Imgur link goes to instagram photo scheduled for Today at 3:15

TL;DR: It took me TWO WEEKS to read this. But it was worth it. I love this series a lot.

Source: NetGalley & I purchased a copy so thank you to the publisher and myself!

Plot: Everyone comes together to either save or consume the world, at this point we just don't know.

Characters: All of them - all of the previous Craft Sequence characters show up (it feels like) and there was so much packed in there. Just wow.

Setting: All over the world here, I love the settings Max Gladstone builds, this travels over a lot and there isn't as much intense detail but we see them clearly as familiar readers at this point.

Magic: We get a little of everything - but especially the Eagle Knights who I haven't read in AGES. As usual I love his magic and how his brain pieces these together.

Thoughts:
I find it very hard sometimes to talk about books and series I love, especially dense and slightly unique and weird ones such as the Craft Wars and Craft Sequence books. Wicked Problems is the second in the Craft Wars series, the follow-up series to the Craft Sequence and while I know it’s not going to work for everyone I also know it can and will work for SO many readers who simply haven’t found this world yet. The world of the Craft is one infused with the magic of gods, humans, chaos, laws, and logic. It’s both over the top and mundane in it’s scope, and the characters are insanely talented and powerful but so fundamentally flawed that they’re relatable. I love them intensely.

This particular volume brings together nearly all of the characters we’ve met previously in the series for the build up to a final showdown. Tara’s ‘fallen’ student Dawn from Dead Country heads one side of the fight. They’re trying to stop the oncoming giant space spiders that intend to eat the world. Tara, Abelard, and Caleb lead another side of this fight. They are trying to stop Dawn but also still stop the spiders (because we love a very complicated miscommunication and misunderstanding here), and finally you have the Mr. Browns. Who simply want to eat everything and help the spiders along the way.

I don’t want to spoil this so here is the very short review for those that picked up Dead Country. Instead of focusing on Tara in this novel we live in a multitude of different PoVs, in fact I’d say Tara has some of the smallest page time. The scope is much wider, the stakes much higher, and the book can feel slow in the middle (it took me two weeks to read). However I think it’s infinitely worth the time and effort and the last 30% had me unable to put the book down.

For current fans, it’s worth it and for those who haven’t tried Max Gladstone, go do it. I love this series, and while it’s not perfect it’s well worth the time and investment. This one is likely going on my favorites of the year.

5 out of 5 Talking Snake Crowns

"Wicked Problems" by Max Gladstone is an engaging addition to his repertoire, blending elements of speculative fiction with deep philosophical questions and social commentary. This novel exemplifies Gladstone's talent for creating complex, thought-provoking narratives that challenge readers to consider the intricacies of human nature, technology, and morality. I enjoyed the characters, they are richly drawn and multi-dimensional. Gladstone excels in creating protagonists and antagonists who are neither purely good nor entirely evil. Instead, they are portrayed as real people with genuine motivations, strengths, and flaws.

Mark Twain once said “a book without plot or character is just a random assortment of words and so one might as well read the dictionary out of order.” Now, far be it from me to argue with a fake quote I just made up (he never said that. Nor did Ben Franklin or Winston Churchill), but I firmly believe Max Gladstone’s Wicked Problems completely disproves Mark Twain’s claim he never made. Because honestly, if a “random assortment of words” can give me segments like “The God gathered them in His mighty hands and lifted them into the hollow of his chest, where His heart once was. Tempe climbed the rough bone.” Or “Way up there, Serpents writhed and bled solar flares, and the King in Red was doing his thing, grown into a skeletal colossus in the writing heavens, crowned with starlight, circled by planetoids of intersecting bone and crystal and coruscating lightning, yada yada.” Or “From below, one assumed that inside [the building] would be like any other spire: a hive of apartments and offices, restaurants, and health clubs, chained djinn furnaces, portals to frozen hells for air-conditioning, nutrient tanks for zombie labor, a Muerte Coffee or seven, everything one might need …” If a book can give me passages like that, then I say screw plot and character and screw Mark Twain. I’m in. I’m all in.

Now, that isn’t to say Gladstone eschews either plot or character. They’re both here in spades. But man, this world with its juxtaposition of the cosmically epic and the quotidian, this writing with its seamless shifting amongst beautifully lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny and bitingly incisive, I’m honestly not sure I needed the plot and character, though I greatly appreciated their presence. And both are strongly executed, as I’ll go into below. But really, he had me at giant skeleton king fighting in the sky . . .

