I read Seven Blades in Black a while ago, but I want to talk about it now because I’ve been thinking about it a bit. I recently followed the author, Sam Sykes, on Twitter with one of my non-Outworlder accounts (because it turns out he’s hilarious on there, seriously, go read his feed). So it’s been on my mind lately, and I had some things I wanted to write about it.
Quick synopsis: Famous gunslinger Sal the Cacophony is hunting down seven wizards in a broken wilderness that still bears the scars of a quite recent war between the magical Empire and the gunpowder-and-fanaticism Revolution. Along the way she meets and/or fights assassin queens, cultist sorcerers, giant magitech mechs, a whole bunch of war mages, and soldiers from both sides of the war. It’s violent, it’s pulpy, it’s great.
I want to talk about it because at first glance, Seven Blades in Black seems to be a video game story.
The protagonist is a gritty, quippy, highly-skilled badass who’s only response to a new problem is to shoot at it. She has a set of very clearly-defined weapons and power-ups that each do different things (the different shells that go into her gun are one of the most video-gamey fantasy powers I’ve ever seen in a book), and a clear list of objectives that she follows on a journey through drastically different settings, each of which gets only a brief introduction before being blown up. Sal the Cacophony is, clearly, a video game protagonist (with a great name, incidentally).
The world is also, at first glance, a video game world. There are two factions that the main character alternately works with, fights against, or turns against each other (a premise similar to anyone who’s played an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game). Both of these factions seem to have had more attention paid to their equipment and methods of fighting than to…well, anything else about them, really. The Revolutionaries equipped with gun pikes and miniboss Relic-users, yelling slogans about the General and the Revolution (I actually quite like their battle cry of “Ten thousand years!” as an oath for how long the Revolution will last), versus the magical Imperial cavalry who’s sole trait seems to be sheer unmitigated arrogance. It honestly doesn’t feel much like a world at first. It feels like something that was written by a game designer who had to justify all the cool shit they wanted to put in their action adventure game, complete with sneering villains and samey minion barks.
It feels like a video game world and a video game protagonist, built on cliches and convenience, right up until it doesn’t.
There are a few points in the story where you’re reminded that the narrator is unreliable, and these moments are what lead you into a better understanding of the book. Sal doesn’t tell you about the bargains she made to become the Cacophony, she doesn’t tell you who she used to be and what the people she’s hunting did to her, she barely tells you anything about the world that isn’t directly relevant to her shooting people. She doesn’t intentionally give you any real details about the setting because she doesn’t care about anything more than surface-level information about who’s shooting at her and how, but a little bit of the why can’t help but seep through the cracks, and eventually you piece together the history of this place.
And it turns out that it’s fascinating. It’s a really different way of building out the world, doing it all through the medium of absolute bugshit shootouts and harrowing sieges and mad chases through exploding cities. Sal always shows up just as things are about to go terribly wrong, or maybe she makes things go terribly wrong by showing up; either way, it’s a fucking good time.
There was only one thing in the book that really bugged me. It was kind of a subtle thing, and I’m not sure if I can explain it super well, but I want to try, because it definitely did affect my enjoyment of the story, which was otherwise fantastic.
Seven Blades’ framing device is that Sal is telling this story to the officer in charge of the prison she’s in while awaiting execution. The problem is, the text of the main story doesn’t read as natural dialogue, at all. Every time the story switched from the interrogation room to the main plot that Sal is recanting, I’d get thrown by a line that would work incredibly well as something that a character wrote down, or that a character thought in their head in the moment, but which would be awkward as hell if it were something that they said to the officer interrogating them. Not a funny “I don’t care about your social mores” sort of awkwardness, more of a “No human being would ever say something like that” awkwardness, or a “telling this detail to her jailer really doesn’t fit with the personality that we’ve seen from Sal thus far” kind of awkwardness. I really loved the style of narration during most of the book, when I’d pushed the narrative’s framing device to the back of my mind, but there were points where I really couldn’t ignore it.
That aside, I want to emphasize that I really did like this book. Read it if you’re a fan of action movies, quippy first-person narrators, and utterly unrealistic but delightfully chaotic fight scenes. Expect to get your heart unexpectedly broken about three-quarters of the way through.