Series Review: Death Gate Cycle

Lord of the Rings!

Everyone's heard of that.

Dragonlance!

How about that? I’m sure many of you recognize that name, too.

The Dragonlance series may not be as popular and well known as Lord of the Rings, but the series has an impressive fan base. There are over 200 novels in the Dragonlance universe released from 1984 to one slated to come out in August 2023. Granted, only a small percentage of those are from the original creators, but there is also the tabletop rpg to consider, and all the supplements that go along with that. It’s a well-known and beloved series to many people, but I’m not here to talk about Dragonlance. I’m here to talk about…

The Death Gate Cycle

This series was written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the same people who created Dragonlance, yet I had never even heard of this series until it was brought to my attention, and odds are you haven’t either. If you have, I’d love to hear how you found out about it, and what you thought of it.

Death Gate Cycle is a series of 7 books that came out between 1990 and 1994, the first and second novels premiering in the same year as Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens, Shrek!, which yes, was apparently the inspiration for the Mike Meyers movie, and two Discworld novels, one of which includes one of my more favorite entries in the series, Eric- though I’m barely more than halfway through that series.

There were definite outliers of the genre at the time, but the early nineties were full of fantasy oozing Tolkienisms. Elves, and dwarves, and orcs, and a great and terrible evil dark lord threatening the world was commonplace.

Death Gate Cycle has elves and dwarves and wizards and dragons, too, but that’s where much of the comparisons end. This series made a habit of circumventing expectations, not just with its tropes and characters, but with its plot as well. Every time I cracked open a new book and thought I understood what was going to happen next, the authors went in a completely different direction.

The big bad, evil dark lord of the series most fantasy of the time we’re known for? There isn’t one. Instead, we get a character who is ruthless and cold, yes, but he cares for his own people so much he constantly risks his life for their wellbeing. He’s also the first character we are introduced to, and the primary protagonist of the series is this lord’s premier minion. Haplo, as he is named, isn’t a farm boy who bumbles into a fate he has to grow into. Haplo is powerful and skilled, a threat almost no one can contend with. Nowadays, you can find sympathetic villains and a young talented protagonist by closing your eyes and throwing a dart at your local bookstore or library, but back then? It wasn’t nearly as common.

The plot kicks off with the Lord Xar sending his underling Haplo off to other worlds to act as a scout in order to gain information that they can use to conquer. And yes, I said worlds. Plural. This series was a miniature Cosmere before Brandon Sanderson even published his first book. Which speaking of, the world building in the Death Gate Cycle is amazing. Detailed and thought out, it’s not just one world crafted to greatness, but multiple worlds with their own unique attributes. Each of the four worlds (theres’ more, but I’m keeping things simple at the moment) are inhabited by the same groups: humans, dwarves, elves and dragons (there are exceptions, but keeping them out for simplicity's sake.) That may sound like a negative or possibly even lazy, but this is honestly where I think the world building shines the most. You get to see how each of the races interacts with each other under different conditions, which were created when, long ago, Earth was destroyed and four new worlds were created in its place.

In one world, the elves and humans fight a war over the control of water, their most valuable resource, that is mined by dwarves practically enslaved by the elves. On another world, the elves are happy to play arms dealers to the humans as they fight amongst themselves. And on another, you find the elves quite lazy, content to move at their own pace as they live their long lives in leisure, forgetting the talents for war their kind had before Earth’s destruction.

Now, I’ll say that at times, the world building is a little too much. A lot of more telling than showing, especially when it comes to the literal footnotes that come with each chapter. The footnotes are explained by the series being written in-world as if a character is writing down the events after the fact. That in of itself is fine. I’ve read other books that do this, and it’s a valid framing device for the story. I just didn’t think it was used to its full potential, and only came off as a way to easily explain a few minor details. Admittedly, when it comes to important information, the authors do the heavy lifting and do a good job of explaining events without footnotes, only relying on them for mostly unimportant lore fluff and kept the pace of the story flowing nicely.

Now to the backstory that sets this whole series off; In the beginning, Earth was Earth- our Earth, our reality as it is now. Then wars happened. Death, destruction, nuclear holocausts, all that stuff. Things were bad. But then humans discovered magic. They used it to better the world. Things became great. It was sometime around here that humans started to diverge into three separate, but similar entities; your basic human, the Sartan, and Patryn. Of the two '“elevated races,” the Sartan and Patryn were only really as different as their magic systems and their opposing ideological views, though there would be a few other minor details as well. Elves and dwarves also had come into existence by this point, but while the book suggests these fantasy races may have always existed but stayed hidden until now, the book also surmises the great wars and their fallout may have created them. It leaves their point of origin to the reader to decide, because it doesn’t matter for the plot. I personally imagine it as an Adventure Time situation, where a whole lot of magical craziness happened in the fallout of the apocalyptical wars.

It wasn’t long before things started getting messy again and another big war broke out, this time between the Sartan and the Patryn, with both sides using the basic humans, elves, and dwarves to help fight their battles, as the Sartan and Patryn magics were far beyond anything the other “lesser races” could compete with.

The book states that the Sartan wanted to rule over everything and enslave the others, and if they win the war, that’s what they’ll do. What happens if the Sartans rule is left unstated, but considering that instead of possibly losing the war the Sartans BLEW UP EARTH, they probably didn’t have the greatest plans for the others, either.

