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masterghandalfWarning: This post necessarily contains discussion of a particular individual's history of abusive and bullying behavior and general bigotries.
The Arts of Dark and Light: Summa Elvetica
By Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale
Alternate Title: An Introduction To An All-New Fantasy Saga That Will Likely Put You Off Continuing It Further
SPORKER: MasterGhandalf
SUMMARY
In a world torn by religious and political conflict, the head of the Amorran Church decides the time has come to answer one very important question – do elves have souls? To determine the truth, a young priest is sent on an adventure so irritating that by the time it’s through, none of us will probably be left caring about the answer, if we ever did to begin with. Following this will come a series of shorter tales which supposedly set up the “epic” to follow, but at best tend to raise more questions than answers and at worst will leave the reader mystified as to just what the author is trying to accomplish, if not horrified by the implications – but hey, the great news is, very little of this is going to end up mattering anyway! Save for possibly more insight into the author’s mindset and creative process than we ever needed or wanted, that is.
In other words, who is this “Theodore Beale” person, and why should we care?
Well, we’d better strap in, because it’s quite a lot. No less a luminary than The Wall Street Journal once described Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, as the most despised man in science fiction and, well… there’s a reason for that. Many reasons, in fact. To be blunt, the man is a notorious racist, misogynist and heavily involved in the alt-right, with everything that entails; check out his Wikipedia page here for more details if you’re truly curious. He’s contributed to a number of far-right, Christian Nationalist and outright white supremacist publications over the years, and he himself wrote a number of nonfiction books decrying “SJWs” back when that was still the buzzword of choice. This is not the topic of this sporking, to be clear, but I felt a certain level of understanding of just the sort of foul cretin we’re dealing with here was necessary before proceeding.
Though he’d been around before that, Beale really made a name for himself – a bad one – in the SFF community because of his involvement in the “Puppygate” movement at the Hugos in the mid-2010s. “Puppygate” began at the Hugos with one Larry Correia and his supporters, the so-called “Sad Puppies” in 2013 as an attempt to get his novel Monster Hunter Legion nominated for Best Novel (which failed). In 2014, it grew into a campaign to nominate a larger slate of works, mostly dominated by “anti-diversity” works attempting to “reclaim” the genre from the “SJWs” who they believed had taken control of it (by attempting to drown out works with non-white or LGBTQ+ characters or progressive themes and/or drive their creators from fandom spaces) which should tell you something about the character of the people involved. The Puppies’ slate of nominations mostly failed, with a particularly poorly performing entry being the short story “Opera Vita Aeterna,” by one Theodore Beale.
The next year, the Puppies were at it again, this time with a wrinkle – Beale himself proposed a second slate of nominees, overlapping but not identical to the Sad Puppies slate (previously led by Correia, now coordinated by Brad Torgersen); these would become known as the “Rabid Puppies.” Notably, while Correia and Torgersen presented their slates as suggestions, Beale told his followers to vote for his proposed slate exactly, with no deviations, which also seems extremely telling (especially since Beale’s slate included an entry by himself and a number of others published by Castalia Press, a vanity publisher he owns). The existence of the Puppies slates led to massive backlash from the SFF community at large, including Tor Books’ creative director Irene Gallo calling them out for being racist, misogynist and homophobic, with the Sad Puppies as right-wing and the Rabid Puppies as outright neo-Nazis; George RR Martin is attributed as having coined “Puppygate” to parallel the ongoing “Gamergate.” And indeed, Beale found support from elements of Gamergate (which he in turn had been a supporter of) and organized coordinated campaigns of harassment and bullying to push his chosen slate of entries, and the Rabid Puppies became so notorious that even Correia and Torgersen distanced themselves from them. Ultimately, numerous participants withdrew from the Hugos in response to the controversy, and the Puppy slates largely crashed and burned with voters, with only one Puppy-supported work (Guardians of the Galaxy) winning in its category (and I somehow doubt that one much needed their support to begin with). General consensus was that not only were the Puppies terrible people, they also had terrible taste across the board.
