The Blind God- A Love Letter to Matthew Woodring Stover That Turns Dark at the End
A Mindful Miscellany #49
Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, where we focus on sense-making and story-telling in the turbulent twenties. We are devoted to cultivating the conditions for sagacity to emerge, like Punxsutawney Phil, from her hidden lair. No guarantee that it will happen, but we are over the moon when it does. I humbly serve as your blundering yet intrepid wayfinder, touching the elephant of reality in most unseemly ways. Bio here.
Warning: If you’re not into Fantasy/Sci-Fi nerdom, and where that connects to the turbulent twenties, you might want to skip this one. But, if you’ve heard the term Grimdark before and it doesn’t scare you away, press on, gentle reader.
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. The conclusion that I am left with is that they were written too soon. Published at the turn of the millennium, before fantasy hit it big on HBO and the big screen, and readership grew from a niche genre into higher visibility (Yay! It’s cool to be into this stuff now!).
But they are sure as hell relevant now.
Imagine if you took Game of Thrones (and some 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 thing.
Here is 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.
You also don’t have to entirely take my word for it:
“I am, unapologetically, a huge fan of this series of books, full as they are of action, adventure and grippingly written violence – along with classic dystopian themes, observantly written (and massively, compellingly flawed) characters, and world-building I’m jealous of as a writer even as I’m impressed with it as a reader.”
In Scott Lynch’s words:
"Oh, you fortunate people. HEROES DIE and BLADE OF TYSHALLE directly informed the writing of THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA... I'd dare say they were what taught me how to craft a novel. Matt is criminally underrated, and these books are bog standard for him, which is to say 'brilliant.' They're bold, startling, multi-layered, humane, and laugh-out-loud wonderful at frequent intervals. I'm not really anything resembling objective on Matt anymore, and he's a friend, but I appreciated his work before I ever got to really know him."
Stover’s Blind God
This second read through, I got legit goosebumps when I was reading the following passage in book 2, Blade of Tyshalle. For context, it takes place on a dystopian future Earth, where Hari/Caine is talking to Duncan, his father, who is slowly succumbing to a degenerative cognitive disease. Years ago, Duncan was an anthropologist, studying Overworld. Of note, the “Soapies” refers to Social Police, a draconian secret police enforcement agency that maintains strict separations between the social castes of the future. “HRVP” is an Earth disease that threatens to infect Overworld the way smallbox hit First Americans. I scanned a five page section here to give you a feel for the full scene. Here are some good bits;
He 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 HRVP 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 Soapy 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?3
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. 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.”
So, what are the implications?
Read Acts of Caine!! Of course, my hope is that the Science Fiction and Fantasy lovers out there will be sufficiently intrigued to at least check out Heroes Die. Echoing the writers above, it’s a travesty they did not find a larger audience when released. They need to be adapted into a multi-season, episodic show. In my humble and hopelessly biased opinion, this trilogy4 is more relevant today than ever.
To Attend is Sacred. What we attend to is a moral act, a point Dr. Iain McGilchrist makes in his work. By attending to larger patterns like the Blind God/Moloch, we become more attuned to the upstream drivers of many of our problems. Simple, but not easy.
Ultimately, It May Not Matter. It’ll be like understanding the poison that puts us into a coma. Maybe the titanic, systemic forces in motion are just too powerful. Jamie Wheal offers the following take, which makes me think of that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden lets go of the steering wheel.
We can’t stop the Blind God/Moloch, but we can rig for heavy seas.
Wheal notes an old Norwegian expression, “There’s no such thing as bad weather. Only bad clothing.” That means Helly Hanson rain gear lanyards, and hanging with a resourceful, resilient crew.
We will get through it, but we’ll be transformed. More communal, more connected, more attuned to the rhythms of reality. We’ll (re)orient ourselves more fully to the Sacred, rather than mercurial, short-term concerns.
But first we have to get through. So rig yourselves for heavy seas, people.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Elven term for humans.
Portal between Earth and Overworld.
Dr. Iain McGilchrist would say it’s because our left hemisphere’s are too dominant in the modern world, the urge to grasp, exploit, tame, extract, monetize, optimize.
Stover wrote books three and four to be read as one larger work.