Book Report - Aether's Blessing (Aether's Revival Book 1) by Daniel Schinhofen

Originally Published: Oct. 30, 2023, 1:45 a.m. Last updated: Oct. 30, 2023, 1:45 a.m.

Tags: books

Let me start with, I bought, started, and then finished this book in less than 12 hours. It's not the greatest masterpiece of all time, but I was glued to it pretty thoroughly.

I mentioned in a previous post that I went a panel on LitRPG writing stuff back at DragonCon. There were 5 authors of the genre present and answering questions and they all did a fantastic job. I hadn't realized prior to attending the panel that LitRPG had even entered Western fiction circles enough for published books to exist at all, never mind to be big enough that people were making a living off of it. All of the authors were candid, charismatic, and, importantly to me, actually answered questions without doing politician shit and forcing in self-promotion all the time. After the panel was over, I saved their names and promised myself to check out at least one book from each as thanks for making that panel so enjoyable. All of the authors publish direct via Amazon. For reference, they were Jay Boyce, James A Hunter, Daniel Schinhofen, Shami A Stovall, and Tao Wong.

Side rant, I went to a similarly setup panel of Fantasy authors talking about how to account for Magic in fantasy stories. Several of them were pretty big authors, including the author of The Dresden Files. They did an awful job and I left the panel actively miserable. Every question they answered, they either shoehorned in spoilers, or blatant "go read my book" comments. Maybe it was the panel moderation that wasn't as good, or the vastly different levels of experience at play, but it wasn't fun. (One author had been publishing for decades, another just finished their first book).

Anyway, Schinhofen was one of the authors at the LitRPG panel. I decided to grab a book of his first, probably b/c he mentioned his stuff was usually a bit raunchy. I picked Aether's Guard at random and it was honestly a bit light on both the raunch and the LitRPG, but I still enjoyed it, and I've already grabbed book 2 to keep following where the characters are going.

The setup for Aether's Guard is a magic-school setting, fantasy medieval world, heavy mix of Japanese and Western cultures. Our MC is Gregory, a 15-year-old about to undergo the ceremony to become an adult, which is also when people find out if they're suitable to become Magi. Like when Hagrid told Harry he was a wizard, except Harry was pretty sure he was a wizard already, and also Hagrid bought him a whore not long after. Yup. We had some sex in the opening chapters of the book, and then there was nothing more extreme than kissing for the whole rest of the book. It was a weird progression.

Likely the biggest point of conflict in Aether's Guard is the heavily stratified society of the Empire the story takes place in. The bulk of the stratification involves the eurtiks, essentially animal-people of all kinds. Full-blood eurtiks are, without exception, permanantly enslaved from childhood, while part-eurtik/part-humans are typically an underclass, or at least heavily discriminated against. Beyond this, Gregory is commonly discriminated against for being a "fringer", someone from the villages further out from the Empire's core. A country bumpkin essentially. The level of wealth disparity between the haves and have-nots is extreme, with Greg mentioning several times that individual items he's seen for sale or been gifted likely being worth more money than his entire village. At the top of society are the largest mage Clans, formal organizations of like-minded mages that have operate similarly to corporations or business enterprises. There exist smaller Clans as well, but the 5 biggest clans have vastly outsized influence on politics, finance, military matters, and so on. Heavily implied that all 5 are corrupt and/or problematic to various extents and all of them use the effectively extralegal status of Magi to perpetuate their power.

Aether's Blessing has a soft magic system, especially regarding the available magic powers of other characters. Any given magi has a specific flavor of magic that they can learn to use and nothing outside of this. These range from the classic fire, wind, physical reinforcement, or enchanting to more exotic abilities like Shadow or whatever it is that Greg can do (decently obvious as the story progresses, but spoilers for the conclusion so not confirming anything here). Magic is fueld by Aether, which is stored internally by a mage and is found in various concentrations in the natural world. It's pretty similar to mana systems in many other stories. How much aether something needs or how much someone has left are never spelled out, so it can vary as needed by the story. How much aether a given mage has access to can be improved over time through training and through consuming elixirs, herbs, or aether-rich food. It's an interesting system ripe for min-maxing, but I was disappointed that there were no numbers involved like a more blatantly LitRPG story would have. The way AG handled it probably makes for better actual storytelling, but a typical LitRPG take would include things like "Greg ate the bane wolf meat. A notification told him that his maximum aether capacity increased by 3." I was slightly disappointed by the lack of this, and I hope that if I check out more of Schinhofen's works they go heavier on the LitRPG. One of the little things I love about heavy LitRPG stories is the exercise of "how would I min-max this in the MC's shoes", so I enjoyed AB as a fantasy novel rather than a LitRPG story.

Greg gets to the school, immediately gets looked down upon, helps a girl out, finds how to grow as a mage and just works hard at it. He's a little clever and a little secretly OP, but there's a strong focus on the fact that he's working hard all day, every day, he's being smart about it, and he's fighting against hard odds to catch up to where mages from the center of the empire have likely been getting prepared for this school for much longer and with much better resources than he has available. The grinding got a little bit old by the end, but we time-skipped between incidents often enough that the pace never felt slow. Furthermore Greg and his partner were always making progress and doing so in a way that had them varying their methods and actively learning new things, rather than just buffing up some numbers or some arbitrary level of strength with nothing else to show for it. I think it was very well done, but the wording of things and the stale conversations could have used an editor's pass.

Speaking of Greg's partner, we have a somewhat heavy-handed romance developing. I liked it, it was cute, but it was pretty corny at multiple levels. Yukiko is a young mage that joins the school on the same day that Greg does, they have a small incident, and they end up getting closer and closer to each other. Yuki has a small amount of snow-owl eurtik blood and is often openly discriminated against, and Greg jumps out to defend her on several occasions. Heavy vibes of Hermione being called a mudblood, but it's the majority opinion instead of just Malfoy and company. Greg and Yuki push each other constantly and they both end up growing in power quickly thanks to the complementary partnership they've created. Believable and lovely on one hand, but a bit repetitive and unnecessarily told rather than shown. I think it was shown pretty well, and then it was told over and over and over. Anyway, I'm glad there's no unnecessarily problematic power dynamic at play, which was something I was worried about when we established the whole commonplace slavery thing.

Small aside, it's pretty sad that I found myself bracing for those kinds of things. Japanese fiction authors need to get their shit together on the "I'll buy a slave and she'll fall in love with me" thing.

Final thing to note about, AB's Empire is 1000+ years old, led by the Emperor that created it, and was created when the Emperor, a powerful mage, defeated a supposedly dangerous enemy long ago (a nation of eurtiks in this case). The Emperor then created a permanent enslaved underclass from a particular ethnic group. This all feels like a blatant ripoff of Mistborn's Final Empire, which I don't mind too much, but I rolled my eyes a bit when I heard all of it.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to Aether's Guard, the next book in the series, Schinhofen's other books, and the works of the rest of the DragonCon panel. I'm guessing I'm in for a wild ride.