/lit/ - Literature

I recently finished the First book of the Elder Empire series, Of Sea and Shadow. This series is written by Will Wright, the author of Cradle.
I liked it. It had an early hook with a strong nautical setting. The main cast is small enough that each gets a chance to have some personality, even if they don't get much page time. There's a lot of action, but it never really overstays it's welcome, and it never devolves into pages of mindless fight scenes.
One thing that's fairly evident after reading some of the other material by this author is that Will Wright is at his best when he's writing protagonists with very defined goals, something this series definitely has.

As far as world building goes it's definitely not proto-Cradle, though you can see where some of the ideas started. The setting here is Age of Exploration era, with cannons and muskets and all that, but the world is ruled mostly by eldritch horrors. Rather than going the "aaaaah help me niggerman" route, the people in this setting went more along the path of capturing those horrors, dissecting them, and figuring out what makes them tick.
One thing I really liked is that instead of doing multiple PoV's like so many modern Authors do, Will Wright decided to go whole hog and has written the second PoV as a second entire series running concurrently and intersecting with this one. I haven't read any of that series yet, but despite that I didn't feel like I was missing any context for this story, so it's perfectly fine as a stand-alone.