Speaking as someone who was an utterly voracious reader as a kid, it's pretty rare for me to run into a fairly well-known fantasy series from the 80s that a) I've never read, and b) still holds up really well today. The Taltos books by Steven Brust are that. I had kind of vaguely heard of them, think I might have tried to read one of the later ones about 20 years ago and bounced off it, but that was all I knew until I borrowed the first one, Jhereg, from rachelmanija when I visited her at the end of March to read on the plane. I devoured it. I wanted more. I just got done with book 4, Taltos, today. And there are so many more of them to read! They're great! I love everybody in this (weird, jhereg-and-assassin-filled) bar.

Based on what I knew about the series, I was expecting "snarky asshole loner hero"; what I was not expecting was a snarky asshole who claims to be a loner while absolutely tripping over himself at every turn to do everything he can for his friends, right up to dying for them (repeatedly). And his friends are just that loyal to him, too. The narrative voice is delightful -- it's very contemporary urban fantasy; the books themselves are a sort of weirdo SFF/high-fantasy/urban-fantasy mashup. The worldbuilding is strange and original and fun. And (not at all a given in a 1980s fantasy series) the books do great with women, both in the way that individual female characters are written, and the worldbuilding in which it is perfectly unremarkable to encounter female mooks, guards, businesspeople, farmers, ship captains, and the like.

Spoilery comments on individual books follow.


JHEREG - Had me at hello and never let up. I loved the world and the characters; I loved the twisty heist-style plot; I loved that the entire plot revolves around a group of people with conflicting loyalties who all care about each other and are all trying their best to resolve a seemingly unresolvable conflict of duty without hurting each other. I really love that Vlad actually feels plausible as both a decent person and an assassin/mob boss (at least, he does to me), and I TOTALLY fell for the fakeout on Morrolan's death, though I guessed ahead of time the loophole that they found with Aliera's sword and soul.

YENDI - I wasn't quite as into the plot of this book as I might otherwise have been because I already knew about Vlad and Cawti breaking up (see below) and therefore wasn't really feeling the romance, but all the things I liked about the previous book were also great here: twisty plot, friendship/loyalty, more details on the series' weirdo worldbuilding. I love how Vlad will just drop casual comments like "It'd be nice if we had a real sky instead of this glowing orange-red thing" that leave you going "wait, what?" I also really love how both the Dragaerans and Easterners think of themselves as human and the other group as not, and how we still don't have any idea what is actually going on with the two groups. Is this far-future sci-fi in which both groups are the descendants of long-ago colonists who were experimented on, or a purely magic world, or some hybrid of the two? The fact that the Easterners think of the Dragaerans as elves/faeries is fascinating and also clearly not the whole story either. I think the only thing we reasonably know for sure (so far) is that they're probably both derived from the same base population, even if they refuse to admit it.

TECKLA - I was fortunately warned ahead of time that this book is pretty dark and Vlad and Cawti break up, because I had asked Rachel if this series had any "jump the shark"/"stop reading here" points and she told me about it. So going into it knowing this book was going to be darker than the preceding ones, I ended up really loving it a lot. I love, especially, that Vlad isn't put in the right simply by virtue of being the protagonist and viewpoint character, and that the revolutionaries were shown to both have a good case and a decent chance of pulling off what they wanted to pull off, even though Vlad's cynicism also makes sense for him as a character. I also really enjoyed the book deepening the worldbuilding by dealing with serfs and farmers in their society, the question of "who grows the food in fantasyland" being central to this book. It wasn't a particularly happy book, but it was a really good one and I appreciated that Vlad didn't end up sailing entirely over the moral event horizon, which I was kind of worried about for awhile there. Also, using Vlad's laundry list as a framing device for the book is brilliant.

TALTOS - That was SO GOOD and is probably my favorite book in the series so far. Vlad and Morrolan bickering their way through the afterlife! Baby Loiosh calling Vlad "Mama!" The wonderful weirdness of the Paths of the Dead! Vlad insisting that he could NEVER EVER be friends with Dragaerans, never, nope, not gonna happen, while nearly getting himself killed trying to save Morrolan and Aliera ... I gotta say this book makes an excellent case for why the two Dragon cousins are so completely ride-or-die for Vlad in the first three books.

I was a little puzzled by the timeline on these books because I think Aliera mentions in JHEREG that she's only had Pathfinder for a few months, but this is the book in which she gets Pathfinder (that's Kieron's sword, right?) and it feels, character- and plotwise, like a lot more than a few months have elapsed between this and JHEREG. That being said, the task of keeping these books' timeline straight over decades must be something else, so a few continuity errors are bound to slip through, and I might be misremembering/misinterpreting anyway; I don't think I would have even noticed if I hadn't just read JHEREG a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, I am head over heels for this series right now and will be running off to start reading PHOENIX shortly.