Both Puppy factions further ran nomination slates in 2016 (though the Sad Puppies’ was just “suggestions”); this time around, the Rabid Puppies’ slate contained several progressive or inclusive works, possibly in an attempt to trick people into voting against them by association (if so, this did not work). Among said nominees was famous purveyor of surreal gay erotica Chuck Tingle, who took the opportunity to troll Vox Day mercilessly. Ultimately, though, SSF fandom was ready for the Puppies tricks this time around and they failed to make much of a splash. The Puppies, including Vox Day himself, continued running slates into 2017, but by this point their schtick was played out and nobody much cared about them anymore; the campaigns fizzled and no Puppy slates have been run since, to general relief. Beale himself hasn’t risen to the same level of public notoriety Puppygate brought him again, to my knowledge, though he’s still out there and has, iirc, been involved in some crowdfunding scams that pocketed supporters’ money (and promptly lost it in failed investments) without delivering the promised works.
Again, this is not what these sporks are going to be about, but it is important background information that I felt everyone should have going forward – the books that we’re about to spork are not only very bad, they’re written by one of the most infamous people in general SFF fandom today, with a systematic history of abusive, bullying and controlling behavior and utterly noxious personal views rooted in gross bigotry of all sorts… and who is, on top of that, just a self-absorbed, self-satisfied twit who isn’t nearly as clever, successful, insightful or as good a writer as he thinks he is. Honestly, considering Beale’s personal history, I almost didn’t go through with this sporking at all, considering Das Sporking’s rules against discussing contemporary politics; however, I think that the Arts of Dark and Light books are themselves closer to something like Battlefield Earth or the early Sword of Truth books, both of which we’ve had on here (or Partially Kissed Hero or even Embers, really), in that the author’s noxious personal views underly them, but they’re not outright manifestos in the way, say, Atlas Shrugged or the Left Behind books (which are too political for the comm, because they can’t really be discussed separately from their authors’ respective ideologies) are, nor do I feel Beale is necessarily a more controversial figure than Bradley or L. Ron Hubbard. So, I talked it over with the other mods a while back, and we decided it was okay to give it a go, as long as the discussion was kept firmly on the books themselves and not the author’s politics or personal life. So, if you’re reading this on Das Sporking, consider this your warning to be careful in the comments; I will be watching (if you’re reading this somewhere else, feel free to ignore this part, though I obviously reserve the right to moderate any comments on my own journal as well). If discussions get too heated, I’ll move the spork over to my journal full-time to complete it; hopefully that won’t be necessary.
Anyway, the books themselves should provide plenty to talk about, because they’re very, very bad! So just what is The Arts of Dark and Light, anyway?
Back in the early 2010s, Theodore Beale, better known as Vox Day, had a quandary. He hated the direction modern fantasy was taking towards the cynical, postmodern and “grimdark,” and in particular blamed one George RR Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire for this trend. Beale thought the fantasy genre had lost something since the days of Tolkien and decided to write a fantasy series (published by his own vanity press) that would be a throwback to the style of fantasy closer to The Lord of the Rings. In a way, this resembled the earlier goals of Terry Goodkind in the same genre in that both wanted to write “serious” and “important” works about protagonists who were “heroic” by their lights, though the ideological underpinnings were different (Goodkind was a hardcore Randian; Beale is a religious fundamentalist/racist/general alt-right nut). And also like Terry Goodkind, Beale suffered from two significant problems. The first is that his personal ideology was one that is actually repugnant to the vast majority of people outside his bubble. The other is that he’s actually a very bad writer. Thus, while Goodkind produced the notorious Sword of Truth, Beale produced The Arts of Dark and Light… which is less notorious mostly for the fact that, not being conventionally published, they’ve never reached an audience as large. Because let’s not mince words here – these books are bad.
