Events have conspired to put in a wuxia mood what with the Wandering Blades draft, the impending release of the new Last Airbender movie, and the recent Criterion sale on Amazon where I picked up a couple of wuxia titles among other things. Then there's Wesley Chu's wuxia-inspired fantasy novel, The Art of Prophecy. I've been listening to the audiobook.
Chu's book is interesting because it mixes the epic fantasy elements with the wuxia ones. The people of Zhuun have been training a prophesized champion to defeat the Eternal Khan and free them from the menace of the Katuia tribes and their steam-powered roving cities of the grasslands. The first problem is the champion, a fifteen year-old boy named Jian, hasn't really received the proper training. Instead, he's just grown up spoiled by luxury and self-importance. The elder "master war artist" Ling Taishi shows up to set things right, but she's just starting to make headway with the boy when the second problem drops: the Eternal Khan is killed while drunk by a random Zhuun soldier.
With the prophecy busted, Jian is a political liability for the five Dukes of Zhuun and the delicate balance of power between them. Tiashi rescues the boy, and they both go on the run.
When while, the Katuia are thrown into chaos and the warrior Sali, decides to break tradition and delay her duty in order to try to find the only surviving member of her family. There's also the mad assassin Qisami thrown into the mix.
I like how Chu uses familiar wuxia elements but remakes them for a fantasy world. Instead of the wulin we have the lunar court as the society of martial artists, presumably related to the world's three moons and their seasonal cycles. Instead of "lightness kung fu" Tiashi's abilities are described as manipulating air with her spiritual energy. There are also the completely un-wuxia elements of the Steampunkish Katuia cities and their home grassland which is formed by gigantic blades of crash and a brittle crust of earth over a sea.
There are 2 more books in the series after this one, and I am interested in seeing where it goes.
1 comment:
Having your BBEG randomly sniped by a grunt does seem like it would cause some issues for a Chosen One. The last time I saw it happen in a TTRPG a PC was the rando grunt in the scenario and he wound up being hunted by folks on both sides of the prophecy in question to "set things right" before the evil god that had been hiding out in the now-departed BBEG found a new host (the PC, that is) and everything went pear-shaped. IIRC the party managed to arrange for the god to possess the (insufferable) NPC Chosen One and then stabbed them both to death with the former BBEG's legendary sword (and a whole lot of more mundane weaponry and an arsenal of spells, as you might expect). Took along windy road to get there, though.
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