Mystic Empire: Book Three of the Bronze Canticles by Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman
Thrice upon a time there were three worlds that were one. Or something like that. I don’t have the book open. But in Mystic Empire: Book Three of The Bronze Canticles by Tracy and Laura Hickman, it’s they way things work. Three worlds that are linked on what would appear to be a fairly painful collision course. The worlds have gotten closer together through the first two books and now, how much closer can they get? Can the people who know each other only through the dream finally meet in real life?
Until the last few days, I had been wondering that for over a decade. I started The Bronze Canticles series while I was still married. My marriage exploded before I got a chance to pick up a copy. I’ve been trying to get back into it ever since. I finally picked up a copy a few months ago and I’ve been wanting to get to it ever since, but first I had to re-read the first two, and of course the life of a reviewer is hard one made up of slaving over a hot keyboard before being dragged, kicking and screaming, off to the salt mines…
Or sumfin’
Stop laughing. I’m making excuses here. This is hard work.
At any rate…
I wish I hadn’t waited this long, even if Mystic Empire was totally worth the wait. Seriously, I loved this thing. It’s weird. I’ve re-read things like the Dragonlance Chronicles, Lord of the Rings, and The Hunger Games a whole bunch of times. They’re worth the re-read. It’s like comfort food for the brain. This was, however, the first time I ever went back to re-read a series that I hadn’t finished when it had been so long after the last book came out. I mean, I re-read HP before The Deathly Hallows hit, but I was also at the midnight release party. I pined for Mystic Empire forever before I got it.
But the fact that I bothered tracking this thing down (and a large part of the problem was that I lost my books after a fiasco with my storage space after the divorce and couldn’t remember the names of the books, and then got confused and thought it was Margaret Weis who wrote these and not her longtime partner Tracy Hickman.) to read it in the first place. Tracy Hickman is, after all, one of the two authors that introduced me to the concept that there was such a genre, and Laura Hickman helped invent the world that the stories I read were placed in. These are important people in my literary life, even if I _do_ still hold Tracy as being at least partially responsible for the killing of Sturm Brightblade on the battlements of the High Clerist Tower, but that was a separate series and it’s only been thirty years since the first time I read those books, so it’s not like I’ve really had enough time to get over myself since then. Obviously.
At any rate…
One of my proudest moments as a Dungeon Master was when one of my players missed a session that ended a pretty epic adventure. One of the other players was talking to him and mentioned that “I feel bad for you, missing a payoff like that.” It was a pretty epic payoff, too. Here’s the point though: I feel like I’m both players in that situation: Current me is looking at Past Jimbo saying “I feel bad for you”. The good news is that I eventually got to see the payoff. And anyway, CJ had fun being adopted into a dwarven clan a couple weeks later so it’s all good there too.
What I’m trying to say is that I really enjoyed Mystic Empire. It was a trip down memory lane to be sure, but it was also a really good book because it was a really good book. Believe me. If you’ve ever heard me talk about Jean M. Auel’s Land of Painted Caves then you know I won’t hesitate to blast a favorite author, even if it’s the last book in a series that I loved.
*SIGH*
That was the biggest literary disappointment of my life. How do you screw up the last book of a series that I had been reading for over twenty years at that point?
HOWEVER
Mystic Empire is the perfect end to the series. I needed to see the three worlds that were one come together and their people meet each other. I can’t say that it happened in precisely the way I thought it would, but I didn’t write the book. And the way it happened was massively satisfying, so that’s even better. Things ramped up nicely and then we got the big payoff.
And it was indeed a payoff to remember. It’s weird because the ending of book two is what I remembered for years afterward and what drove me to purchase the whole series again so that I could finally read this.
When you cross a Goblin Empire with a nation of undead fae and then add in a dragon worshipping cult, complete with dragons, it doesn’t get much better. There’s so much here, so many backs and forths, that I got caught up and didn’t want to find my way out. I was constantly waiting for the next switch, the next goblin machination, the next new Truth from the fae…
Yeah, it’s one thing after another and all of them held my interest. I felt like I needed to put my head on a swivel. Although a tottering head may have prevented me from being able to see the words to read them. Maybe that would have been a bad move.
I won’t make this mistake again. Next time I feel the need to finish a series I’ll do it and I won’t wait over a decade to do it. I’ve learned my lesson.
I guess my only disappointment with Mystic Empire is that the ending leaves the possibility of a sequel open and there hasn’t been one. It’s not a true cliffhanger, but there is definitely room for more to come. In a way, it’s almost a relief that it’s been so long since this thing was published because I’m not running off to my local book store or logging into Amazon looking for a sequel that’s not going to come.
Either way though, this was one wild ride. I’ll be revisiting one or more of the Hickmans at some point in the near future.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Black Beads
Mystic Empire: Book Three of The Bronze Canticles
Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman
Aspect, 2009
Mystic Empire: Book Three of The Bronze Canticles is available for purchase at the following link. If you click my link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.