#erraticerrata

[liliennacht]

Fortuna, Lady of Long Odds

#Fortuna #erraticerrata #lady of long odds #Pale Lights #web series #webnovel

[echodoctor]

What I've Been Reading Lately: Pale Lights

It is a truth universally acknowledged that H.P. Lovecraft was a little bitch.

Unlike Rhode Island's least beloved and most thalassophobic son, Pale Lights tells the story of a world where humanity exhibits the only natural response to eldritch horror: continuing to be a bunch of squabbling, scheming motherfuckers who honestly might collectively be more of a problem than the ancient gods of primordial darkness sharing this underground cavern/post-apocalyptic civilization with them.

It is the Fantasy Mediterranean and there are not two square goddamn feet in this giant cave world without something ancient and hungry lurking in it. Fortunately, we have the Watch, professional monster-hunters and tireless guardians of humanity!

Unfortunately, humanity is a perpetual motion machine of bad decision making, and there's always some asshole trying to start a cult to something that eats you.

There are boats! There are ancient magical technologies! There are elephants with a profoundly upsetting amount of heads!

This fascinating and intricate world is shown from two very different perspectives, as the book is split between our pair of protagonists: Angharad Tredegar, an honorable sword lesbian tragically forced into a very non-swords-and-women-related situation, and Tristan Abrascal, who would like you to understand that he's really just a little guy and to please ignore that completely unrelated trail of dead bodies.

Both of them are about to join the Watch or die trying.

The Watch will not be getting a choice in the matter.

The author does a fantastic job at balancing drama and humor, the mysteries and lingering questions are intriguing, and while the story can sometimes go dark places it never feels bleak or pointless.

Characters will try very hard to reach out into the dark and save people. Sometimes they succeed.

And even when they don't, it still matters that they tried.

Book one is fully complete, book two is updating every Friday, and both of them are available for free right here:

Contents include but are not limited to:

-Our Lady of the Sunk Cost Fallacy

-a man so handsome it almost makes up for his personality

-the early adoption of grenade-related technology

-Lucifer's abandoned hermit crabs

-an increasing amount of problems both caused by and solved with poison

-the Fantasy Communist Manifesto

-three to seven rats sharing the trench coat that is divinity

-and grandma

#Pale Lights #ErraticErrata #did you like Fallen London literally at all? #then read this immediately #book review

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 26 – Pale Lights by ErraticErrata

Okay technically this is a web serial, not a book – you can find it here – but a) it’s divided into ‘books’ and the first one recently finished, b) I’ve read like 350,000 words of it at this point and c) I want to talk about it a bit.

So, Pale Lights is a fantasy adventure story, set in a world where some prehistoric cataclysm left humanity living in a truly vast (multi-continental) cavern beneath the earth, full of old gods and devils and a darkness that will sink into you if you go too long without exposing yourself to the Glare of light spilling down from various openings in the firmament (and potentially stored in a variety of magic devices). It stars Tristain, a conman and gutter rat who accidentally killed the wrong man, and Angharad, a minor noblewoman fleeing assassins after the slaughter of her family, as they flee their enemies into the theoretical safety of the Watch, a sovereign military order that might get you killed hunting down rogue devils but is more than powerful enough to offer amnesty to all its recruits and force everyone else to go along with it. Specifically they both try to join through the fastest and most guaranteed method there is – survive and pass the trials on the Dominion of Lost Things, and your spot among their ranks is totally assured.

As you might expect, this doesn’t exactly go according to plan for either of them.

The plot’s sufficiently full of twists and detours that I’m not going to bother trying to give any sort of detailed synopsis, but one incredibly endearing thing about the whole serial is that it’s structured around these three deadly trials intended to test one’s mettle and worthiness, and absolutely none of them go according to plan. Which, speaking as someone who is generally left pretty annoyed by stories where the entire plot is ‘and then the protagonist surpassed the entirely artifical problems an outside authority put in front of them, meeting expectations perfectly!’, I really did greatly enjoy.

The plot was also just satisfyingly and surprisingly brutal – EE’s previous gargantuan serial was explicitly (though increasingly theoretically as it went on) YA, and made plot armour an explicit part of the setting’s metaphysics. Pale Light is...very much that. There were several points where it felt like at least one named, fleshed out character with their own arc was dying horribly every chapter. Bracing! Relatedly, and necessary for that, the cast is big, into the dozens of fleshed out characters the plot leaves behind and goes back to whenever they’re relevant or on screen again. Which is the sort of indulgence you can get away with in a web serial. (I’ve actually seen a lot of people complain that the cast was too large or hard to keep to track of. Those people are weak.)

