Welcome to War Of Souls, the third trilogy in the DragonLance ™ series.  If you’re like me, or most cynical, rational, people, you’re probably thinking to yourself about the time you hear "third", "trilogy" and "TM" that, "DragonLance was merely a derivative, stupid, junk fantasy series to begin with, and after writing several progressively worse books, they’re trying, yet again, to get the last dollar out of loyal fans with a trilogy that must give new meaning to terrible."

And, in a normal series, you’d be perfectly right.  But there’s something very strange about DragonLance ™.  Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman seem to actually be writing in a more creative, less derivative and, in my opinion, more interesting way as the books progress.  The Chronicles series is populated by cliché, shallow characters, predictable plots, and all of the worst aspects of most fantasy novels, which gives it, of course, an instant following among people who like that sort of thing.  In fact the only thing that saves it at all is that there are a few particularly strong characters, good writing, and humor to carry it through for the rest of us. However, by the time of the Twins series, the characters are becoming unique, deep, and fascinating and the plot is taking unexpected turns that cannot be predicted by the first three paragraphs in the novel.

War of Souls starts out with an almost entirely new batch of characters from those in the first two trilogies or even the extended Chaos Wars and Second Generation novels.  Goldmoon still remains, barely, from the first novels, but plays a far more three dimensional role here than she did as the barbarian princess whose primary job was to wear tight buckskin leggings and carry around a blue staff.  Tasslehoff, too, reappears, although his reappearance, via being brought back from the past by a time travel device, is sort of thin. However, the humor he gives to the bleak story is greatly desirable.

Most of the rest of the characters, however, are new, more human, and more three-dimensional than their earlier Chronicles counterparts.  The hero, Gerard, is grumpy, ugly, wealthy, spoiled, and dissatisfied with his life. The heroine, Mina, is a spooky Joan of Arc like warrior-cleric who brings back the powers of the now lost gods for a mysterious One God.  This is strange enough, but when one considers the religious statements that could be made from Mina and the sociological statements that could be implied from Gerard and his to be mentor Medan, suddenly Dragons of a Fallen Sun looks far less like trash fantasy and more like a novel that could be truly thought provoking.

Besides the more realistic characters, the world in War of Souls also changes from fantasy cliché to something strangely different. The world has collapsed, magic, including Palin’s new magic, has disappeared, and the gods are gone, leaving magicians unhappily with only their earlier scientific techniques and clerics with merely the ability to futilely comfort the spiritually distressed.  The dragons, now the most powerful things around, rule the world with the help of the Knights of Neraka (earlier the Knights of Takhisis), who keep peace in a Nazi like regime.  However, even the Knights have changed in a way deeper than the changing of their name and are more interested in rule than conquest and in keeping people alive than in exterminating them.

So, the plot is good, the characters are great, and the setting is startling, new, and unnerving. What’s not to like?  Well, quite a few things according to most fans. For one, the familiarity of the books is completely gone.  After all, most readers read DragonLance TM so that they can have a nice, comforting fantasy story with easy to relate to characters and a plot where everything turns out well in the end.  Not only does Dragons of a Fallen Sun, the first novel in the War of Souls trilogy not have easy to relate to characters and a comforting fantasy world, no one can even be sure that things will turn out right in the end.  The good characters have become evil and the evil good, and it’s difficult to determine whether or not everything will be right by the last page of the last book.

Secondarily, and perhaps more important for people who realized that, forty years after Dragons of a Summer Flame and over sixty years after Dragons of Autumn Twilight that most of our old friends would be dead or so old that they couldn’t move without walkers, is Fallen Sun’s tendency to drag in places.  There are several intertwining storylines involving plots like evil Joan of Arc like character tries to conquer the world for her God, good knight with the evil knights tries to save the elves, magicians try to figure out what happened to magic and, failing that, another magician, elven prince tries to regain his homeland, etc.  And, while most of these plot lines are fascinating, keeping the reader annoyed at any disturbances that might disrupt his or her speed through the book, others, such as Palin slowly trying to convince Jenna to tell him what happened to Dalamar for several hundred pages, get tedious quickly.  Besides that, keeping track of everything can be a pain, even more so as the cast is nearly entirely new, especially for people so disgusted with Dragons of a Summer Flame and The Second Generation that they have no clear idea what’s transpired between Test of the Twins and Dragons of a Fallen Sun.

However, despite a few flaws in pacing, Dragons of a Fallen Sun is a remarkable book, even outside of the DragonLance TM genre.  In fact, considering its change of world, darker style, and replacement of characters, it may even be better suited to people who love fantasy, but not DragonLance TM  in particular than the series’ die-hard fans.  Perhaps it is best to think that, though not flawless, Dragons of a Fallen Sun is a great fantasy novel, provided that the reader forgets that it’s DragonLanceTM.