Diriel Quiogue, SWORDS OF THE FOUR WINDS

So! The other day, I picked up Swords of the Four Winds (2013) by Diriel R. A. Quiogue (Kwee-o-ga), a book I discovered after reading an interview by the editor of New Edge Sword-and-sorcery, who praised Quiogue's work highly. 

I'm always a bit skeptical of self-published work, but I have to say, this collection by Quiogue is Grade A sword-and-sorcery fantasy. The pacing is very Howardian. Quiogue proceeds from scene to scene with scarcely any pause, and although his characters occasionally engage in rapid infodumps or Grand Reveals to keep the pace from flagging, I tended to appreciate this technique rather than deplore it, as it seems so genre-appropriate.

What's unusual or unique about Four Winds? Well, since this collection counts as "sword-and-silk" (i.e., Asia-centered S&S), I couldn't always -- as a Western reader -- pinpoint Quiogue's historical analogues. I'm guessing "Lord of the Brass Host" owes itself to the Terracotta Army, and Arios is a transplanted Macedonian veteran from the Middle Eastern campaigns of Alexander the Great (fictionalized here as "Callistos Zhulkarnein"). I really liked this latter setting. In the third Arios story particularly, "The Sea of Dragon's Blood," I enjoyed the oddity of a sea battle on the Dead Sea (where nothing sinks!).

But even if I couldn't quite recognize the historical analogues, Quiogue's source material provides him an astounding array of new elements and tropes for the S&S subgenre. I liked all the tales individually, but my favorite is probably "Track of the Whirlwind." Again, I couldn't quite pinpoint the historical analogue (Korea, maybe?), yet this tale works as a brilliant mix of action and colonialist criticism: three East Asian kingdoms on the same island are fighting amongst themselves while being goaded into internecine warfare by pseudo-Spanish diplomats. Besides Quiogue's weightier theme, "Whirlwind" is one of those rare S&S tales where you don't know who'll win the final fight -- the main hero, Datu Buhawi, or the good monarch Rajah Walid.

For instance, normally, the hero of an S&S always wins their fight. There's only one Datu Buhawi story in Quiogue's collection, though, and if Rajah Walid had won, Quiogue could then have enabled a Golden Age for a newly united East Asian island kingdom, one now capable of resisting the encroaching faux-Spanish. Yet it was not to be. Quiogue powerfully choses the more bitter ending. All in all, this is just one of the admirably tightest S&S stories I've ever read.

All in all, Quiogue is a strong talent within the subgenre, and Four Winds is what happens when an author who knows how to do S&S well actually goes out and does it. Of course, granted: most action stories don't have much to recommend them on a thematic level. Other than "Track of the Whirlwind," this tendency holds true for Swords of the Four Winds. If you pick up this book, you're reading Quiogue for his sheer story-telling abilities and his startlingly original Asian settings, not because of any "epic" themes or the distinctive psychologies of his characters. That's fine, though, and I'm glad I took a chance on Quiogue.

For future personal reference, here's a few online things about Quiogue that I managed to scrounger up.

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