring up at the sky, she had a spontaneous out of body experience (I don't know why. She says "Thinking of it now, it's obvious what natural processes were affecting my body", but unless she injested psychodelics offscreen, I have no idea wtf she's talking about) that showed her the universe and planets and shit. Then she talks about her apprentice ship to someone called "The Keeper of the Tower" who was not teaching her enough so she was going to steal from his library but something went wrong and "the library shifted" and the chapter ends there. After that, is the most lengthy chapter by far where she convinces Elva to be her apprentice.
Then the next chapter is Eragon asking "what the fuck was that" and then somehow ends with Angela handing off apprentice ship of Elva to Eragon, which he accepts since he still feels guilty over fucking up the wording of his blessing on her.
Okay, this is the story I was most looking forward to actually when I heard it announced because it would serve as a contrast between two author's writing styles. Unfortunately, it didn't amount to much. There is a slight difference in voice, but that's mostly attributable to Angela just being the wackiest character in the franchise. If I hadn't known ahead of time that it was written by someone else, I wouldn't have noticed anything different. Either his sister has the exact same writing style or else he edited her work so closely that it may as well have been written by him.
There really isn't much to talk about, because the entire thing can be summed up with "And here Angela does stuff in her silly way". Angela in the series is kind of a cross between Mad Scientist and Crazy Cat Lady and none of her actions are ever really explained in a way that make sense. Look, Eccentric Characters are basically a genre staple of fantasy, so that's why she exists as a character, but in most other books, there is a method to the madness that you eventually learn to feel for. Yoda is weird because he likes to troll, Gandalf is only silly when he's goofing off with hobbits on his off hours, and Dumbledore uses his silliness as deflection. With Angela, she's just weird and her motives aren't explained and to this day we don't even really know what she wants or what she's doing in a broader sense. She's an ally, but other than that....
This means the relationship is actually kinda cold between them. Eragon regards her wearily and as a potential danger instead of a friend even though she's one of the most recurring figures in his life and apparently traveled all this way to give him her autobiography so he could take some kind of lesson from it. I feel like these characters SHOULD be friends and even the characters seem to act as if they think that, but Eragon thinks one slip up of the tongue would make her want to kill him. And just to take this to the paratext for a moment, Eragon was originally based off Christopher Paolini (he claims Eragon grew into his own character, which is fair enough, but he started as a self insert) and Angela is his sister insert. So, just from that, you'd think these two would have a warmer relationship in the text, since I feel they obviously have a good relationship in life.
But the real meat is the autobiography itself which is...basically nonsensical other than the part about Elva. And the dialogue between them is probably the worst part of the book. It has the artificiality problems mentioned before, but even more stilted. And that's all there is to the Witch chapter, which makes it the most threadbare part of the entire book. And since the previous chapter and the after chapter are about learning some kind of lesson, and Angela specifically writes out that she gave Eragon the autobiography to give him some kind of lesson, but it's not actually stated wtf it is. I guess she was saying he should take Elva off her hands, but I don't see how "I'm tired of taking care of this kid, you wanna do it for me a little" is a lesson (and just so we're clear, I'm only slightly exaggering that wording. She basically says she could take care of Elva by herself, but it's a hassle and is asking Eragon to do her a solid. And it doesn't really explain why she included the part where she trips balls and or the library of the Keeper (who she refuses to talk about when Eragon asks her about him))
Part 3: The Worm
We're back to Eragon going about his day when he hears there's trouble in the mines that the dwarves are digging. There's a cave in, 2 of them die, and Eragon is moved to tears by this even though he didn't know them very well. He's really bummed he couldn't save them, despite all his power. The Urgals decide to cheer him up by telling him a folk tale.
If the Witch section of the book felt threadbare, it's because this one feels disproprortionately long. With each of the 3 parts being divided into 3 chapters, there are 9 chapters total (10 if you include the "About names" afterward the book that has a little worldbuilding) in this 282 book. Of those 9 chapters, the 8th chapter is 113 pages, with the entire 3rd part taking up 140 pages. Literally half the book is devoted to this one. Despite that, this is a pretty simple tale.
There's an urgal clan, and one day they're attacked by a dragon (featured on the cover), who eats their livestock and kills a good part of their clan. Having eaten his fill (AND BOY DID HE, YOU'LL SEE IN A BIT), he fucked off to a nearby mountain and slept. Clans went back to try and kill him, but the only way they could do that is to stab his eye, which they didn't even get to as dragon just swiped them off the mountain with his tale before they even got to him. So they just had to sit there and rebuild. The dragon occasionally woke up and ate more of their livestock, but not as much as he did before, and didn't kill anyone, then went back to sleep on his mountain. Eventually, an urgal wizard came by and decided to try and kill the dragon, but instead he just got fucked up. Now, the main character of this tale is a female urgal called Ilgra who saw her dad getting killed by the dragon, so she vowed revenge. She got a spear, and she learned from the first of the clans who went up to fight him, so she made sure to be all sneaky when climbing. Ilgra got to his eye while he was sleeping (he kept one eye open while doing so) and she tried to stab him...but he woke up at the worst possible moment and blinked her spear away. She fell from the mountain, broke her leg, and the dragon didn't even bother going after her.