The Arts of Dark and Light was intended to be a five-book series by most accounts. Ironically, like his beloathed Martin, Vox Day would hit a significant delay in publication. A Throne of Bones, the first Arts of Dark and Light novel, was published in 2012; A Sea of Skulls, the second volume, only came out in 2017, and that was an incomplete rush job trying to squeak the book in for the 2017 Dragon Awards for Best Novel with only about half the final text, by my reckoning, completed (it didn’t win); the actually complete version wasn’t published until 2024 (while I’ve seen previous sporkings of this series, they only use the initial incomplete version of Skulls; if I make it that far, I wonder if I’ll be a first?). The remaining three volumes are not even on the horizon. So even setting aside the quality, Beale hasn’t even managed to get his magnum opus out in a timely manner. Reportedly, he pivoted to trying to finish the series as a comic at one point, gods only know why, but that too seems to have sputtered out
So, all that said, what is The Arts of Dark and Light about, you may ask? Well, ostensibly it’s a thematic response to ASOIAF and throwback to LotR. In reality, this is… dubious. Structurally and narratively, it honestly resembles ASOIAF far more than LotR, telling a story of political intrigue and civil war among human nations while inhuman evil forces slowly return in the background; the key differences being that the main nation is heavily Roman-inspired (but more on that in a minute…) rather than medieval-England-inspired, and all the characters are, as you might have gathered, really dumb. The most obvious Tolkien influences are to be found in the presence of elves, dwarves, orcs and so on in the story – and, well, if Beale thinks that by itself is enough to capture the spirit of Tolkien, I don’t know what to tell him. It’s worth noting that he’s denied being directly inspired by the narrative structure of ASOIAF, but, well… not only does the series title itself have the “an X of Y and Z” format, not only does each individual book title have the “An X of Y” format, but each chapter within the books is named after its primary POV character, from a rotating cast of tight third-person viewpoints (which isn’t unique to Martin, but something he’s certainly known for). So, uh… at least in terms of titles and internal structure, that’s kind of blatant, isn’t it? Any deeper parallels will be left for us to discover.
Beyond that… well, the books are just plain not very good. The writing has a sense of smug satisfaction with its own cleverness that I’ve always found extremely adolescent (as in, something I tend to associate with the writing of literal adolescents) and quickly becomes wearying. The worldbuilding is remarkably shoddy; the primary nation, as mentioned, is based on Rome… but as previous sporkings of these books have pointed out, it’s a version of Rome where basically every notable era of pre-modern Roman history seems to be happening all at once, from the Republic to the Principate to the Papal States, to predictably confusing results (for added confusion, it’s parked right next to a fantasy counterpart culture of medieval France). Real-world religious texts and traditions also get dropped in periodically, barely changed at all to account for the fantastic setting, making things worse. All of this feels like it’s been vomited on top of Baby’s First D&D setting, which as one might imagine doesn’t help the coherence one jot. For the cherry on top, even the terminology and demonyms, and the spellings thereof, are pretty inconsistent. And the story itself is massively overstuffed, full of gratuitous characters and dead ends, impressively achieving a level of bloat in one volume that most fantasy authors have to pass the halfway point of their whole series before they can manage! And of course, Beale is just a sexist, racist, elitist and general bigot in ways that can’t help but shine through in his writing, so that’ll be fun.
But, we’re not quite there yet; you may have noticed that our current spork is neither A Throne of Bones nor A Sea of Skulls. What, you ask, is this Summa Elvetica thing? Basically, Beale took a novella and a bunch of short stories he’d previously written for the setting (including “Opera Vita Aeterna,” which would later crash and burn at the Hugos), compiled them together and dolled them up as a sort of prelude to The Arts of Dark and Light. “Summa Elvetica” itself is the novella, dedicated to answering the question raised in our summary – do elves have souls? And, more to the point, do any of us in the audience care? It does, however, introduce several characters who will be important in the series proper; it’s sort of The Hobbit to Arts of Dark and Light’s LotR, if you’ll pardon a comparison that feels almost blasphemous. It’s followed by a number of short stories, of highly variable quality ranging from the absolutely dire to the somewhat tolerable, all of which are at least ostensibly in Beale’s setting of Selenoth (though Beale himself, in the one interview about the series I’ve tracked down, admitted there’s some early-installment weirdness at play here and some of this stuff is only loosely canon). I plan to do a full sporking of the “Summa Elvetica” novella and then give a one-post overview of each of the short stories, some of which are more directly relevant to the main series than others. After that, we should be ready to dive into A Throne of Bones later this year, assuming we’ve all managed to come through the horror that is Vox Day largely intact.
