But if I understood what we did, I was less sure of how we did it. The grounding principle of the Small Science was “like calls to like,” but then it got complicated. Odinakovost was the “thisness” of a thing that made it the same as everything else. Etovost was the “thatness” of a thing that made it different from everything else. Odinakovost connected Grisha to the world, but it was etovost that gave them an affinity for something like air, or blood, or in my case, light.
This is a fantasy novel and, like all fantasy novels, it is constructed upon an original mythology. Part of that mythology—a huge part—involves what the Grisha refer to as “Small Science” but which others condemn as witchcraft or magic. The difference between what is magic and what is science—or, indeed, if there is any difference at all—is upfront and significant. The layout of the Small Science is initialized here in an unusually accessible manner. The phrases “thisness” and “thatness” do not recur; they are stated once and make the mythological foundation clear from the beginning. Do not just quickly skim over these invented words or this explanation. It is essential.
The next, a dark slash had appeared on the landscape, a swath of nearly impenetrable darkness that grew with every passing year and crawled with horrors.
This is the novel that brought darkness back to the literal in literature. Okay, that may be hyperbolic, but unlike most description of darkness in the literature of the past 150 years, this darkness is not intended to be merely metaphorical. Darkness is the defining metaphor of our age in literature. It is omnipresent. A writer once published a very fine article suggesting that cloudy might warrant that honor and while she made a strong case, alas it just doesn’t hold. Once you start looking for darkness as a metaphor that is immersed in the lexicon of modernity, you start tripping over it. But this darkness is real. This darkness is tangible. It has a visceral literal quality that is also absolutely essential to the book.
“Greed is your god, Kaz.”
“No, Inej. Greed bows to me. It is my servant and my lever.”
Guess what else is essential to understanding the mythology which is set up in this opening entry into a fantasy series? Greed. It is, for lack of a better term, infinite. And that is straight from the horse’s mouth, the horse in this case being an unidentified philosopher within the construct of this mythology who observes that two things are known to be infinite: the universe and greed. The magic which is science (or vice versa) and the darkness and the mythic obsession and the quests undertaken in this novel and its subsequent follow-ups all stem from this infinity of greed.
