I recently went back and reread the quartet of fantasy novels that comprise the Caine Sequence, by Matthew Woodring Stover. It’s always been a mystery to me why these books flew so far under the radar.
I am left with the conclusion they were written too soon.
Imagine if you took some sweet sword & sorcery from Conan and dropped it inside The Hunger Games (With a dash of Fahrenheit 451), then added mind-bending quantum effects for the final book. That’s the scope of this quadrilogy.
Here is a brilliant summary of the series by a Redditor with the username of Werthead. I think I’ve figured out who he is, but I don’t want to compromise his Reddit handle in case he wants to keep it unknown. Reposting in full because he nails it:
In the middle of 1998, Matt Woodring Stover’s second novel Heroes Die landed like, to quote C.S. Lewis on Tolkien, “lightning out of a clear blue sky.” It was a book that was extremely hard to categorise. At first glance, it’s science fiction. It’s set on 23rd Century, dystopian Earth. People are born in a strict caste system based of immense wealth, with the poor left to starve in immense slums, with the rich protected by impregnable technological defences and lethal weapons. One of the few escapes for these down-and-outs is to become an “Actor,” starring in televisual spectacles for the amusement of the masses, but with a twist: their stories are real.
Earth, it is revealed, has opened a transdimensional link to Overworld, a pretty standard epic fantasy setting complete with powerful kingdoms, wicked theocracies and violent, nonhuman creatures, not to mention, somehow, actual magic (which doesn’t work on Earth). Actors go through the wormhole to this world and partake in Dungeons-and-Dragons-on-acid adventures, every battle captured by near-undetectable cameras and beamed back home. Audiences are on the edge of their seat because anything can happen. There is no script, and a very real risk of death. The life expectancy of an Actor is not long, but for as long as they are alive, they are celebrities beyond compare.
Hari Michaelson is one of the best Actors in the business, noted for both his combat prowess and his intelligence. He is reluctantly called back into service by the news that his estranged wife Shanna, who plays the mage Pallas Ril on Overworld, has been captured by Emperor Ma’elKoth of Ankhana. Ma’elKoth is trying to wipe out a band of rebels, but the rebels are protected by a spell that makes people forget their identities, which makes identifying them incredibly hard. As Ma’elKoth tries to harness Pallas Ril’s powers to help him crush the rebels, Hari is sent back to Overworld to rescue her using his old stage name: Caine, master assassin without compare.
So far, so good: an unusual spin on the standard fantasy tropes, what’s known in the business as a high concept (“it’s Big Brother meets Conan the Barbarian!”), but also enough familiarity that people can find something familiar to ease them into the story which, after an unusual setup, would probably be business as usual.
Matt Stover was really not interested in telling that story. Instead, Heroes Die is a dark-hewed narrative asking intelligent questions on the morality of violent entertainment, on cultures dying by pieces whilst the people are amused by bread and circuses, and on the value of relationships and of humanity. It’s a story about politics and war, love and intrigue, on paternal relationships and what happens when a government loses all sight of anything approaching objective morality. The premise sounds like it could offer knockabout hijinks, but in practice it’s a dark, sober and gritty fantasy with some nice structural tics, particularly the Earth sequences being a standard multi-POV, third-person narrative but the Overworld storyline being first-person from Hari’s POV, and reflecting his interior monologue as he describes the action to the audience on Earth, resulting in some justified fourth-wall breaking.
Heroes Die is a great book which did okay (somehow, despite having one of the worst covers of all time), enough to warrant a sequel. Blade of Tyshalle, published in 2001, is almost indescribable. It’s almost twice the length of the first book and completely different style and tone. It’s a much darker novel – so dark that it renders most so-called “grimdark” books infantile in comparison – but one that doesn’t overdwell on its darkness, instead using to make sure the reader knows how serious the stakes are. It’s an intelligent, smart but pitiless novel compared to its forebear. If Heroes Die is an intelligent, smart SF/fantasy hybrid which mixes intelligence and action, Blade of Tyshalle is an outright philosophical assault on the senses that leaves the reader reeling.
