City of the Fallen Sky is a novel in the Pathfinder Tales series from Paizo. It is a good book, if you like fantasy novels. I’d give it three stars out of five, if I had a rating system……
NOTE TO SELF: reply to the tweet by paizo on May 8 with this…
As with all (?) the Pathfinder novels, City of the Fallen Sky takes place in the setting they have created for their Pathfinder game. The primary protagonist is an alchemist, which makes it somewhat unique among fantasy novels. He’s not a great sword fighter or wizard casting all kinds of spells. There is also a ranger-type and a thief/rogue. Those three are the stars of the book. For reasons I won’t get into until the spoiler section, the three of them have to travel across the continent to some ruins. There, they are to find interesting relics, and return them to a powerful person.
None of that is super original, of course. Many fantasy novels involve travel and going into ruins for treasure. But, the book doesn’t dwell on the ruins, or even the treasures they are after all that much. And, the travel across the continent is more about learning about the characters, than it is about travel or the continent. Unlike some novels these days, the unimportant things are mentioned, but not talked about for pages and pages. I liked that a lot.
Two of the characters change and grow in the book, but the third, imo, does not. In retrospect, that isn’t surprisings, especially as I knew pretty early that character was lying about something….
I enjoyed the few fight scenes in the book, but see the spoiler section for one issue I had. They each offered something unique, and featured the alchemist doing alchemy things (and some other stuff, but mostly him).
Overall, you learn about the world a bit, you learn a lot about being an alchemist, and you get some adventure. In other words, you get a nice, traditional, fantasy novel with decent to good characters and pretty good writing.
Spoilers! Here there be Spoilers
You were warned….
I thought it was fairly obvious that the captive was not one of the character’s brothers. Also, while the female character was bad-ass, we still didn’t see much of her doing cool stuff. On the other hand, we didn’t really see the rogue doing cool stuff either, so I don’t think it was a female thing. More of a “the alchemist is the star” thing. Of course, that keeps the book shorter, but it also takes away from the action some. At least for me. And while the battles featured cool stuff, they also were kind of the same to me. The other two do normal, boring, stuff, and the alchemist does something cool.
I really enjoyed the growth of the rogue character, even if that, too, was predictable. I thought the author did a good job of having things happen, or mentioned, though, without dwelling on them. The ending where the rogue protected his friends was well written. We didn’t need his plan and thoughts and all kinds of things….we got a good role-playing section.