She found the staff of the urgal wizard, but her leg being broken she couldn't be a warrior anymore. So instead she decided she'd kill the dragon with magic. But she didn't know magic, so she waited until another urgal wizard came by to her village, which eventually happened. And in case it wasn't clear, this story is taking place over years, so the dragon sleeping on the mountain and just coming down every so often to snack on the urgals livestock has just become a sort of normal occurance they deal with, like a storm or whatever. Ilgra is the only one whose still salty about her dad dying so she still wants revenge on the dragon, everyone else has kinda gotten over it. In fact, the Dragon in some cases has become something of a protector of the urgal clan because it's his food, so he stops other urgals from raiding them.
Anyway, as she learns about magic, she knows she needs something radical to kill it. So she basically has a river nearby she uses magic to build a huge ass dam and intends to lure the dragon into the valley below and then break the dam on it. However, giant bird demons attack (they're these creatures from the main series, giant winged monst- okay, look, they're basically the Fell Beasts from LotR), which forces her to call the dragon. The dragon comes to fuck up the giant birds, but the birds are actually formidable against him 2 on 1, so Ilgra leads them to the dam trap and unleashes the water there. One giant bird is killed, the dragon and the other giant bird is stunned. She can kill the dragon now, but the bird wakes up and is about to kill her sister, so instead she lets the dragon wake up, who then kills the bird. The dragon acknowledges her since he recognizes the trap she set up, then leaves, and Ilgra realizes that the nature of the world is to have some giant fuck up monster dicking you over, so she's less salty about the dragon now. Which isn't to say she's not going to try to keep killing it, but I guess she takes it less personally now.
The urgals conclude the story and eragon takes the same lesson Ilgra did, in that there is always some shit going on and you can't do anything about it.
If the Witch section of the book felt threadbare, it's because this one feels disproprortionately long. With each of the 3 parts being divided into 3 chapters, there are 9 chapters total (10 if you include the "About names" afterward the book that has a little worldbuilding) in this 282 book. Of those 9 chapters, the 8th chapter is 113 pages, with the entire 3rd part taking up 140 pages. Literally half the book is devoted to this one. Despite that, this is a pretty simple tale.
There's an urgal clan, and one day they're attacked by a dragon (featured on the cover), who eats their livestock and kills a good part of their clan. Having eaten his fill (AND BOY DID HE, YOU'LL SEE IN A BIT), he fucked off to a nearby mountain and slept. Clans went back to try and kill him, but the only way they could do that is to stab his eye, which they didn't even get to as dragon just swiped them off the mountain with his tale before they even got to him. So they just had to sit there and rebuild. The dragon occasionally woke up and ate more of their livestock, but not as much as he did before, and didn't kill anyone, then went back to sleep on his mountain. Eventually, an urgal wizard came by and decided to try and kill the dragon, but instead he just got fucked up. Now, the main character of this tale is a female urgal called Ilgra who saw her dad getting killed by the dragon, so she vowed revenge. She got a spear, and she learned from the first of the clans who went up to fight him, so she made sure to be all sneaky when climbing. Ilgra got to his eye while he was sleeping (he kept one eye open while doing so) and she tried to stab him...but he woke up at the worst possible moment and blinked her spear away. She fell from the mountain, broke her leg, and the dragon didn't even bother going after her.
She found the staff of the urgal wizard, but her leg being broken she couldn't be a warrior anymore. So instead she decided she'd kill the dragon with magic. But she didn't know magic, so she waited until another urgal wizard came by to her village, which eventually happened. And in case it wasn't clear, this story is taking place over years, so the dragon sleeping on the mountain and just coming down every so often to snack on the urgals livestock has just become a sort of normal occurance they deal with, like a storm or whatever. Ilgra is the only one whose still salty about her dad dying so she still wants revenge on the dragon, everyone else has kinda gotten over it. In fact, the Dragon in some cases has become something of a protector of the urgal clan because it's his food, so he stops other urgals from raiding them.
