This is a short book discussing a strange black worm apocalypse that engulfs the entire world. These worms especially hate relics but seem to want to kill everything in a sort of torpid, lazy fashion. Grimgar has always stretched the bounds of reasonableness in its storylines, so this isn't very surprising. Nothing can surprise me when it comes to this series.
For a long time the story has been about humans vs. sentient non-humans, but now both groups are hunted and powerless before the worms.
The plot can go any direction it pleases, the important thing is how characters feel, and Haruhiro gives another master course on describing an indescribable emotion. The author is really good at getting inside someone's head and explaining it in easily understood words.
Sadly Kuzaku and Setora are alive but now they're villainous undead, so the tragedy from last book is just as tragic as before. Clearly there's still a lot of loose ends to tie up before the series can end.
Soul of Fire was a much deeper and more appealing novel. It described the fatal flaw of democracy -- that elites can lie to the masses and convince them to vote for things against their own interest, a process that Richard is powerless to fight against with mere truth. The lower classes naturally trust the people they've been taught are their betters and authority figures, it's part of human nature, so no matter how outlandish their lies it's impossible to get the masses to stop believing in them. The proper answer to fraud is force -- shut their lying mouths. Argument doesn't work. It doesn't work in the real world, and it doesn't work in The Sword of Truth either. How do you argue with a bunch of ten year old children chanting "Give peace a chance! Give peace a chance!" It's all so ludicrous and deranged. These people are too stupid and ignorant to be reasoned with, nothing you say will ever get through to them. They must be forced to do the right thing, nobody is ever convinced.
Not only did Terry Goodkind expose the failure of democracy, he also wrote about the stupid victimology cult of the west and denounced it in the strongest possible terms. He created an entire fictional country where one ethnicity had conquered and civilized another, but in time had grown to feel guilty about it and shared power with the people they had conquered. Eventually the conquered got the upper hand and leveraged the guilt about what had happened in the past to completely enslave and abuse the original rulers, who placidly accepted their horrible new state as somehow deserved. Now the originally advanced people are no longer allowed to read, take any positions of authority, talk back to anyone of the other ethnicity, or even deny their sexual advances. All willingly, all placidly, all without a fight. Even though they're 85% of the population.
It's impressive how prescient this parable hidden as fiction was. This was written in the 1990's. And yet it foresaw everything that is happening in Europe, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand today. We're all bending over backwards for the fake crimes of our ancestors and letting minorities rule over us. Look at the United Kingdom with their Indian Prime Minister and Pakistani Mayor of London. The deal is getting worse for us all the time, but we never give a peep about it, we just roll over and die and apologize as they rape and pillage everything we built up.
Terry Goodkind is dead, so fortunately he didn't have to see the failure of his books to persuade anyone not to act like the Hakens did in Soul of Fire. Millions of readers loved his book, but apparently none of them got his message, that maybe we shouldn't let the inferior supplant the superior, but instead we should be proud of our superiority and continue progressing as our ancestors had. My only surmise is he wrote the fictional kingdom so euphemistically that none of his readers grasped the parallels and so they all thought it was a silly work of fiction with no bearing on real world politics. Undone by his own artistic subtlety and craft.
I also read a cute book called Little Sister Party. It's the story of a world where you can choose what next skill you get every time you level up, and it can be anything, only restricted by your imagination and desire. This creates very interesting skillsets that can't really be called 'classes' like Paladin, Priest or Warrior anymore. They then go on adventures fighting goblins and trolls and the like. On top of that the guy is enjoying an erotic not-quite-romantic harem with not-quite-little-sisters which is always nice. And on top of that the author has employed new AI art to produce magnificent portraits of these cute imoutos. To think that AI can be this detailed and energetic and emotionally pure. I'm amazed:
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