Mageborn

Stephen Aryan

Oct 2017 · Sold by Orbit

About this ebook

Fear of magic may spark the next world war in the new fantasy series from Stephen Aryan, set in the same world as Battlemage.

Habreel believes eradicating magic is the only way to ensure lasting peace. He will do anything to achieve his goal, even if it means murdering every child born with magical ability.

As a series of mysterious deaths place the seat of magical learning under suspicion, two students and one lawbringer must do everything they can to combat Habreel and his followers, before magic disappears from the world for good.

Ratings and reviews

Let me start off by saying that Aryan has created a truly magical world starting from Battle Mage through Chaos Mage and now once again in MageBorn. The world he has created is not only expansive and extremely inclusive but well contained throughout certain portions of the book. All of that being said I just have to note that the writing is just not that good. Instead of fleshing out characters fully we are left with vague impressions of who these characters are at their core and what really makes them the people that they are and do the things that they do. Instead of getting into the gritty details of the main characters lives and really fill them out we get surface characteristics as well as some shallow self reflection (if any) from the characters POV. I understand that Aryan writes relatively short novels when compared to some of his contemporaries such as Rothfuss, Sanderson, or even Scott Lynch but one would think that as an author he would at least pay more attention to detail to give us more of an insight into who these people really are. As it stands their is not one marquee character across any of these series because they all come off as shallow and hastily written which is just a shame because this world that he has created is much to interesting to be wasted on poor character development. The next issue that comes to mind is along the same lines of character development. Aryan has given us this broad world where magic is abundant which every now and then is refreshing after some of the more subtle or tame magical systems that other authors use but instead of giving us more detail into such topics as the Source, how magic is shaped, the "gods", and so on Aryan continues to throw out names, places, and object of things in the series with a RAFO type of attitude but then proceeds not to explore those ideas any further even in a subtle way. That is not to say that Aryan does not provide a little bit of tongue in cheek writing for the reader such as "Prince" who was mentioned briefly in Battle Mage and then again in Chaos Mage which I thought was quite nicely done along with a few other easter eggs of sorts. But that being said the general consensus that many on the internet have come to is that the gods of this world are the most interesting aspect of the whole universe and until this recent novella Aryan has not even tried to lazily explain them not even from a character POV or flashback which he has had plenty of opportunity to do considering that he has made multiple of the "gods" POV characters in this universe. It just seems sloppily executed overall. Throw this all on top of Aryans almost perverse pleasure in emasculating male characters (he literally went so far as castrating a character among other things. Everyone who is sane is all for strong BALANCED characters but he seems to enjoy taking male characters and making them irrelevant, impotent, incompetent, or window dressing and he risks falling into the same trap that many fantasy writers before him fell into by disregarding one group so heavily and alienating readers) and it seems that he is writing these stories for himself and not his fan base. Which is fine but if that is the case then just keep them for yourself to read mate. P Ps. Aryan does a wonderful job representing the LGBT community and that is something to be commended for

About the author

Stephen Aryan was born in 1977 and was raised by the sea in northeast England. A keen podcaster, lapsed gamer and budding archer, when not extolling the virtues of Babylon 5, he can be found drinking real ale and reading comics.

He lives in a village in Yorkshire with his partner and two cats.