Anyway, assuming I haven’t scared you all off with my introduction to both Vox Day’s numerous personal offenses and his terrible writing, I hope to see you here soon for the beginning of “Summa Elvetica!” Because this is just a novella, I’m not doing any counts for this one (but I plan to for the main series); I also plan to introduce some new guest sporkers to help bear the burden of this series along with us, but for this short novella, I think I’ll bring back some old faces. So, rejoining us from some of my Ed Greenwood sporkings (and called on because I think of all my characters, they’re among those who would piss of Vox Day the most) let’s extend a hearty welcome to Errezha and Calassara!
Hoping to see you all soon as we begin our journey!
NOTE: Some of you who’ve been watching my journal might be surprised by this post, since I’d promised that my next sporking would be Brian Lee Durfee’s Five Warrior Angels trilogy. However, while I have many issues with that trilogy, I worried that they’d take a long time to show themselves (and those books are long) and they might not be bad enough on their own merits to deserve a full sporking. In contrast, Arts of Dark and Light is more overtly bad, and shows its badness much sooner. However, if you were really curious about Five Warrior Angels, fear not! I’m planning to make them my next review series, trying to do them one a month for the next three months after Destinies of Blood and Stone (which I hope to wrap up in January, February and March of this year); I think this format should let me get at my issues with them quicker, and after that if anyone is still interested in my doing a long-form sporking or readthrough of them, we might be able to get to that at some point in the future as well!
Table of Contents
CHAPTERS
SUMMA ELVETICA
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Immaculatus Dei
Summa Elvetica
Author Note
Final Thoughts
MASTER OF CATS
BIRTH OF AN ORDER
THE LAST WITCHKING
THE HOBLETS OF WICCAM FENSBORO
THE WARDOG’S COIN
QALABI DAWN
A MAGIC BROKEN
OPERA VITA AETERNA
By Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale
Alternate Title: An Introduction To An All-New Fantasy Saga That Will Likely Put You Off Continuing It Further
SPORKER: MasterGhandalf
SUMMARY
In a world torn by religious and political conflict, the head of the Amorran Church decides the time has come to answer one very important question – do elves have souls? To determine the truth, a young priest is sent on an adventure so irritating that by the time it’s through, none of us will probably be left caring about the answer, if we ever did to begin with. Following this will come a series of shorter tales which supposedly set up the “epic” to follow, but at best tend to raise more questions than answers and at worst will leave the reader mystified as to just what the author is trying to accomplish, if not horrified by the implications – but hey, the great news is, very little of this is going to end up mattering anyway! Save for possibly more insight into the author’s mindset and creative process than we ever needed or wanted, that is.
In other words, who is this “Theodore Beale” person, and why should we care?
Well, we’d better strap in, because it’s quite a lot. No less a luminary than The Wall Street Journal once described Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, as the most despised man in science fiction and, well… there’s a reason for that. Many reasons, in fact. To be blunt, the man is a notorious racist, misogynist and heavily involved in the alt-right, with everything that entails; check out his Wikipedia page here for more details if you’re truly curious. He’s contributed to a number of far-right, Christian Nationalist and outright white supremacist publications over the years, and he himself wrote a number of nonfiction books decrying “SJWs” back when that was still the buzzword of choice. This is not the topic of this sporking, to be clear, but I felt a certain level of understanding of just the sort of foul cretin we’re dealing with here was necessary before proceeding.
Though he’d been around before that, Beale really made a name for himself – a bad one – in the SFF community because of his involvement in the “Puppygate” movement at the Hugos in the mid-2010s. “Puppygate” began at the Hugos with one Larry Correia and his supporters, the so-called “Sad Puppies” in 2013 as an attempt to get his novel Monster Hunter Legion nominated for Best Novel (which failed). In 2014, it grew into a campaign to nominate a larger slate of works, mostly dominated by “anti-diversity” works attempting to “reclaim” the genre from the “SJWs” who they believed had taken control of it (by attempting to drown out works with non-white or LGBTQ+ characters or progressive themes and/or drive their creators from fandom spaces) which should tell you something about the character of the people involved. The Puppies’ slate of nominations mostly failed, with a particularly poorly performing entry being the short story “Opera Vita Aeterna,” by one Theodore Beale.
