A very positive review of A SEA OF SKULLS by a reader well-read in epic fantasy.
This was an absolutely PHENOMENAL book from start to finish! Better than the first in the series! The depth of worldbuilding found in here is rivaled only by Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Nobody has yet beaten Tolkien. And in my opinion, nobody ever will. But Day has certainly surpassed Forgotten Realms in depth and has, after this book, surpassed Martin’s work in quality and scope (Even if we’re only considering the first 3 since the last 2 books in ASOIAF are simply nowhere near as good).
To illustrate the caliber of Day’s worldbuilding, I was reading through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn concurrently, which is praised as having some of the greatest worldbuilding of all time! And while Mistborn is justly praised for its really strong worldbuilding, it’s simply nowhere near as good as the Arts of Dark and Light, which has entire cultures, races, religions, even languages fleshed out. “A Sea of Skulls” operates on an entirely different level of depth and complexity. This comparison, though perhaps unfair given the differences in subgenre, highlights the exceptional quality of Day’s work in this regard…
Bottom line: Objectively, this series is already better than “A Song of Ice and Fire” and it will remain that way assuming it doesn’t deviate in quality in a similar manner as Martin’s series did. It’s better than Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, better than Erikson’s Malazan, and somehow even better than Abercrombie’s First Law. The only series better than AODAL is Lord of the Rings, and Vox Day WILL NOT beat Tolkien. It’s not going to happen, BUT… if he keeps this up, he might just find himself moving from “pretty good author” to “one of the greats” territory, alongside writers like Mieville, Stephenson, and Weir.
My chief takeaway from this? We’d better do yet another round of proofreading before we print the interiors of the leather editions. Any volunteers who HAVE NOT proofread it already? It’s always amazing how two different proofreaders can each come up with a list of 100 typos, and only about 20 of them are in common.
However, I will assure the reviewer and anyone else who is interested that all of the major threads can and will be wrapped up in A GRAVE OF GODS. When I was contemplating the possibility of five books, I was not counting Summa Elvetica and I wasn’t sure about how big I was going to make the scope of the series. But after seeing how Martin fell apart and hasn’t been able to complete his, I decided to further discipline my focus and keep the primary series to three books.
In related news, we’ve settled on the names for the four German editions, and Summa Elvetica will be an official part of the series. Two of the translations are already completed and will be released sometime this winter.
- Die Seelenlosen
- Der Knochenthron
- Das Schädelmeer
- Das Göttergrab