Speaking of characters – the supporting cast is great, and a decent number of them are well-drawn and earnestly compelling, but a story like this really lives or dies on the strength of its protagonists. And I’d say Pale Lights passes that test with flying colours – Tristain and Angharad are both more than strong enough to carry a story on their own, but jumping between them lets the story have a lot of fun with their biases and what they assume or overlook, and their (very different and often wildly misinformed) perspectives on each other, their goals, and the supporting cast are just a joy. EE’s always had a real talent for internal monologue and character voice (even in my least-favorite bits of A Practical Guide to Evil, Cat’s perspective was a consistent delight), and being able to consistently jump between and develop two here really makes them shine.

The fact that they’re both a) actually adults, b) morally dubious and c) incredibly devoted to a particular sense of morality and ethics that’s minimum 30 degrees off anything conventionally ‘good’ helps a lot, too. Tristain my beloved shameless vendetta-obsessed will-knife-anyone-but-his-closest-friends-without-a-second-thought gutter rat.

It’s actually really quite interesting how, despite one being a chivalry-obsessed bravo whose word is her bond and so finesses her oaths and promises like a mobbed up lawyer and the other being a street criminal second story man with a sideline in poisons, they’re both really incredibly defined by a fixation on loyalty and vengeance.

The setting is interesting, though the narrative does sometimes feel a bit like it’s straining under the weight of all the weirdness piled onto it, with the whole ‘everyone’s underground and 90% of light is artificial’ thing. The various gods are all interestingly eldritch, especially Tristain and Angharad’s patrons (Fortuna probably my third favourite character in the whole thing overall), the devils and lemures and monsters are all fucked up and horrifying in a really fun way, and the magic is appropriately occult-seeming.

I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, exactly, but I do find the utter shamelessness with which EE copies real world cultures to create fantasy counterparts kind of endearing? I really can’t overstate how incredibly obvious it is that, like, ‘this empire is based on the Aztecs. They border this feudal mess based on India, and this league of Republics based on China. The main city the story launched from is Venice. The big creepy cursed academy is called the Scholomance. The treaty with the devils binding them not to eat people is called the Iscariot Accord. Die mad about it.” Gives the whole thing a real tabletop RPG setting vibe, honestly.

Anyway, can’t really say to what degree my attachment to this was built from the Stockholm Syndrome of following it week-to-week, but probably one of my favourite stories read this year, and eagerly looking forward to book 2.

#book review #pale lights #erraticerrata #sff #web serial

[fallowhearth]

This is probably wrong of me, but I so wish for a Pale Lights (Tupoc's Version). I do desperately want to know what's going on with him. What was he thinking during the trials? What's the deal with his contract? Why did he do all that betrayal and murder? Sheer love of the game? A secret plan?

Please, please ErraticErrata, write Spider Lights (or Pale Spiders or whatever) release it as bonus content.

#Pale Lights #erraticerrata

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

"There’s nothing righteous about martyrdom,” Black spoke, tone thick with distaste. “How gloriously they die on their pyres, those blessed few who think themselves above all of… this. And yet what do they really accomplish? Refusing to accept reality for what it is instead of what you think it should be is not being high-minded, it is cowardice. I take no guidance from someone whose crowning achievement is their own death. Sacrifice solves nothing on its own. It is no substitute for the labour needed to change things, just an easy way out.”

#practical guide to evil #pgte #erraticerrata #quotes

[booksandchainmail]

re: recent posts, would you recommend starting Guide now or try and catch up to Pale Lights?

That depends, how much do you like reading a serialized work as it publishes?

I really enjoy getting weekly chapters, and the way a serialized release schedule builds investment. But I also have friends who really dislike having to wait for more every week, and won't read a serial until it's complete.

Pale Lights is currently in a place where there's enough of a backlog that there's an initial binge to get you deep into the characters and world, but IMO not so much that it's too intimidating to catch up. Book 1 wrapped up a few months ago with ~300k words, and book 2 is only around 10 chapters in. Despite the lengths, I find web serials really manageable to read as they come out: keeping up with ~6000 words a week isn't a huge timesink.

On the other hand, PGTE is around 3 million words, which is a hefty chunk of time to commit. Those words are absolutely worth it, but it does take a while.