The next year, the Puppies were at it again, this time with a wrinkle – Beale himself proposed a second slate of nominees, overlapping but not identical to the Sad Puppies slate (previously led by Correia, now coordinated by Brad Torgersen); these would become known as the “Rabid Puppies.” Notably, while Correia and Torgersen presented their slates as suggestions, Beale told his followers to vote for his proposed slate exactly, with no deviations, which also seems extremely telling (especially since Beale’s slate included an entry by himself and a number of others published by Castalia Press, a vanity publisher he owns). The existence of the Puppies slates led to massive backlash from the SFF community at large, including Tor Books’ creative director Irene Gallo calling them out for being racist, misogynist and homophobic, with the Sad Puppies as right-wing and the Rabid Puppies as outright neo-Nazis; George RR Martin is attributed as having coined “Puppygate” to parallel the ongoing “Gamergate.” And indeed, Beale found support from elements of Gamergate (which he in turn had been a supporter of) and organized coordinated campaigns of harassment and bullying to push his chosen slate of entries, and the Rabid Puppies became so notorious that even Correia and Torgersen distanced themselves from them. Ultimately, numerous participants withdrew from the Hugos in response to the controversy, and the Puppy slates largely crashed and burned with voters, with only one Puppy-supported work (Guardians of the Galaxy) winning in its category (and I somehow doubt that one much needed their support to begin with). General consensus was that not only were the Puppies terrible people, they also had terrible taste across the board.
Both Puppy factions further ran nomination slates in 2016 (though the Sad Puppies’ was just “suggestions”); this time around, the Rabid Puppies’ slate contained several progressive or inclusive works, possibly in an attempt to trick people into voting against them by association (if so, this did not work). Among said nominees was famous purveyor of surreal gay erotica Chuck Tingle, who took the opportunity to troll Vox Day mercilessly. Ultimately, though, SSF fandom was ready for the Puppies tricks this time around and they failed to make much of a splash. The Puppies, including Vox Day himself, continued running slates into 2017, but by this point their schtick was played out and nobody much cared about them anymore; the campaigns fizzled and no Puppy slates have been run since, to general relief. Beale himself hasn’t risen to the same level of public notoriety Puppygate brought him again, to my knowledge, though he’s still out there and has, iirc, been involved in some crowdfunding scams that pocketed supporters’ money (and promptly lost it in failed investments) without delivering the promised works.
Again, this is not what these sporks are going to be about, but it is important background information that I felt everyone should have going forward – the books that we’re about to spork are not only very bad, they’re written by one of the most infamous people in general SFF fandom today, with a systematic history of abusive, bullying and controlling behavior and utterly noxious personal views rooted in gross bigotry of all sorts… and who is, on top of that, just a self-absorbed, self-satisfied twit who isn’t nearly as clever, successful, insightful or as good a writer as he thinks he is. Honestly, considering Beale’s personal history, I almost didn’t go through with this sporking at all, considering Das Sporking’s rules against discussing contemporary politics; however, I think that the Arts of Dark and Light books are themselves closer to something like Battlefield Earth or the early Sword of Truth books, both of which we’ve had on here (or Partially Kissed Hero or even Embers, really), in that the author’s noxious personal views underly them, but they’re not outright manifestos in the way, say, Atlas Shrugged or the Left Behind books (which are too political for the comm, because they can’t really be discussed separately from their authors’ respective ideologies) are, nor do I feel Beale is necessarily a more controversial figure than Bradley or L. Ron Hubbard. So, I talked it over with the other mods a while back, and we decided it was okay to give it a go, as long as the discussion was kept firmly on the books themselves and not the author’s politics or personal life. So, if you’re reading this on Das Sporking, consider this your warning to be careful in the comments; I will be watching (if you’re reading this somewhere else, feel free to ignore this part, though I obviously reserve the right to moderate any comments on my own journal as well). If discussions get too heated, I’ll move the spork over to my journal full-time to complete it; hopefully that won’t be necessary.
Anyway, the books themselves should provide plenty to talk about, because they’re very, very bad! So just what is The Arts of Dark and Light, anyway?