But hey, once they blew up Earth, the Sartans did create four new worlds and moved some of the surviving ‘lower class’ races to the new worlds, so that was nice of them, right? Oh, and they also created a 5th world called Labyrinth that was used as a prison planet for the Patryn.

Generation after generation passed for the Patryn, with the old dying out and new Patryn being born inside the prison realm. The Labyrinth was meant to rehabilitate them, but instead it tries its hardest to kill them. The Patryn live an existence of constant danger as the creatures of the Labyrinth and the world itself tries to kill its inhabitants. The ultimate goal is to reach the end, where they would finally gain their freedom. One Patryn made it. Xar. He made it to the end, where the Nexus awaited him. Once there, he continued to use his immense magical prowess to help those still inside to escape. And there, he learned about the Death Gate, the gateway that would lead him to the other worlds.

Xar- Lord Xar that is, had conquest on his mind. He saw his chance to grasp power in the other four worlds and wanted revenge against the Sartan, so he sent his strongest, most trusted underling through the Death Gate to scout the worlds out, learn their weaknesses, and cause trouble all for the sake of making it easier for Lord Xar to take each world over. This is where the first book, Dragon Wing, begins, with Haplo taking a flying ship through Death’s Gate to the world of Arianus.

On Arianus, Haplos quickly realizes there is no sign of their Sartan nemeses. In fact, the Sartan have been missing from the world for so long, the current inhabitants of Arianus don’t even remember them. And while that seems good news for Haplo and the Patryn cause, their disappearance is a mystery that needs to be solved. Another problem that arises is that the new worlds the Sartan created are not as perfect as they should be. They are failing worlds, each with a deadly flaw that causes living on them very difficult, though Arianus certainly has it the best of all the other worlds.

Each of the first four books follows a similar, basic format. The first portion of the book introduces us to the new world and that world’s relevant cast of characters. Then Haplo makes his appearance and interacts with the cast-of-the-book and they run through figuring out the conflict of the story which is set up in the first portion. By the end of the book, Haplo returns to the Nexus and begins his mission anew in the next book. This is where I need to make sure I point out my previous statement about the story always managing to outdo my expectations. Every time I thought I knew how the next story was going to play out, this series proved me wrong. Every new world has a new problem that adds to the difficulties, every cast brings their own troubles, and Haplo continues to be impacted by the events around him, changing him.

That’s the first four books, but as I mentioned, Death Gate Cycle is a series of seven. Well, the last three books are reserved for bringing everything together. By the end of book 4, the troubles have continued to build up, loyalties new and old are shaken to their core, and the real threat of the worlds has revealed itself.

I can’t get into it any further without spoilers, so here’s my general review;

The story is great. The worlds incredible. The writing is pretty utilitarian, focusing less on prose and more on telling the story. With the magic and the multiple story threads coming together, it honestly feels a bit like a Brandon Sanderson story, just with a focus more on the worlds themselves than the magic systems that Sanderson loves to create. Each book does have its own flaws, but nothing big enough that kept me from reading the next book in the series.

Book 1 had a bit of a tone issue in the first half, switching between what felt like a typical fantasy and some Discworld-like silliness.

Book 2 had probably the weakest cast of the series, which made the forced romance all the worse.

And book 3 started off a bit slow, but some interesting revelations and an absolutely crazy last third of the book ended up making this one of the better novels in the series for me.

Book 4 introduces the actual antagonists of the series. And while it’s done well in this book, the nature of the antagonists leads to some problems in the following books, compounded with a few other factors that only worsen the issue which I will refer to as “Because the Plot Needs it to Happen.”

I personally feel the last three books suffer from a lot of Because the Plot Needs it to Happen, mostly in the form of bad guys doing a certain thing- or not doing a certain thing- because otherwise the plot would resolve right there on the spot. There’s another character who acts more stubborn and/or stupid about a few decisions that only build on top of the trouble, and another character who helps the protagonists get out of trouble in just a way that allows the story to keep moving.

I can overlook a lot of the Because the Plot Needs it to Happen since it is in the nature of the main antagonists to do so, and another source of it that I can excuse somewhat is from a character that is played mainly for laughs- a 4th wall breaking wizard and his smarmy dragon. (The 4th wall bit is eventually explained in-story, so it’s not technically 4th wall breaking)

The last book is also is the shortest of the bunch, and feels like it’s padded to even make it that far. The authors likely could have gotten away with a larger 6th book and ended it there, but since I wasn’t there and really don’t know what other factors made things the way they were, I’m just left with my own personal theory that there are 7 books because 7 ends up being an important number for the story.

Overall, this series is good, though I was ultimately disappointed by just how great it could have been- but how much of that could I legitimately expect from an old school, early nineties classic fantasy novel that was already venturing away from the norms set by Papa Tolkien? Hard to say.

But I’ve saved one last complaint for the end, and it’s the worst thing about the entire series… In the first book, we are introduced to a character named Hugh the Hand. I wanted more of him, his world, and his story. Definitely not enough Hugh.

I feel it’s criminal that this series didn’t make it on Reddit’s best fantasy series list this year, but that might go back to the issue I first brought up with the book: most modern day fantasy readers just haven’t seemed to have heard about it. Well, if you’ve read this review, at least now you can say you’ve heard about it, too. Check out the first book, Dragon Wing. Even if you don’t continue on from there, that book itself is a solid novel worth reading.