Caine Black Knife (2008) feels like a much-needed reset. The scope is much, much smaller and more straightforward: Caine has to return to the site of his most famed victory, which sparks a lengthy flashback to his first great adventure as an Actor. After Blade of Tyshalle caused readers’ brains to leak out their sinuses, Caine Black Knife feels like a very straightforward action story in contrast. There are still smart musings on a variety of topics, but this is Caine stripped back and simplified. If anything, some fans suggested too simplified.
They needn’t have worried. Caine’s Law (2012) is the apocalyptic finale to the series which completely reconceptualises the events of Caine Black Knife as a small part of a much more elaborate plan. Caine’s Law is, even by the standards of this series, bananas. The narrative is fractured into different timelines, with some stories taking place in the past, present and future of the main timeframe we’ve been following so far. Characters finds themselves able to “unhappen” past events, resulting in shifts in time and space. An interrogation scene is interrupted as captor and captive debate the literary merits of To Kill a Mockingbird. Chapters featuring exotic magic use and explosive set pieces sit alongside thematic and metaphorical explorations of the nature of the horse and how it sees the world. We learn that the narrator of this series is unreliable, not in the sense of being a liar but his libertarian outlook and belief in the indomitability of one man’s will is only possible when supported by friends and allies. Caine’s Law reads like the result of a writing collaboration between R.A. Salvatore and Gene Wolfe, with the results guest-edited by Lemmy from Motorhead. It’s crazy and captivating stuff.
The Acts of Caine quartet may remain unmatched in the history of fantasy for what the author achieves: four novels that are completely different to one another in tone, atmosphere and prose style which both work as four parts of a grand whole and also as individual novels (maybe somewhat less so in the case of Blade of Tyshalle and Caine’s Law). It’s a series that pretty unflinchingly sits in the grimdark genre but doesn’t make the mistake of dwelling on misery and things like rape (actual rape is never really spelt out; the unwilling perversion of the human mind and consciousness through magic or technology is a much stronger theme throughout); I’d certainly recommend it to people I’d never recommend authors like Scott Bakker or Mark Lawrence to. There are dashes of hope and optimism which illuminate the story Stover is telling, rather than misery for misery’s sake.
It's a work of profound intelligence mixed with highly accessible, kick-arse action, trying some of the same things as Bakker and Steven Erikson but nailing its goals precisely, and coming without the lengthy list of caveats that recommending those authors entails.
The Acts of Caine is the fantasy genre given three shots of premium vodka. It’s not quite like anything else ever written in the genre and I’m not convinced we’ll see its like ever again. Matt Stover went on to write some excellent other works – including arguably the best Star Wars novels ever written (Shatterpoint, Traitor and the Revenge of the Sith novelization that is frequently cited as being far better than the film it’s based on) – and has occasionally hinted at a sequel series focusing on Hari’s daughter, but for now the story is quite comfortably complete. I’m not entirely sure I want to him to return to this world as the quartet is perfect as it stands, but I’m also eager to see if he can deliver something equally weird, compelling and readable.
Stover’s Blind God
The following bit from Blade of Tyshalle resonated with me. Hari/Caine is talking to his father Duncan, who is slowly succumbing to a degenerative cognitive disease—A disease which caused him to be physically and emotionally abusive to Hari as a child. Years ago, Duncan studied Overworld as an anthropologist. I scanned a five page section here to give you a feel for the full scene. Here are some good bits:
He [Hari] began to come across references to the Blind God. It was never represented directly; there was never a description of its appearance, or its powers, or its motives. As near as Hari could make out, it seemed to be some of shadow force driving everything the ferals1 did that elves didn’t like, from clearing land for farms to building roads, from raising cities to waging war. All this kind of stuff was called “feeding the Blind God.” It was the Blind God that had chased the elves out of the Quiet Land a millennium ago; as the feral population burgeoned, the Blind God had become a power the elves could not counter. They fled the Quiet Land and closed the dillin.2 Hari came to the end of the chapter and shrugged. “I don’t get it,” he said. “This’s got nothing to do with HRVP3 and the Social Police.”
