[McDermott, Will; The Moons of Mirrodin; Renton: Wizards of the Coast, 2003.]

Mirrodin, "A world of metal," in which "a Viridian elf sees strange visions of a reality in which creatures of flesh and blood move through a landscape of verdant beauty." (from the splash page).

The story begins in what is called a thousand or so times in the first few paragraphs "The Tangle" which is the vast metal forest in which elves and trolls live. Great trees spiral upward into the sky, yap yap yap, this book is manure.

Our main character is a female elf named Glissa. Glissa is a stupid bitch with a chip on her shoulder as are most female heroes (also known as heroines) in crappy fantasy and science fiction pulp. In fact, she is stupid enough and bitchy enough to actually make it onto TV or even into a movie like Tomb Raider. How stupid is she? A point of intellectual reference: The brightest creatures on Mirrodin are goblins. But, I digress.

McDermott is a talent-free goon. This book should be considered to be literary persecution of good taste and an affront to novel writing. I hate it, and hope to force-feed it to the author page by page with a big wooden spoon. I could list reasons, but I would prefer to wade through the novel making fun of everything instead, and through this process you will see what I mean about how much Will McDermott sucks.

Actually, I was wrong. The story begins with Karn and Jeska leaving. They are observed by a figure called Memnarch. It is vaguely explained that Memnarch is a living being created from the Mirrari, and installed by Karn to rule the world that Karn has created. The world is called “Argentum.” This all ceases to matter in the slightest as soon as Memnarch finds a puddle of oil, which appears out of nowhere. We are expected to believe that a world entirely created by Karn has become tainted by what we must assume is Phyrexian influence, who gives a damn, whatever, what am I talking about? This oil apparently overtakes the mind of Memnarch who decides to change Karn’s world to make it his own and to rename it after himself. No, it does not become Memnarchia or anything similar to his name. It becomes Mirrodin, which sounds nothing like Mirrari, go straight to hell Will McDermott. A million billion years pass, most of which involve Memnarch standing in one place looking at something, then figuring out how it works or having a metal-man on metal-man fantasy or something.

Then we come to The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle is the home of Tel-Jilad the Tree of Tales. In The Tangle lives stupid bitch Glissa and her bland family, who also live in The Tangle and her “guy I really like but can’t say anything to about it because Will McDermott has no concept of literary romance and is an idiot” Tangle-dwelling friend Kane, who is a lackey of the TROLLS OF TEL-JILAD, one of the Tel-Jilad Chosen. He does not seem to be a 2/1, because he dies like an 0/1 pansy, and he definitely doesn’t have protection from artifacts because he spends half the time equipped with slagwurm armor.

Here, McDermott employs one of the most annoying literary devices known to man: He attempts to invent a believable in-context curse word. Apparently, all the elves on Mirrodin have these racial memory flashbacks called “flares.” Periodically, the elves have their memories wiped out by the trolls (also smarter than elves on this world). Glissa constantly uses “flare” as a curse word, making her even more annoying than had she simply been a stupid bitch with a chip on her shoulder who did NOT use flare as a curse word. Tangle, tangle, tangle.

Glissa is such a rebel just like Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider and therefore is a solid female character and should be emulated by girls the world over. She is a non-conformist, taking no orders from silly men and trolls. One of her gifts is apparently near invincibility on combat, but even more astounding is her ability to grasp concepts that come straight out of left field and which have nothing to do with the story or the world but which do exist in the general Magic backstory and which are injected into her thoughts by the woefully inept McDermott, that bastard. For example: Glissa is blankly clueless about 90% of her world and its mysteries, but she suddenly busts out with a term like “Planeswalker” like she was asking somebody to pass the freakin’ peas! Please, somebody, poke Will McDermott in the eye! What the flare is wrong with this guy?

