THE GUARDIANS OF THE FLAME, Books 1-4, by Joel Rosenberg

Overall Rating: 9

I'll admit to being a little skeptical when a friend first told me about this series. A group of Dungeons and Dragons-esque gamers who get swept into the world of their game? It sounded pretty trite at first, but the friend had no problems with bashing books he thought were poor, so eventually I gave it a chance.

While the storyline never shows anywhere near the complexity of a work by Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind, I still found myself absorbed by the first book, The Sleeping Dragon, and gobbling it up at any given opportunity to read. Blasted into their fantasy world and magically transformed into their characters--including physically and possessing their character skills--the band of misplaced college students accidentally destroy their means of survival in the very beginning and learn quickly how dangerous their situation is when soon afterwards one of their number is murdered. They discover that the agent of their transferral to the fantasy world was none other than their gamemaster himself--a college professor who had visions of the alternate reality and was able to create small magic on the Earth side--and that the only way to get home is to find the Gate Between the Worlds, hidden in a distant mountain and guarded by a sleeping dragon so old the mountain built itself around him.

Early on the emerging leader of the group, Karl Cullinane, discovers over and over that the fantasy reality is a cruel one, where slavery and other deprivations are commonplace, and vows to fight it wherever he can. Therein emerges the pattern set in the next three books, which also cover the following seventeen years. Karl and the rest of the "Other Siders" establish a home--which they call Home, appropriately enough--in Elven lands where their forays against slavers give the freed slaves a place to return if they can't return to their own homelands again. The first four books of the series mix fighting with political intrigue, magic with gunpowder and other inventions brought over from Earth, friendship and loyalty and betrayal...all under the shadow of one Professor Arthur Deighton, who sent Karl and the others there in the first place and is far more than he first appears.

And by the fourth book, the next generation begins to emerge--including Jason Cullinane, Karl's son, and the Heir Apparent to the empire Karl and the Other Siders have built through accident and design.

The first four books of The Guardians of the Flame were absolutely some of the best fantasy I'd read in a long time...it's only a pity that the next books in the series would be, a least to me, such a profound disappointment.

This page modified 27-Jul-2000 10:31:10.