Anyway, as she learns about magic, she knows she needs something radical to kill it. So she basically has a river nearby she uses magic to build a huge ass dam and intends to lure the dragon into the valley below and then break the dam on it. However, giant bird demons attack (they're these creatures from the main series, giant winged monst- okay, look, they're basically the Fell Beasts from LotR), which forces her to call the dragon. The dragon comes to fuck up the giant birds, but the birds are actually formidable against him 2 on 1, so Ilgra leads them to the dam trap and unleashes the water there. One giant bird is killed, the dragon and the other giant bird is stunned. She can kill the dragon now, but the bird wakes up and is about to kill her sister, so instead she lets the dragon wake up, who then kills the bird. The dragon acknowledges her since he recognizes the trap she set up, then leaves, and Ilgra realizes that the nature of the world is to have some giant fuck up monster dicking you over, so she's less salty about the dragon now. Which isn't to say she's not going to try to keep killing it, but I guess she takes it less personally now.
The urgals conclude the story and eragon takes the same lesson Ilgra did, in that there is always some shit going on and you can't do anything about it.
Of the 3, this is definitely the best story of the lot, even though it's overly long and really boring in a lot of places as well. If nothing else, it's moral actually makes sense and connects to the problem Eragon has in the framing device beforehand. He's sad he can't save everyone, and the answer is "Yeah, it sucks, but there's always something that'll be out of your power to help. Shit happens."
But I'm glad we're here now because there is a key identifying problem between all 3 stories that make them really boring to read: The protagonists are all incredibly passive. In each case, Eragon is basically ordered to listen to someone give him an aesop, and in the stories, the characters have no agency. Essie didn't do anything about the thugs that came to her bar, that was all Murtagh, who doesn't get a pov until the fights over. In 2 of the 3 of Angela's stories, she's just kind of having things happen to her, though I will admit that she does take action by convincing Elva to become her apprentice. Then, in the third story, it may sound like Ilgra did a lot, but 70% of the story was "And then she bided her time". She first spends her time training to go jab it's eye out and when that doesn't work, she spends her time practicing magic and planning the dam plan. There's just a lot of things TO characters, but little of characters just doing things.
And often when characters do do things, they are glossed over. Like, look at this. When the 2nd Urgal Wizard comes to town, she needs to convince him to teach her. I want to make it clear that this is probably the most plot critical event in the story. The "Stab him while he sleeps" plan failed and now she's crippled, so if she wants another chnace at the dragon, she NEEDS to learn magic, and besides that she needs a job in the village since she was a warrior beforehand. Now, the urgal wizard coming to town is lucky for her, but he doesn't want to teach her, so they agree to play board games for it. She has to beat him in this game, or she is fucked and her life is over. So, I say again, this is the most important turning point of the story. Without it, she can't make the dam trap, she can't save her town at the end.
It's resolved in a single paragraphs of non-information
I...wait, what? Whats Beater and Biter? Why did Ilgra not expect to win Biter? Does she suffer any social ramifications for fleeing during breaker or is it just that Qarzhad was too stupid to make the right move? This is a major tension point of the story and it's just skimmed over! What the hell?
Also, while I pointed out Paolini's weakness in terms of describing human behavior in part 1 and talked about his weakness in writing dialogue in part 2 (though in fairness, his sister could have written the Angela-Elva dialogue), I have to point out that just Paolini's use of language is bad. "Purple prose" is a really weak criticism that tries to hate on things just for trying to sound elegant when sometimes it totally works, but when it fails, it's often a reader issue for many reasons...but this one is probably the funniest example of it in the book, so enjoy the image of a pregnant dragon
In Conclusion
I wish I could tell you if Paolini has improved as a writer since the Inheritance Cycle's conclusion, but as I said, I barely remember the later books. I read up about them in preparation, so I know plot details (And BOY, are some of the conclusions that series reached wierd), but I would need to reread the rest of the series to get a real feel for that. And I...just don't want to? I'm already rereading Harry Potter and I enjoy those books, and it seems like a waste of time to do that when there are so many good books out there. And given these short stories, yeah, I don't think it's too much to assume the series is bad, even if a lot of the complaints made about it back in the day are bullshit.
That said....yeah, this isn't very good. And I wasn't trying to be overly harsh, but the first two stories are kinda broken in various ways. The first one is just nonsense in terms of the moral it's trying to teach and a huge bore through most of it, with the fight using the fork being the closest it comes to being entertaining. The Angela one is just gibberish for most of it except the part with Elva, which might be coherent but is also the most stilted conversation in the entire book. The third one is the only one that comes together in any sort of fashion with a passably cool ending, but has issues itself. Whether Paolini has gotten better since his Inheritance Cycle days is almost moot when he's clearly still not up to snuff.
Hopefully he will do better with his sci-fi book that's coming out god knows when.
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