So, anyway, after the total lack of sexual tension has been established between Glissa and Kane, McDermott unleashes a horde of levelers on The Tangle, The Tangle, The Tangle. Here is where we begin to see how bad McDermott really is. Can’t develop a character? Well then by all means add them to a long list of tragic deaths that have no purpose other than to remove the burden of thinking and writing from the shoulders of the author. In the middle of the night, Glissa is snatched from her Tangle home by trolls in order to prevent her from being killed by the levelers, which are also definitely not 10/10s and have nothing to do with your library. Because she is an irritating cliché, she escapes the clutches of the trolls when she learns of the levelers attacking her house, steals a ridiculously powerful sword, and rips a house full of levelers to pieces, but too late, as they have chawed through her entire family, which McDermott details very very badly. Glissa is then caught by the foot in the mouth of a leveler, passes out and is dragged from The Tangle back to their lair, which turns out to be a random location in the middle of nowhere and I mean that literally, as it’s never explained by the author.

Glissa wakes up in the company of a goblin named Slobad. He probably did dirty goblin things to her as she slept. Slobad says “huh” a lot. Every time he says something, huh? He’s the smartest character in the story, huh? Slobad is a wanderer and a jack of all trades and is, unfortunately, the only interesting character in the book, aside from Bosh the Giant Lump of Iron Dumbness introduced later. Slobad knows his way around the world. He takes Glissa through the Glimmervoid to the place where the Leonin live. I suppose the Ancient Den is there somewhere. The Leonin are all lame. I hate them. Glissa causes the death of the king’s girlfriend, but it was no great loss because it was yet another passionless and vague relationship because Will McDermott equals crap. After bringing death and destruction upon the Leonin, Glissa and Slobad move on to the black mana section of the book. (We have covered green and white, for those not paying attention). In the black mana section of the book, stupid crap happens. They go to the Vault of Whispers. They also find Bosh in the swamps. This is boring. Next is the red mana section. The Great Furnace. More violence and stupidity happens. Boredom.

At some point they go back to The Tangle. Flare me if I know which part. I know it was after they find Bosh. So they go back in order for Kane to be violently killed along with the leader of the trolls. It was unmoving and stupid. Also, Glissa has to chop the fingers off this vedalken archmage guy so that later on she can use them to access a room with magical identity scan protection on the doors. She makes a necklace out of the fingers.

They go to the blue mana section of the book last. Blue is the color of the bad guys because of course blue is bad and red and green are good, kiss my entire ass. More people die I think. The story gets fuzzy here because I was beyond caring at this point and I was desperate to finish the book so that I could set it on fire. They are attacked under the quicksilver sea by a million eels and a giant monster. Glissa inhales quicksilver. In case you didn’t read that closely: A sea of highly toxic liquid poison is traversed in a submarine, the main character is not only submerged in the mercury, she breathes it into her lungs, and she lives. This book is total shit.

Did I mention that all the while these flying ornithopter-like things pursue the heroes, half the time spelled aerophuis and the rest of the time spelled aerophins? Well, they were. All the time. How lame.

So the bad guys are these big-head wizards who routinely process and ingest this stuff called “Spice” no, I mean “The Serum” which allows them power and vision and mutates them as a side effect. It did not in any way remind me of Dune. Heck no, it is totally unique and original and nothing like Dune. Dune, in fact, is nothing like this story, because Dune did not feature a ruling class that lived in an oceanic environment. Oh, no, wait…Yes it did. My bad. Oops. This was entirely like Dune.

They have no trouble infiltrating the Seat of the Synod. Glissa defeats all the guards and outsmarts the super-intelligent wizards with the help of stupid bitch with a chip on her shoulder number two, Bruenna, a human mage of no apparent mana color correlation. Perhaps she was gold. I might call her blue-white. Anyway, all she can do is manipulate wind. She sucks. She almost dies but doesn’t, so, you know, “boo” etc.

The book ends at what McDermott apparently thinks is a cliff-hanger but which is, in fact, not compelling in any way. The most interesting thing that happens in the final scene is Glissa vomiting. She gets vertigo. After careening from tree to tree in The Tangle, flying like mad on the wings of some sort of beasty thing and generally being used and abused, she gets dizzy and barfs by simply entering a tunnel.