Back in the early 2010s, Theodore Beale, better known as Vox Day, had a quandary. He hated the direction modern fantasy was taking towards the cynical, postmodern and “grimdark,” and in particular blamed one George RR Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire for this trend. Beale thought the fantasy genre had lost something since the days of Tolkien and decided to write a fantasy series (published by his own vanity press) that would be a throwback to the style of fantasy closer to The Lord of the Rings. In a way, this resembled the earlier goals of Terry Goodkind in the same genre in that both wanted to write “serious” and “important” works about protagonists who were “heroic” by their lights, though the ideological underpinnings were different (Goodkind was a hardcore Randian; Beale is a religious fundamentalist/racist/general alt-right nut). And also like Terry Goodkind, Beale suffered from two significant problems. The first is that his personal ideology was one that is actually repugnant to the vast majority of people outside his bubble. The other is that he’s actually a very bad writer. Thus, while Goodkind produced the notorious Sword of Truth, Beale produced The Arts of Dark and Light… which is less notorious mostly for the fact that, not being conventionally published, they’ve never reached an audience as large. Because let’s not mince words here – these books are bad.
The Arts of Dark and Light was intended to be a five-book series by most accounts. Ironically, like his beloathed Martin, Vox Day would hit a significant delay in publication. A Throne of Bones, the first Arts of Dark and Light novel, was published in 2012; A Sea of Skulls, the second volume, only came out in 2017, and that was an incomplete rush job trying to squeak the book in for the 2017 Dragon Awards for Best Novel with only about half the final text, by my reckoning, completed (it didn’t win); the actually complete version wasn’t published until 2024 (while I’ve seen previous sporkings of this series, they only use the initial incomplete version of Skulls; if I make it that far, I wonder if I’ll be a first?). The remaining three volumes are not even on the horizon. So even setting aside the quality, Beale hasn’t even managed to get his magnum opus out in a timely manner. Reportedly, he pivoted to trying to finish the series as a comic at one point, gods only know why, but that too seems to have sputtered out
So, all that said, what is The Arts of Dark and Light about, you may ask? Well, ostensibly it’s a thematic response to ASOIAF and throwback to LotR. In reality, this is… dubious. Structurally and narratively, it honestly resembles ASOIAF far more than LotR, telling a story of political intrigue and civil war among human nations while inhuman evil forces slowly return in the background; the key differences being that the main nation is heavily Roman-inspired (but more on that in a minute…) rather than medieval-England-inspired, and all the characters are, as you might have gathered, really dumb. The most obvious Tolkien influences are to be found in the presence of elves, dwarves, orcs and so on in the story – and, well, if Beale thinks that by itself is enough to capture the spirit of Tolkien, I don’t know what to tell him. It’s worth noting that he’s denied being directly inspired by the narrative structure of ASOIAF, but, well… not only does the series title itself have the “an X of Y and Z” format, not only does each individual book title have the “An X of Y” format, but each chapter within the books is named after its primary POV character, from a rotating cast of tight third-person viewpoints (which isn’t unique to Martin, but something he’s certainly known for). So, uh… at least in terms of titles and internal structure, that’s kind of blatant, isn’t it? Any deeper parallels will be left for us to discover.
Beyond that… well, the books are just plain not very good. The writing has a sense of smug satisfaction with its own cleverness that I’ve always found extremely adolescent (as in, something I tend to associate with the writing of literal adolescents) and quickly becomes wearying. The worldbuilding is remarkably shoddy; the primary nation, as mentioned, is based on Rome… but as previous sporkings of these books have pointed out, it’s a version of Rome where basically every notable era of pre-modern Roman history seems to be happening all at once, from the Republic to the Principate to the Papal States, to predictably confusing results (for added confusion, it’s parked right next to a fantasy counterpart culture of medieval France). Real-world religious texts and traditions also get dropped in periodically, barely changed at all to account for the fantastic setting, making things worse. All of this feels like it’s been vomited on top of Baby’s First D&D setting, which as one might imagine doesn’t help the coherence one jot. For the cherry on top, even the terminology and demonyms, and the spellings thereof, are pretty inconsistent. And the story itself is massively overstuffed, full of gratuitous characters and dead ends, impressively achieving a level of bloat in one volume that most fantasy authors have to pass the halfway point of their whole series before they can manage! And of course, Beale is just a sexist, racist, elitist and general bigot in ways that can’t help but shine through in his writing, so that’ll be fun.