“Yes. It does. If. Quiet Land. Is. Earth.”
Next page:
Hari sighed again, and opened the book to Duncan’s end-of-chapter commentary.
Clearly, the “Blind God” is a conscious, deliberately anthropomorphic metaphor for the most threatening facet of human nature: our self-destroying lust to use, to conquer, to enslave every tiniest bit of existence and turn it to our own profit, amplified and synergized by our herd-animal-instinct— our perverse greed for tribal homogeneity.
It is a good metaphor, a powerful metaphor, one that for me makes a certain kind of sense not only of Overworld’s history, but of Earth’s. It provides a potent symbolic context for the industrial wasteland of modern Europe, for the foul air and toxic deserts that are North America: they are the table scraps left behind after the Blind God has fed.
Structured by the organizing principle of the “Blind God,” the Manifest Destiny madness of humanity makes a kind of sense— it has a certain inevitability, instead of being the pointless, inexplicable waste it has always appeared.
Hari gave a low whistle. “You published this? I’m surprised Soapy4 didn’t bust you on the spot.”
“Before. Your. Birth. Things. Were. Looser.” He sagged for a moment, and his eyes drifted closed, as though the effort had exhausted him, but the digivoder’s impersonal tone never changed. “Keep. Reading.”
Hari reopened the book.
The “Blind God” is not a personal god, not a god like Yah-weh or Zeus, storming out the grapes of wrath, hurling thunderbolts at the infidel. The Blind God is a force; like hunger, like ambition.
It is a mindless groping toward the slightest increase in comfort. It is the greatest good for the greatest number, when the only number that counts is the number of human beings living right now. I think of the Blind God as a tropism, an autonomic response that turns humanity toward destructive expansion the way a plant’s leaves turn toward the sun.
It is the shared will of the human race.
You can see it everywhere. On the one hand, it creates empires, dams rivers, builds cities— on the other, it clear-cuts forests, sets fires, poisons wetlands. It gives us vandalism: the quintessential human joy of breaking things.
Some will say that this is only human nature.
To which I respond: Yes, it is. But we must wonder why it is. Consider: From where does this behavior arise? What is the evolutionary advantage conferred by this instinct? Why is it instinctive for human beings to treat the world like an object?
We treat the planet as an enemy, to be crushed, slaughtered, plundered. Raped. Everything is opposition— survival of the fittest on the Darwinian battlefield. Whatever isn’t our slave is our potential destroyer. We kill and kill and kill and tell ourselves it is self-defense, or even less: that we need the money, we need the jobs that ruthless destruction temporarily provides.
We even treat each other the same way.
“Holy crap, Dad,” Hair said incredulously. “How did I miss this? How did Soapy miss this?”
“Edited. Out. Not. In netbook. Never. Trust. Electronic. Text.”
“You got that right.”
The similarities to Moloch are indelible (a concept I’ve written about here), the personification of dynamics that emerge through the interactions between individuals, groups, technology, and systemic incentives. Dr. Iain McGilchrist would say it’s because our left brain hemispheres have grown too dominant in the modern world, with their urges to grasp, exploit, tame, extract, monetize, and optimize.
According to Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex,
“Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.”
My hope is some of you will be sufficiently intrigued to check out Heroes Die. It’s a travesty these books did not find a larger audience when released. They need to be adapted into a multi-season, episodic show.
In my hopelessly biased opinion, the Caine Sequence is more relevant today than ever.
Currere Certamen Tuum / Run Your Race
Elven term for humans.
Portal between Earth and Overworld.
HRVP is a pandemic Earth disease which threatens to infect Overworld.
“Soapies” refers to Social Police, a draconian secret police enforcement agency that maintains strict separations between the social castes of the future.
Damn you Adam… added to the book list. You’re too credible and convincing
Just finished the first book per your recommendation, it starts out as a dark and wild ride so knowing it gets darker is crazy. I’m loving it so far though