As for that plot, Wicked Problems picks up shortly after the events of its predecessor Dead Country, and we’re basically presented with three plot aims. One is to prevent the end of the world via the star/civilization-devouring skazzerai, who are fast approaching (think Galactus if he were a giant spider and there were a whole bunch of them). Two groups are trying to defend the word, but each in their own way and thus we get the the second plot goal, which is to prevent the other group from doing what they’re trying to do to stop the skazzerai. And the third plot goal is basically forming the groups in true “let’s get the band together” fashion, if doing so involved not a few phone calls but a high-security-prison break, “seeing a man about a god,” waking up a pair of gods (and they tend to be grumpy when they’re woken), dropping from the sky, walking through a plain of fire, and, well, you get the idea. The plot is exciting, tense, compelling, and varied in tone and style. Sometimes we get a mass battle, sometimes we get an uber-tense one-on-one scene, sometimes a quite moment of introspection or relationship-building. And it’s peppered throughout with enough humor that the approaching apocalypse doesn’t weight the whole thing down overmuch.

As for the characters, I loved seeing the gang all together in one book, even if they’re playing in different bands. In my review of Dead Country, I said it made a surprisingly excellent entry into Gladstone’s CRAFT series despite it coming so late into the series. But I’m going to reiterate my advice at the end of that review (and argue it more strongly) that it’s best to read the books in order anyway, because here the sheer readerly joy of being reunited with these characters just won’t hit the same way. And who are they, for those lucky enough to have read the series already? We’ve got Tara, Abelard, Caleb, Kos, and Kai in one group and Dawn (newly introduced in Dead Country) leading the other group of Temoc (Caleb’s estranged father newly broken out of prison), Mal, and The Arsenal, a group of tough mercenaries picked up early in this novel.

It’s a complex weave of plot, character, and alliance/confrontation, particularly with relationships that cross group borders, the existence of a common enemy, and an understanding that both groups are aiming at something they believe will save the world, or, in one character’s more precise phrasing: “You’ve seen this world. Do you think saving it and fixing it are nearly the same thing?” And therein lies the other rub (besides the different methods of fighting off the apocalypse): what does saving/fixing mean, exactly? This is no simplistic “hey kids, let’s get the plucky underdogs together and defeat the Dark Lord who wants to turn the world Dark because he’s, you know, Dark,” kind of story. All sorts of thorny, deep, hard-to-wrestle-with questions present themselves in terms of how this world, or its various parts, constructs itself and to the benefit of whom.

One character muses, “What will [the skazzerai] find when they arrive? We have chewed the world for them, like another bird . . . Made ourselves useful instruments. What remains? What terror, joy, or wonder, when even the field of honor has become of quotas and efficiencies … They waited for us to do their work. Now it is done.” Another thinks, “The world is full of people who think they can do better. And it still looks like this.” Yet another makes a plea that “we have to change. Not just you and me, but, people. We hurt each other so easily. Our power grows, and so does our power to inflict harm … There has to be another way.”

And if all that seems abstract or removed, here’s one more: “It seemed unreal, but that was wrong. There was only one world. It was all real. And one reason Kai’s part of that world functioned, her house and toddlers and her beachside drinks and all the rest of it, was that it was very good at distributing the blood and broken teeth and abandoned toys far away from the places where it kept its wealth.” I defy anyone conscious to read that and not think of our iPhones and Priuses (Priusi?) and out-of-season fruit and and and and all that is behind them: the forced child labor/slavery, the blood, the early deaths, and and and. This is a novel that bites as often as it soars.

The difficulty of these questions, the refusal to make them simple or to provide simple, feel-good answers, is nicely mirrored in the characters’ relationships: estranged faith and son, former lovers, mentor and mentee, former adversaries now allies. Gladstone weaves a tangled web, an enthralling, compelling, thought-provoking, funny, scary, tense, insightful, spirited, action-packed, moving, and overall fun web. I’ve loved this series throughout and Wicked Problems maintains the series’ high quality. I can’t wait to see where it goes next. After all, as Mark Twain once said, “If you’ve got dead flying gods, skeleton kings, and giant planet-eating spiders from the void between the stars, you’ve got yourself a winner!”

Max Gladstone decided to end his excellent Craft Wars series with a trilogy. This is a world with so much magic that people created gods that enslaved them. Eventually people mastered the magical craft and killed many of the gods to mine their magic. There is a stock exchange and people who use religion for magical reasons. In the first book, Dead Country (paper) Tara Abernathy goes home to visit a dying father and meets Dawn, a young lost girl with untapped magical abilities. Dawn has a vision of Wicked Problems ( paper fromTordotcom) coming, namely giant spiders that intend to eat the planet. Desperate to find power to stop them, she races across the world acquiring powerful friends. Tara is convinced that Dawn's methods will destroy the world, and chases after Dawn with her own allies. Along the way characters from previous books in the series pop up. Wow! I can’t imagine how the third book will top this exciting adventure.