But, we’re not quite there yet; you may have noticed that our current spork is neither A Throne of Bones nor A Sea of Skulls. What, you ask, is this Summa Elvetica thing? Basically, Beale took a novella and a bunch of short stories he’d previously written for the setting (including “Opera Vita Aeterna,” which would later crash and burn at the Hugos), compiled them together and dolled them up as a sort of prelude to The Arts of Dark and Light. “Summa Elvetica” itself is the novella, dedicated to answering the question raised in our summary – do elves have souls? And, more to the point, do any of us in the audience care? It does, however, introduce several characters who will be important in the series proper; it’s sort of The Hobbit to Arts of Dark and Light’s LotR, if you’ll pardon a comparison that feels almost blasphemous. It’s followed by a number of short stories, of highly variable quality ranging from the absolutely dire to the somewhat tolerable, all of which are at least ostensibly in Beale’s setting of Selenoth (though Beale himself, in the one interview about the series I’ve tracked down, admitted there’s some early-installment weirdness at play here and some of this stuff is only loosely canon). I plan to do a full sporking of the “Summa Elvetica” novella and then give a one-post overview of each of the short stories, some of which are more directly relevant to the main series than others. After that, we should be ready to dive into A Throne of Bones later this year, assuming we’ve all managed to come through the horror that is Vox Day largely intact.
Anyway, assuming I haven’t scared you all off with my introduction to both Vox Day’s numerous personal offenses and his terrible writing, I hope to see you here soon for the beginning of “Summa Elvetica!” Because this is just a novella, I’m not doing any counts for this one (but I plan to for the main series); I also plan to introduce some new guest sporkers to help bear the burden of this series along with us, but for this short novella, I think I’ll bring back some old faces. So, rejoining us from some of my Ed Greenwood sporkings (and called on because I think of all my characters, they’re among those who would piss of Vox Day the most) let’s extend a hearty welcome to Errezha and Calassara!
Hoping to see you all soon as we begin our journey!
NOTE: Some of you who’ve been watching my journal might be surprised by this post, since I’d promised that my next sporking would be Brian Lee Durfee’s Five Warrior Angels trilogy. However, while I have many issues with that trilogy, I worried that they’d take a long time to show themselves (and those books are long) and they might not be bad enough on their own merits to deserve a full sporking. In contrast, Arts of Dark and Light is more overtly bad, and shows its badness much sooner. However, if you were really curious about Five Warrior Angels, fear not! I’m planning to make them my next review series, trying to do them one a month for the next three months after Destinies of Blood and Stone (which I hope to wrap up in January, February and March of this year); I think this format should let me get at my issues with them quicker, and after that if anyone is still interested in my doing a long-form sporking or readthrough of them, we might be able to get to that at some point in the future as well!
Table of Contents
CHAPTERS
SUMMA ELVETICA
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Immaculatus Dei
Summa Elvetica
Author Note
Final Thoughts
MASTER OF CATS
BIRTH OF AN ORDER
THE LAST WITCHKING
THE HOBLETS OF WICCAM FENSBORO
THE WARDOG’S COIN
QALABI DAWN
A MAGIC BROKEN
OPERA VITA AETERNA
no subject
Date: 2026-01-14 03:30 pm (UTC)Vox Day
Alright, that's just me with too much Hazbin Hotel content stuffed into my brain, but, I can's see the word "Vox" without thinking about that Tv-Head Demon... But since he a was a 50's racist white man when he was alive, maybe there's some parallels to draw... Even if that Vox was a little more competent in running his "trade".
do elves have souls?
Oh my Optimus Prime, is this the Valladolid debate? Is this gonna be the Valladolid debate but with elves? Is this gonna be uber-mega-racist, but with elves instead of whatever non-white people Vox Day hate the most?
the main nation is heavily Roman-inspired
Of course it is... It's always the roman empire... or the viking blender special (Watching the whole of the Viking Tv show while drinking whatever you find under you sink, if you survived, sorry for you, you're now Vox Day.)
it’s a version of Rome where basically every notable era of pre-modern Roman history seems to be happening all at once, from the Republic to the Principate to the Papal States
So, which version of Rome do you want to take inspiration of?
Vox Day: Yes.
Well, well, well, we are here for a fucking ride and my belts are buckled as hell.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-14 05:54 pm (UTC)"Arts of Dark and Light"? That was the best title Beale could come up with? He may as well have just called his series "Fantasy Novels!" and be done with it.