From a story perspective:

PGTE is rougher at the beginning, since it's the author's first work. It's also more accessible to get into, since it's built on top of a standard fantasy world template, so there's less immediate worldbuilding to wrap your head around. It has a single protagonist, plus frequent interludes from outside perspectives. Pale Lights throws you into the deep end a bit in terms of setting, but also more meaty worldbuilding in a way it takes PGTE a bit to work up to. It has multiple POV protagonists, but no regular outside interludes (aside from an epilogue).

Practical Guide takes place in a world built on deliberately-generic high fantasy tropes, and then plays around with them and builds on top of them. It features a lot of battles and army movements and fights between people with vast amounts of personal powers. Pale Lights is a much weirder setting, has less outright fights, and features more small-scale conflicts (so far) between characters closer to baseline human with one specific power each.

tldr:

My personal advice would be to read Pale Lights first, if only because it's the one where when you start reading matters now. PGTE isn't getting any more or less finished, so if you read it a year from now you'll get the same experience. I think PGTE is an amazing piece of work, but Pale Lights has the potential to be even better, and is currently a smaller commitment to start with. Practical Guide is one of my favorite works of all time, and I've probably spent more time thinking about it than any other work. I can't say Pale Lights has reached that level yet, but I think it will given more time.

That said, they are very different in setting and premise, so I'd recommend reading the little summary blurbs for each, and seeing if one really grabs you (since I think those convey genre well).

blurbs and a few extra notes under the cut:

the one caveat to "PGTE is complete" is that it's currently being rewritten on an app called Yonder, which is unfortunately paywalled and on a weird subscription model. Hopefully we'll get the complete rewrites of individual books available for purchase at some point, but who knows. It will also theoretically get a webtoons adaptation as the rewrite goes, but no details have come out yet. When this was announced it was also said that the PGTE website would be taken down, but that decision was postponed, there's no new deadline, and if it does go down there are... ways to acquire a copy.

PGTE blurb:

The Empire stands triumphant. For twenty years the Dread Empress has ruled over the lands that were once the Kingdom of Callow, but behind the scenes of this dawning golden age threats to the crown are rising. The nobles of the Wasteland, denied the power they crave, weave their plots behind pleasant smiles. In the north the Forever King eyes the ever-expanding borders of the Empire and ponders war. The greatest danger lies to the west, where the First Prince of Procer has finally claimed her throne: her people sundered, she wonders if a crusade might not be the way to secure her reign. Yet none of this matters, for in the heart of the conquered lands the most dangerous man alive sat across an orphan girl and offered her a knife. Her name is Catherine Foundling, and she has a plan.

PGTE prologue epigraph:

In the beginning, there were only the Gods. Aeons untold passed as they drifted aimlessly through the Void, until they grew bored with this state of affairs. In their infinite wisdom they brought into existence Creation, but with Creation came discord. The Gods disagreed on the nature of things: some believed their children should be guided to greater things, while others believed that they must rule over the creatures they had made. So, we are told, were born Good and Evil. Ages passed in fruitless argument between them until finally a wager was agreed on: it would be the mortals that settled the matter, for strife between the gods would only result in the destruction of all. We know this wager as Fate, and thus Creation came to know war. Through the passing of the years grooves appeared in the workings of Fate, patterns repeated until they came into existence easier than not, and those grooves came to be called Roles. The Gods gifted these Roles with Names, and with those came power. We are all born free, but for every man and woman comes a time where a Choice must be made. It is, we are told, the only choice that ever really matters.” – First page of the Book of All Things

Pale Lights series blurb:

Vesper is a world built on the ruins of older ones: in the dark of that colossal cavern no one has ever known the edges of, empires rise and fall like flickering candles. Civilization huddles around pits of the light that falls through the cracks in firmament, known by men as the Glare. It is the unblinking stare of the never-setting sun that destroyed the Old World, the cruel mortar that allows survival far below. Few venture beyond its cast, for in the monstrous and primordial darkness of the Gloam old gods and devils prowl as men made into darklings worship hateful powers. So it has been for millennia, from the fabled reign of the Antediluvians to these modern nights of blackpowder and sail. And now the times are changing again. The fragile peace that emerged after the last of the Succession Wars is falling apart, the great powers squabbling over trade and colonies. Conspiracies bloom behind every throne, gods of the Old Night offer wicked pacts to those who would tear down the order things and of all Vesper only the Watch has seen the signs of the madness to come. God-killers whose duty is to enforce the peace between men and monsters, the Watch would hunt the shadows. Yet its captain-generals know the strength of their companies has waned, and to meet the coming doom measures will have to be taken. It will begin with Scholomance, the ancient school of the order opened again for the first time in over a century, and the students who will walk its halls.