The prose itself is somewhat clunky, and so I stopped reading at 4%. I have not read his other books, so I cannot advise as to how it would compare. However, it feels like a 3 to 4 star range for sci fi fans.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for the ARC.

Had to DNF this halfway through. I liked the small scale fantasy world of "the craft" and I felt like this got too big too fast with the universe. Wish it hadn't, it really lost the charm for me.

Wicked Problems is the second in Max Gladstone's Craft Wars sequence, which builds off another series of his, the Craft Sequence. I'll offer full disclosure by saying that there's never been a Craft book of his that I didn't like. Something about the blending of magic, gods and warfare with the more prosaic linguistics of consulting and attorneys, the mix of the high fantasy with the low familiar, really hits the spot. Gladstone also isn't shy about pointing out social issues, framed inside his fantasy; you're as like to see a necromantic lich lord called out for his unsound environmental provisions, as groundwater drains from a nearby lake broken by spellfire, as to find a high finance firm using precognitive worship to try and spot trends in the market. It's a smart conceit, and one I've always found deeply enjoyable.
That has not, honestly, changed here. This is a second book in a second series, so I would say that if you're coming into the story fresh, there are probably better starting points. The original sequence pretty much works as standalones, but Wicked Problems needs you to have read its predecessor, at a minimum, to get to grips with it. And the additional context from the other series isn't a bad idea either. But if you're coming in as a fan, as someone who already knows the characters and the world, then let me tell you, this is a story which will reward close reading. It isn't afraid to ask hard questions of its characters - morally, ethically, and occasionally through all too literal sacrifice. It wants to know whether or not you're willing to take action in the face of mounting catastrophe, and it's also willing to entertain the idea that the specific action you might take may also be, you know, wrong. Wonderfully, this is a story which looks at two groups of people trying to save the world from onrushing cataclysm - they're just finding that their means of doing so, and their own sense of what is allowed in order to make that happen, are at odds. No cackling villains here (well, maybe one or two), mostly people doing the best that they can with the information available, and fucking up from time to time. Now granted, those times may or may not involve extradimensional entities and the occasional fireball, but hey.

And the characters themselves...well, if you're here you already know most of them. What they've already lived through, the decisions and consequences they've had to deal with Everyone on the page is smart, thoughtful, and willing to do a lot of things. Some of them are cynics, some are idealists, but they're there, looking back out at us, filled with raw pain and utter joy. There's families trying to live together on opposite sides, and students and teachers at the edge of a knife. There's golems and pirates and the occasional god, and say it however many times you like, they all feel like people to me, Like they could step off the page, grab a beer and start arguing about arcane theory and how it, say, allows you to use lava monsters to run geothermal plants. They're people, even the ones who aren't. Maybe especially the ones who aren't. They're dangerous and clever and hurt, and they're always willing to surprise both their antagonists and the reader at the last second.

I don't have a lot to say about the story, except that it'll grab you at the back of the neck and not let go. It's going to keep you there, turning pages until far too late at night, as you try and figure out who is going to survive, what they plan to do, and whether or not they're right. It's a story that asks questions and throws out answers for you to look over yourself, to decide where you sit, where your sympathies are. It's a story that compels and fascinates, blood and metal and love and thunder. It's another marvellous book from Gladstone, another excellent Craft story, and if you're a fan, you should go pick it up, very soon.

Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I cannot recommend this series enough.

Indeed, it is not only fantastically written, practically overflowing with great lines and references and wordplay, it is also one of those rare, beautifully blooming world-building exercises that straddle the fence between the oh-so-familiar and the expertly sharp Lovecraftian-mythos-turned-legalistic-actuarial-oligarchy.

Sound too complicated?

Yes -- and no.

Max Gladstone is one of those writers that can suck you in, make everything JUST FINE -- right before he throws you into godzilla vs cthuhlu scale conflict.

So why isn't EVERYONE reading these Craft books?

Honestly... I have NO IDEA. They're WILD, creative, emotional, and exciting.

In this particular novel, we get to have ALL of the great PoVs that came from the original 5 book series in what could only be described as an Avengers-Level narrative.

