Daniel Abraham is Amazing

Since I don't have my new library card, (yet), I don't have a stack of books in my room just waiting for me to read them. Therefore, when I ran out of new books to read, I turned to my bookshelf and tried desperately to find some I haven't read a dozen times before.

I ended up selecting my 2008 Anthology of Fantasy and Horror short stories, the first story of which is my third favorite, "The Cambist and the Lord Iron." A cambist is a money-changer, and that story is the only one to have ever made economics seem interesting to me.

Something I noticed, though, in reading the story, was the name of the author, Daniel Abraham. I've read the story twice before, but not for a while, so I decided to read the author's bio about Mr. Abraham to see if there was a reason his name rang familiar to me. It turned out there was.

A few months back I heard about a quartet of books called, "The Long Price Quartet," a fantasy world in which certain people called "poets" are able to describe a concept, like rain or sterility, with such power that they can cause the concept to manifest in a form that includes volition. The khaiem, (essentially a kingdom ruled over by a khai), used these manifest concepts (andats) to become the most powerful nation in the land. For when your enemy can cause endless floods in an instant, or force every woman of your people to miscarry, how can you hope to overcome them?

The andats are also useful for trade. Water-Falling-Down made sure the crops of her khaiem always had enough rain to feed the plants, and no rain when they didn't. Seedless, another andat, can take a warehouse full of cotton and rid it of seeds with a gesture. This brings weavers and dyers to the city, which bring with them trade, which brings wealth and prosperity. There is a problem with the andats, though.

They do not like being forced into human form. They are slaves, held against their will, and when a poet dies, so dies his control of the andat. A new poet must be trained to control the concept, and no andat can be bound the same way twice. Each time it becomes more difficult to bind the andat, to describe them well enough that the binding works, but unique enough that it doesn't copy what has come before. And if a poet tries to bind and andat and fails...?

The results aren't pretty.

I've just finished the first book, A Summer In Shadow, and heartily recommend it anyone. It's about $8 on Kindle, and I fully intend to purchase the second book today.