Even as someone who knows, lbh, very little about stocks, the fluctuations in Tesla stocks have been wild. Yesterday Politico published a story that Musk might be stepping down from government and they surged. Then today they plunge by the highest amount in a single day in its history. The general trend isn’t good for them, they’ve dropped significantly in the past year and pundits at least seem to agree that this is fairly catastrophic for Musk.

It’s mostly interesting because the price of Tesla stocks is being used as collateral on a bunch of debts Musk doesn’t want to pay. If they drop below $115 dollars, that collateral is void and he has to pay those debts immediately. That’s a long way off – they currently sit at $267. Except in January they were $428, so you can sort of see how catastrophic their decline in value has been.

Minor quibble about this book: Viewpoint characters called Dann, Dayne, and Dahlen. Viewpoint characters called Calen and Coren.

It’s not a huge problem, I don’t find myself getting confused, but it stands out as someone who is pernickety about giving my characters different sounds for their names unless a similar sound is meant to denote a connection.

It’s annoying that for all this book’s many flaws, and there are so many, including the irritatingly cookie-cutter romance subplots, there are actually things it does really well.

Rist’s storyline – despite it being the source of the worst ‘real world philosophers with their names barely changed’ moment so far – is superb, and actually has been consistently over all four books so far. Having him work for the evil empire and sort of knowing they’re pretty bad, but staying because of both genuine bonds he’s built with good people there and a constant stream of manipulation tactics is actually pretty neat. Usually when you’ve got someone working for an evil empire in a book, they have no idea it’s evil and then they immediately defect when they find out – here, he’s uncomfortable with all the blood magic, notices the obvious censorship in all the books, realises that his mentor has done terrible things in the past and challenges him on it, but it still makes total sense that he’s staying. By the time he has the opportunity to leave, he’s built up relationships with his fellow mages, and his various mentors (who are bad people, but not two-dimensional evil archetypes), and any cracks are filled in by manipulation.

It’s also got the strongest character writing of any storyline. Garramon, his mentor, is absolutely a villain, but he clearly has genuine affection for and loyalty to the mages under his care. A lot of the other imperial higher-ups are exhausted immortals who hate what they’re doing but have sunk-cost-fallacied themselves into never stopping. Neela is the only love interest in this book who actually feels like she has character flaws, and her own life with her own goals, and a dynamic with Rist beyond sassiness and pep talking. Rist himself is a really solid portrayal of an autistic character, not least because him being autistic isn’t the sum total of his personality and isn’t written in a condescending or infantilising way.

It’s good stuff, and tbh should’ve been the main storyline.

And there’s other plot threads that are good too: Dann is actually fairly engaging to read and has a character arc. He is – extremely Mat-from-Wheel-of-Time, both in his personality and arc, but there’s nothing wrong with writing a character that takes cues from a character in another thing. The humour in his storyline doesn’t always land, but it lands sometimes and frankly that’s more than can be said for a lot of books.

Dann’s storyline has fairly … mixed … character writing, there are some characters who are really well written (Vaeril, Tessara) and some who just aren’t (Erik).

Ella’s storyline is pretty decent too, with Ella being a pretty well-written character even if she is just covering all the basic story beats of 'person discovers they have a mysterious and dangerous magic’ storyline, in order, exactly how you’d expect.

And for a book with a lot of different storylines (nine, at last count, which is too many – look, everyone wants to be GRRM with eight or nine ongoing storylines, but most people can’t be GRRM. I can’t be GRRM. If the massive delays with The Winds of Winter have shown us anything, it’s that GRRM can’t necessarily be GRRM), it does a decent job at linking together the different storylines and having them intersect and weave in and out of each other. That’s definitely not nothing, it’s something a lot of authors struggle to do even with far fewer storylines.

There is good stuff here, but it’s drowned in just an absolute sea of guff. Trim the storyline down to Rist in the empire, Dann and Calen in the rebellion, and Ella doing her own thing, and you’d have a really strong set of books.

Not thrilled that the last three nights I’ve gotten 5 hours, 1 hour, and 6 hours of sleep respectively. I feel fine, it doesn’t seem to have really impacted my mood, but it’s not super sustainable.

Unrelated issue with the book I’m reading, and one that’s only popped up in this book, not in the previous three: Trying to work in fantasy versions of real world philosophers.

Like it is ridiculous how much it slammed me out of the story as I read someone in this fantasy world rattle off the famous quote often attributed to Edmund Burke but whose earliest attribution is from John Stuart Mill, and then explain the real-life misattribution with the names barely changed.

And this isn’t even the only time it’s happened in this book. Earlier characters were discussing The Art of War by ‘Sumara Tuzan’ and it was almost as jarring.

Because this clearly isn’t the characters talking, this is the author reaching through the page to explain to me the cool fact he learned about how Edmund Burke actually isn’t the originator of the quote.

The fourth book in a fantasy series that I … I’m actually not sure if I enjoy it, but I read three entire doorstopper books of it, so something about it must appeal to me. Anyway, the fourth is out, and as one of my many problems with it, there are several romance subplots and my god, bar one they are all the exact same two characters with the exact same romantic dynamic.

There are four, and three of them are:

– Man who is a viewpoint character, who is a morally upright, somewhat stoic warrior, recently burdened with the heavy responsibility of leading other warriors and being slowly crushed by it.

– Woman who is a quote-unquote ‘sassy’ warrior under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also constantly be the Supportive Presence who tells him how great he is.

– All their interactions are either him being like “Wow … you’re so beautiful …” and her being like “[Sassy remark about his good taste and/or that he needs to focus],” or him being like “The responsibilities … so many people’s lives on my shoulders …” and her being like “[Pep talk monologue about how he’s a charismatic leader whose men are absolutely loyal to him].”

One of them is:

– Man who is a viewpoint character who is a morally upright but antiheroic-by-way-of-naivete mage who isn’t responsible for leading people and is also a halfway decent portrayal of an autistic character.

– Woman who is a quote-unquote 'sassy’ mage who isn’t under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also be supportive in a vaguely tsundere-ish way.

– They do actually have a decent variety of different kinds of scenes together, in fairness.

Part of this is that the author just doesn’t know how to write that many characters of either gender, there’s basically four types of men and three types of women, which becomes very noticeable in a book with tons of characters. Honestly, the storyline about Mage Guy Who’s Getting Bamboozled Into Working For The Evil Empire should have been the main or maybe only storyline, because it’s the only one with a viewpoint character who’s especially interesting, it has a fairly decent supporting cast, and the romance subplot there is easily the most tolerable.

It also has the lowest amount of Speeches About How Great The Viewpoint Character is, and the speeches that do happen are rendered a lot more tolerable because they’re coming from various forms of Evil Imperials who are making said speeches to manipulate him.