The Last Guardian of Everness – John C. Wright (War of the Dreaming, Book 1)

Title: The Last Guardian of Everness

Series: The War of the Dreaming

Author: John C. Wright

Genre: Fantasy

Okay, I absolutely love John C. Wright’s books. His Golden Age trilogy was a masterpiece of science fiction, and I found his Chronicles of Chaos completely captivated me. That said, I had pretty high expectations as I opened this book. In doing a little reading online, I did learn that Wright supposedly wrote the two books of this series before any of the others.

That latter fact may explain why I found the first portion of the book dragging for a little ways. It eventually picked up rather unrelentingly (in Wright’s usual fashion), but I was a little surprised at the slow start. By the end of the book, I was completely immersed in Wright’s world, and was very happy I had the second book (Mists of Everness) on hand when I finished reading this – the ending to this book resolves little and completely leaves you hanging.

Trying to summarize the gist of the story is hard. I realized I had actually read several different takes on it, each different, each wrongly focused in the end. There’s actually too much going on in these books to summarize one without the other, and there is not one or two main characters, but in the end it is more like an ensemble where a whole cast with different roles prove as important and essential as the others. The overarching conflict is that within the realm of dreaming there are those who desire to take over our world and there are certain guardians who have been given a task of alerting the enemies of these conquerors as soon as they begin to breach our world. That’s just the beginning. The relationship of our world and reality to that of the dream is not so simple as it sounds here.

What is at stake is the existence of life as we know it, and the resolution is not as simple as “beat the bad guys.” It’s much more complex and Wright doesn’t hesitate to get a little deep with the science or the mythology. You really can’t read any of his books without your thinking cap on because many of the concepts are just not simple.

This is definitely a solid contribution to the Fantasy genre, and it actually takes things in a different direction than most books of the same vein.

Worldview: More pan-theistic than pagan, though the latter is definitely true

Recommended Age: Due to material depth of concepts, definitely late High School to early college age.