And here's where *I* love it most: As I read all of these, originally, I was giddy with the idea that it was pulling off a Charlie Stross Laundry Files moment, but instead of secret service, it was legal challenges, industrial espionage, and ELDER GOD corporate wars.

Not only do we get all of that here, but it just keeps raising the stakes.


Now, was I rather surprised to see it go in quite this direction after Dead Country, where it felt so down-to-earth and shaped like a western? Yep! But getting back into the lovecraftian-fueled big cities IS a fantastic literary device, custom tailored to keep us on our toes or skeleton wings or alchemical marriages.

My only desire is to turn EVERYONE on to these wonderful novels, to make sure that they never get lost, that they become as truly big as they OUGHT to be.

Quality is quality, and these have it all.

Really enjoyed the continuation of this series! Max Gladstone doesn't disappoint. Only some minor pacing flaws and preferences.

Everything I loved in Dead Country, book one of the new Craft trilogy has been lost. Actually, to be specific, it has been jumped up with an injection of epinephrine straight into the heart. Instead of one main character, we have five or six; instead of heading home for a funeral, we have chasing a wayward student across the continents, instead of –well, at the risk of getting spoilery, I’ll just say, instead of small scale-village conflicts, we have city and continent-wide ones. It was the literary version of Speed turned into Crank.

The Prologue begins with Dawn and Sybil, the snake manifestation last seen in Dead Country. This is good; when Dawn spells out her mission for us, it starts us on solid footing in story continuity and recalling recent events. Then we start the jumping, beginning with Caleb Altemoc, seen in Two Serpents Rise (2013), my least favorite book in the series, and Last First Snow (2015). We will jump heads to Abelard (Three Parts Dead, 2012, and Four Roads Cross, 2016), Kai (Full Fathom Five, 2014) and Temoc (LFS). Confused? Me too! While you don’t have to have read all these books, but it will likely probably help because this is, quite frankly, a Team Superhero novel. Heavy on action, full of grandiose but strangely non-specific agendas (“stop them”), slim on characterization (except instant loyalty and inklings of affection) and generally, just a very different direction than I was expecting after Dead Country.

Dawn’s narrative is the interlinking voice in this story. I appreciated the complicated picture we get of her and Sybil, and how that contrasts with that of the other characters. I liked her voice. The one I had to most trouble with were Caleb and Kai, who are essentially working adults now, and whose language and thoughts feel like that of modern professionals: “Descending in stocking feet with her heels in her handbag was about as much fun as Kai would have guessed. She got splashed by the maelstrom and clipped by a rock shard once. But she did not die, which was nice.” It led to some moments of mental incongruity.

Speaking of incongruity, I felt like there were more moments of them in this book, although its hard to be sure when I’m speaking from memory. Kai, for instance, talks about going blind dates through a service using demonic algorithms, a clear (and unneeded) commentary on dating apps, and her date talking about the new book “of a forty-book series of thrillers about some itinerant special-forces type who bought fresh pairs of underwear rather than doing laundry.” Yes, yes; we get the Reacher reference. Why is it there? Have you sacrificed your story’s pathos for a moment of modern social humor and/or commentary? I think so.

What saved it for me is that Gladstone tries very hard to create a ‘both sides could be right,’ a great philosophical challenge–albeit one that none of the characters have the time for, much like a superhero movie. We will do this thing because I have said I will do it, for the moral stance of it all. It’s this depth to the characters that I appreciate.

“No trace remained but Dawn’s memory and the pirate’s expression. Dawn though, This woman has not been a pirate all her life. She was a child once. She had parents. She became this thing, of her own will or not. She was not quips and daring and cutlasses down to the atoms.
There was no secret, Tara had said in the graveyard. Just hurt people on the same side.”

One of the strongest parts of Gladstone’s writing is the emotional and situational complexity:

“‘You hoped she was dead.

He looked out at the horizon. “I hoped she was out of it. Away from gods and Craftsmen and the Wars you all talk about like they’re over. She was not a good person or a nice person and she hurt a lot of people including me. Including herself. I didn’t want her to hurt anyone else.”

There are some very creative scenes, and it is certainly action-filled, so it pulls one along with momentum. Despite the too-obvious intrusions of the modern American world into the story, I will keep returning for the creative world-building, the questions of ideology, and the exceptional prose.



Many thanks to NetGalley for an arc of this story. Of course, opinions are my own. Quotes are subject to change in the final publication, of course, but give an idea of what to expect.