Pale Lights book 1 blurb:

Tristan Abrascal is a thief, one of many making their living under the perpetual twilight of the greatest city in all of Vesper: Sacromonte. Quick wit and a contract with a capricious goddess have always kept him one step ahead, until one night he crosses a line by accident that burns all the bridges he had left. But not all is lost, for his mentor offers a way out of peril that turns out to be more than a simple escape. It is also an opportunity to get even with the infanzones, the nobles he’s lived under all his life, and it so happens that Tristan has a full ledger’s worth of scores to settle with them. Lady Angharad Tredegar has fled halfway across the world, leaving behind a ruin of a life: her family butchered by a ruthless enemy, their estate torched and their nobility revoked. Yet no matter how far she flees the blades of assassins follow, and she finds herself growing desperate for any protection. She has one relative left to call on, her estranged uncle in Sacromonte, but she finds that the safety he offers comes at a cost. Angharad has sworn revenge, however, and her honour will allow for no compromise. She will do what she must to survive so that one day bloody vengeance can be visited upon her enemies. The paths of the two take them to the doorstep of the Watch, but for desperate souls like them enrolment is a lost cause. They will have to do it the hard way instead, by surviving the trials on the isle known as the Dominion of Lost Things. Where every year many go, and few return.

#pgte #pale lights #practical guide to evil #erraticerrata

[kvothbloodless]

#practical guide to evil #pgte #erraticerrata #just got to this part in the reread and was like “hang on thats almost exactly what cat said to sve noc at the end of book 4”

[lilientage]

#pale lights #fortuna lady of long odds #erraticerrata

[project-catgirlpillar]

beatris art taken from @gwennafran's trial participant lineups. every chapter makes beatris being the only character in the retired section funnier

#highkey the smartest character #idk man #pale lights #erraticerrata

[st-just]

Just binge-read book 1 of Pale Lights, and I liked a lot about it! A lot of the same things you described in your book 1 review, so I won't repeat it. (Though I'll note that with both PGTE and now Pale Lights, while I find EE's writing to generally be quite funny, most of the cast having nearly-identical "witty, snarky" senses of humor and proclivity for banter can get a little too cute for me sometimes.)

That said, I grimaced when getting to the end of book 1. Just what I wanted to see, our protagonists going to secret Watch school. And look, our POV characters and their closest allies from the trial are now going to be in a team of four together. How nice. It feels a bit "YA" of a plot shift, which worries me. (Though I guess the Trial participants who survived are all young adults, if I'm remembering correctly? I miss Yong...) I have enough faith in EE to forge onwards, but this better not turn into The Gods are Bastards.

Oh glad you enjoyed it!

You're definitely correct about senses of humor, though imo Angharad's internal monologue mostly avoided it? Relative to Guide, anyway.

Anyway I had similar fears to you about book 2, but honestly the plot synopsis of book 1 could pretty easily sound very YA as well? In both cases I think EE's mostly avoided it.

That said I am very much hoping there'll be a significant time skip or two once the Scholomance setting is established and people are settled, yes.

#pale lights #erraticerrata

[gwennafran]

Royal Road Cover for ErraticErrata’s Pale Lights Book 1

Go here is you want to follow the book on Royal Road. 

People that know me knows that I can name every character on that cover. ;)

#Pale Lights #airavatan #lantern #cover #gwennafran art #monster #bridge #ErraticErrata

[thetallowman]

Well that's the end of book 1, with an epilogue that raises as many questions as it answers. (I think these last few chapters are the first time EE's switched between narrators with a paragraph break? Good signifier that the main party's finally assembled.)

One particular detail did catch my attention though, so I'm calling it now: the Fisher used to be the Fisher King, and the reason the Queen is Perpetual is because she stole half his name.

#pale lights #erraticerrata

[triviallytrue]

did not expect pale lights to get this gay this quickly

#where wildbow disappoints erraticerrata delivers

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Thinking about a setting where every woman is a bisexual horndog and all the men are aspec

#inspired by the average sexualities of erraticerrata's characters #shitpost

[blackholebinding]

May 2023

Fanbinding of A Practical Guide to Evil by erraticerrata. Also my first attempt at rounding a spine!

#bookbinding #my binding #apgte #rounded spine #my typeset

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

Woe on us all, but if the Gods demanded my home be ashes then the Gods would burn.

#practical guide to evil #pgte #erraticerrata #quotes