Out of the Waters is the second
novel in David Drake's “Books of the Elements” fantasy series,
following The Legions of Fire. I recommend reading the first
book before this one, though Out of the Waters is a self-contained
story and stands up well on its own.
Like its predecessor, Out of the
Waters centers on the city of Carce, the capital of a sprawling
empire. Gaius Alphenus Saxa, a wealthy aristocrat, has been newly
appointed as the governor of Lusitania, one of the provinces of
Carce's vast empire, and is financing a lavish public spectacle to
celebrate. The performance is going as planned when a shocking sight
appears in the theater- images of a great city defended by strange
flying ships, being attacked by a monstrous many-limbed creature from
the sea that grows larger and larger as it advances on the city.
As the rest of the crowd continues to
watch, enraptured, Saxa's son Varus has a prophetic vision. He
realizes that they are witnessing a scene from the distant past, the
destruction of ancient Atlantis by the mythical beast known as the
Typhon- a vast, monstrous being that will soon return to lay waste to
the entire world. His stepmother Hedia, a woman who fears almost
nothing, is transfixed with terror at the sight of strange men made
out of glass walking the battlements of the siege city- the same
creatures she has seen in a series of recent nightmares. And his
younger sister Alphena, watching the cataclysmic scene of
destruction, doesn't see the monstrous Typhon at all- she sees a man.
Saxa and the crowd are delighted,
thinking it must be some amazing feat of stagecraft, but Varus,
Alphena, Hedia, and Varus' friend Corylus - have already witnessed
too much to confuse the vision with some sort of stage trickery.
Together, the five have already saved Carce from a doom foreseen in
one of Varus' visions, and now they must find a way to do so again.
There are many dangers in their path and many mysteries to unravel-
the reason for Atlantis' terrible fate, the origins and nature of the
Typhon itself, and how they can possibly stop something that crushed
a civilization even more advanced than Carce, and said in myth to be
so terrible that only Zeus himself was able to stop it.
I really liked Out of the Waters.
The book follows a similar structure as The Legions of Fire,
splitting up the heroes early on and sending them on separate
journeys that eventually converge again, and like its predecessor
this format works quite well. The plot is exciting and interesting,
especially as the true nature and origins of the Typhon are revealed,
and Drake does a really good job of actually making a grotesque,
world-destroying monstrosity the heart of a very emotionally engaging
story.
The different strands of the plot are
written such that each of the four main viewpoint characters has a
very distinctive voice, and Drake is very effective in using this to
bring them to life. Varus' sister Alphena gets to take a more active
role in the story this time, and it was interesting to see her grow
as a person compared to who she was at the start of the first book.
The setting is unusual for this sort of
fantasy in that Carce, its empire, and its culture are quite
explicitly Rome in all but name- aside from “Carce,” even names
are kept the same. In addition to making Carce feel very different
from a more typical fantasy setting, Drake's attention to historical
detail frequently makes Carce seem much more foreign to a modern
reader than many imaginary worlds, even during mundane events. There
are aspects of it that you'll get more out of if you already have
some knowledge of the period, but the book explains things well
enough that its not a requirement to understand what's going on. The
Typhon is inspired by an interesting mixture of Classical and
American Indian (Cherokee, more specifically) mythology, and Drake's
combination and interpretation of them result in something that is
both horrifying and poignant.
Many aspects of the book- lost
Atlantis, the Typhon, some of the places the characters journey to-
put me in mind of early American fantasy and “weird fiction”
authors like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, or (to some
extent) H.P. Lovecraft, not so much in their specifics but in the way
they evoke the the sense of the cosmos as something frighteningly
vast, in both space and time. This contributes to the overall tone of
the book, which (like most of Drake's fantasy, now that I think about
it) is probably best described as a high fantasy story set in a
sword-and-sorcery universe. The world is indifferent to humanity and
its fate, magic and the supernatural tend to be frightening,
disturbing things, human life is frequently very cheap, and there's
no sign of any sort of higher power watching over mankind, but the
protagonists are nevertheless heroic figures who will undergo
whatever it takes to protect the world.
I highly recommend Out of the Waters
for fans of fantasy, and especially for fans of Drake's previous
work.