As usual, Max Gladstone has crafted a fascinating, thought-provoking novel that I'm not sure I agree with in its entirety, but that is well worth my time and thought because of that disagreement. Picking up where "Dead Country" left off, "Wicked Problems" follows Tara, Dawn, and their respective allies as they gather information and power in an attempt to stop the spiders. First, though, they have to stop each other from stopping the spiders in the *wrong* way. What the right way might be, and whether it has any hope of success, is a question that unsurprisingly continues to be deferred, but Gladstone deftly balances the two rival agendas without committing to a favorite side or caricaturing the failures of either. As in his (supposedly) unrelated "Last Exit," Gladstone again puts questions of power and sacrifice at the center of the story. Are the world, and the interactions it is composed of, driven by an underlying logic of might makes right, or are there other forces at play? Is amassing more power, especially at great personal cost, the only way to make the world better, or does doing so inherently compromise any noble goals? How do the bonds between people make us stronger, and how do they tie us down? Tara and Dawn, while they may harbor a great deal of unresolved anger and fear towards each other, and claim to be following vastly different paths, offer striking similarities in their answers, as both seek to reshape themselves to meet what they see as the coming evil to end all evils. I'm curious to see where the next volume(s) in the Craft Wars take us, and whether the author chooses to offer any clear answers to the questions posed here. I found the conclusions in "Empress of Forever" and "Last Exit" somewhat disappointing, perhaps as a reflection of my own pessimism and status as a cog in some of the very systems these books are trying to expose, criticize, and dismantle. On a more literary level, the vast scale and world-ending stakes in this book sometimes leave me more distant and unmoved than in "Dead Country," where the weight of family and memory helped make the conflicts more personal. Still, despite fearing both an unsatisfying ending and an increasing escalation of stakes, I'm curious to see where these questions lead next.

Four out of five stars. My own personal peeves aside, a solid sequel that continues to poke at the question of how best to live in, and improve, a failing world.

This may or may not be a dystopian story, I never could tell. There is a wealth of gods, characters, and monsters. It really needed a backstory. I vaguely remembered the plot but the complexity of the book made my recollection quite foggy.

The likeability of characters is a major criterion of how much I enjoy a book. I liked Mal but was a bit indifferent about Dawn and Tera. Frankly, the number of characters was a bit overwhelming. The book has aspects I enjoyed but it will never land on my most liked books page.

In my review of Dead Country, I commented that having Tara Abernathy as the protagonist made sense, because if there was a main protagonist of the Craft Sequence, it was Tara. This book made me realize there’s a much better way to handle the concluding trilogy of the Craft universe: have the whole gang come together. I would say this book has four protagonists: Tara, again, but also Caleb Altemoc from Two Serpents Rise and Last First Snow, Kai Pohala from Full Fathom Five and The Ruin of Angels, and (very interestingly) Dawn from Dead Country. We also get appearances by Abelard and Shale (much more substantial than their cameos in Dead Country), and Elayne Kavarian, and Teo Batan, and the King in Red, and more I will not be mentioning because of spoilers. As the great sage Kronk said, it’s all coming together.

The feeling of everything coming together was one of my favorite parts of this book (and all the “So … you two know each other then?” moments as the cast crossed paths were just plain fun). The various events in Alt Coulomb and Dresediel Lex and Kavekana all have consequences that are playing out here, and (I suspect) the events of those books shed light on the mysteries of this book as well. I had intended to re-read the Craft Sequence before Dead Country, and had really really intended to re-read it after finishing Dead Country, but I never made the time and am kicking myself for it. I have a general sense of what happened in those books, enough to not be lost in this one, but I know I missed a great deal.

This book follows up on the two threats revealed in Dead Country, both the eldritch horrors approaching from the stars and Dawn, having become a sort of god of the Craft, as paradoxical as that might seem in the universe of the Craft Sequence. The book is essentially divided into two competing camps: Team Tara and Team Dawn. Each camp is worried about the other, but each is also worried about the whole approaching eldritch horror thing as well. And there are other players on the board, with goals we don’t really understand.

Unsurprisingly, given how Dead Country ended, Tara’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility plays a big part in events. Normally I don’t have much patience for the trope where the protagonist is all, “I must do everything myself and protect everyone” and the protagonist’s friends are all, “Knock it off, you unseasoned chicken wing, we’re helping.” But here it works and works well.

It’s also worth mentioning that Tara has been more or less free of any romantic entanglements in the Craft Sequence, which I’ve generally appreciated. That’s no longer the case, and it’s adorable and I love it.

Follows on from Dead Country, and set in the same world as the Craft Sequence.
My review of this book will appear in Locus Magazine next year.