Rating: 
Summary: A worthy sequel to Swordspoint!
Review: Wow. I waited several weeks for an unfilled order for this book at [a store] and finally gave up, going to Amazon.com in desperation. My copy arrived yesterday and I was awake until 3:00 AM reading this delicious, sexy, thrilling, magical tale that I literally could not put down for hours! The son of the memorable Alec, late of "Swordspoint", is the focus of this story, a handsome, dissolute young lordling, (clever and witty, but not so caustic as his father) who attends the famous University and falls for a young professor. The professor has been researching the ancient tales of the kings and their wizards, their relationships, and their power struggles. The magical legends, believed to be full of fanciful notions of mysticism, appear to be coming back to life in the world with young Theron Campion, the noble, and his professor reliving the ancient roles of the kings and wizards before them. This book is beautifully written, darker and sexier than "Swordspoint", and just as thrilling and new. I LOVED this book. Seek out the comic book series (yes, comic book) "A Distant Soil", issue #29, for a short story by Delia Sherman entitled "The Tragedy of King Alexander the Stag" for an original, nowhere else published story of the Kings and Wizards of the "Swordspoint" world. I can't recommend this book enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent and enjoyable sequel to a minor classic
Review: _The Fall of the Kings_ is Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner's sequel to Kushner's first novel, _Swordspoint_. This novel is set some 60 years later. One of the heroes, Theron Campion, is the son of one of the heroes of that first novel. He is a somewhat self-indulgent but basically good aristocrat who fairly seriously attends the university, partly to avoid becoming too entangled in what he considers the empty life of most of his fellows. The other hero is Basil St. Cloud, a rising young history professor who believes that the story of the rise and fall of the Kings of their country, and of their advisory Wizards, has been seriously misrepresented. After the last King was deposed and killed 200 years previously (by a direct ancestor to Theron), the official view has been that the Kings were irredeemably corrupt and that the wizards were also corrupt, and that their magic was simply trickery and manipulation. Basil believes that while the later Kings were bad, the first Kings were very good, and he also slowly finds hints that the Wizards may have once been able to do real magic.Basil and Theron fall in love, and as their relationship deepens, strange things begin to happen. Theron continues to have strange dreams which involve turning into, and killing, a deer. Basil runs across a curious book that purports to be a Wizard's spell book. Basil's rivalry with a stodgy fellow professor threatens to bring Basil's most controversial views into the open. The northern part of the Kingdom, from whence came the first King and the Wizards, is the source for a group who secretly yearn for the restoration of the Kings, and this group includes one of Basil's students. The authorities start looking for sources of rebellious sentiment, and they are inevitably led to naive and innocent Theron and Basil. And Theron's fears drive him towards a lovely young woman as a potential wife, naturally angering Basil. It's a pretty fun book to read, with a nicely depicted academic/bohemian milieu. The ending is fairly logical but I found it unsatisfying and a bit abrupt (though I wouldn't be suprised to see a sequel, and I hope we don't wait another 15 years). I did think some characters were ill-treated by the authors (such as Theron's putative wife). I also admit I found the implied support for royalist positions and some rather brutal magic a bit offputting. I'd rank it a notch below _Swordspoint_, despite in some ways being quite a bit more ambitious. Enjoyable, not a classic.
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