Well, this is the first of the Dark Sun novels (there are five in this series) and I am not really sure whether I have read them all. There was a time when I read a lot of the novels released around D&D worlds, but that was usually because a friend handed them to me and said, 'read this, it's good'. Well I did, and I did sort of enjoy it, but looking back on it from this point in my life I do actually wonder whether these books are really all that fulfilling, or simply publicity stunts.

What I remember about this book is that it is about a slave who escapes slavery, hides in the mountains, befriends some ravenous halflings, and then returns to the city of Tyr with a rag-tag army and defeats the sorcerer king. It does sound somewhat like a quest, however while it is a quest, I am not convinced that many, if any, of the Dungeons and Dragons related books can really be described as quest books in the truest sense of the word. This concept, that I have outlined, is that a young boy is thrust into a quest, and through the quest becomes an adult. While it is not necessarily something we all face, the quest narrative can be allegorical for not only our rise to adulthood, but also a journey to come to understand ourselves.

Darksun is the first of the D&D worlds to actually use slavery. It is not that slavery is endorsed (it never is) and while a number of other worlds do have slavery (such as the drow and the mind flayers, though the mind flayers tend to use their slaves more as cattle than as a work force) generally it was something that sat in the background that nobody really thought about, unless the adventure involved busting open the ring (as with one series of adventures). In a way I always found it quite disturbing (at least after I completed university) that slavery was never really explored in the D&D world. Obviously we do not wish to condone it, since we like to think that we have moved on from that rather distasteful period of our history.

However, slavery, I might argue, is still alive and well. There is obviously actual slavery, which tends to involve kidnapping people (usually from developing countries) and selling them to the highest bidder. There is also a form of slavery where people are promised a new life in a developed country, but upon arriving there, they discover that the smugglers have yoked them with a huge debt and force them to work in substandard conditions for little pay. One could also argue that unless we are working for ourselves, we are slaves to our employer, but I will argue otherwise.

The difference between an employment contract and being a slave is ownership. A contract is a mutual agreement of obligations. We agree to perform duties for our employer, and our employer agrees to pay us. Our employer does not own us (slavery involves property) but has an agreement with us, and both of us are expected to hold to our end of the bargain (the law of contract makes sure of that). This does not mean that bargaining power is always equitable, that is not always the case, but it is not ownership. A slave cannot simply hand in a letter of resignation and walk away. However, there is also the concept of debt. We may not be indebted to our employer, but we may be indebted to others, such as the bank. While the bank does not own us, we are in a contract with the bank, and are expected to uphold our end of the bargain (such as paying back the loan), and refusal to do so can result in civil penalties. Fortunately though, debtor's prisons have long since been abolished.

This will be the last Darksun book that I review because, to be honest, I did not I continue reading the series after this book, even if I read the book, but I am pretty sure that I did because I wouldn't be writing a review of it if I hadn't. One of the keys to whether I read it or not is generally the date, because around this time I had returned to Highschool and was generally mostly other books, and specifically not reading books related to Dungeons & Dragons (though I still had a friend that would lend them to me, and surprisingly, he still does that).

This is apparently a love story about a woman who is torn between the types of magic she wishes to practice. The Darksun world was created as some post apocalyptic world that arose after some magical Armageddon. As such a bulk of the world is lifeless desert and any life that does exist is generally destroyed by the defilers. There are two types of sorcerer in Athas (the name of the Darksun world), the preservers and the defilers. The preservers seek to use magic sparingly as it is clear that the source of magic comes from life, and misuse of magic destroys life. The defiler is the opposite: they simply do not care. It is needless to say that the sorcerer kings are defilers, and they generally use the life force of their slaves to cast spells.

This is reflective of the world in which we now live. I do not believe the creators of any of the Dungeons and Dragons worlds ever meant them to be allegorical. Howcver, the concept of the post apocalyptic world appeared shortly after World War II since we had invented weapons that could easily send us there. Dungeons and Dragons, though, tends to take us to lands of adventures, and throw magic into them. We have seen this before in Gamma World, and now a more developed world setting hit the shelves.

To me, it is the debate between industrialisation and preservation. Our world, in fact our magic (that being science) throws us into this debate. One could argue that the industrialists, the oil barons, and such like them, are like the sorcerer kings of Athas. They wield tremendous power and the result of their lust for wealth and power is the destruction of the world around us. There are numerous books and documentaries that I can refer you to in that effect, so I won't go into a long diatribe about that here. However we also have the green movement, which are like the preservers in that they seek to use science sparingly, and look for ways to preserve nature and the world in which we live. This, however, has been around for quite a while, but really took off significantly in the late 90s as we came to see the pollution and the destruction that industry was levelling. Once again, I do not believe Dungeons and Dragons was trying to be political, but in a way, not only have they done so with this setting, but it was quite before its time in its allegorical message (not that it was intentional).