McDermott is bad. McDermott is wrong. There needs to be a word that means worse than bad or wrong, like badwrong – or badong. McDermott is badong. And I will stand for the opposite of McDermott: Gnodab. The book is full of spelling errors, even in the cases of the names of things invented by McDermott and the proper names of characters! The word choices are generally poor and his descriptive ability is two-dimensional. Plot-wise, he is worse than amateurish. His solution to any problem is violence and extortion. His characters are thin copies of one another, and their relationships to one another are canned and immature.

This was a horrible, horrible book. I hate the fact that a person made money from producing it and I hope that there is a special place in purgatory for anyone who pays to have it produced.

Buy this horrible book at Amazon.com!

Discuss this article in the Magic: the Gathering Forums!

Related Stories

• Where Are They Now: Is There Life After Magic Super-Stardom?
• Behind the Mirrored Din
• Wizards To Pretend Mirrodin Unknown Until At Least November

[McDermott, Will; The Moons of Mirrodin; Renton: Wizards of the Coast, 2003.]

Mirrodin, "A world of metal," in which "a Viridian elf sees strange visions of a reality in which creatures of flesh and blood move through a landscape of verdant beauty." (from the splash page).

The story begins in what is called a thousand or so times in the first few paragraphs "The Tangle" which is the vast metal forest in which elves and trolls live. Great trees spiral upward into the sky, yap yap yap, this book is manure.

Our main character is a female elf named Glissa. Glissa is a stupid bitch with a chip on her shoulder as are most female heroes (also known as heroines) in crappy fantasy and science fiction pulp. In fact, she is stupid enough and bitchy enough to actually make it onto TV or even into a movie like Tomb Raider. How stupid is she? A point of intellectual reference: The brightest creatures on Mirrodin are goblins. But, I digress.

McDermott is a talent-free goon. This book should be considered to be literary persecution of good taste and an affront to novel writing. I hate it, and hope to force-feed it to the author page by page with a big wooden spoon. I could list reasons, but I would prefer to wade through the novel making fun of everything instead, and through this process you will see what I mean about how much Will McDermott sucks.

Actually, I was wrong. The story begins with Karn and Jeska leaving. They are observed by a figure called Memnarch. It is vaguely explained that Memnarch is a living being created from the Mirrari, and installed by Karn to rule the world that Karn has created. The world is called “Argentum.” This all ceases to matter in the slightest as soon as Memnarch finds a puddle of oil, which appears out of nowhere. We are expected to believe that a world entirely created by Karn has become tainted by what we must assume is Phyrexian influence, who gives a damn, whatever, what am I talking about? This oil apparently overtakes the mind of Memnarch who decides to change Karn’s world to make it his own and to rename it after himself. No, it does not become Memnarchia or anything similar to his name. It becomes Mirrodin, which sounds nothing like Mirrari, go straight to hell Will McDermott. A million billion years pass, most of which involve Memnarch standing in one place looking at something, then figuring out how it works or having a metal-man on metal-man fantasy or something.

Then we come to The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle. The Tangle is the home of Tel-Jilad the Tree of Tales. In The Tangle lives stupid bitch Glissa and her bland family, who also live in The Tangle and her “guy I really like but can’t say anything to about it because Will McDermott has no concept of literary romance and is an idiot” Tangle-dwelling friend Kane, who is a lackey of the TROLLS OF TEL-JILAD, one of the Tel-Jilad Chosen. He does not seem to be a 2/1, because he dies like an 0/1 pansy, and he definitely doesn’t have protection from artifacts because he spends half the time equipped with slagwurm armor.

Here, McDermott employs one of the most annoying literary devices known to man: He attempts to invent a believable in-context curse word. Apparently, all the elves on Mirrodin have these racial memory flashbacks called “flares.” Periodically, the elves have their memories wiped out by the trolls (also smarter than elves on this world). Glissa constantly uses “flare” as a curse word, making her even more annoying than had she simply been a stupid bitch with a chip on her shoulder who did NOT use flare as a curse word. Tangle, tangle, tangle.

Glissa is such a rebel just like Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider and therefore is a solid female character and should be emulated by girls the world over. She is a non-conformist, taking no orders from silly men and trolls. One of her gifts is apparently near invincibility on combat, but even more astounding is her ability to grasp concepts that come straight out of left field and which have nothing to do with the story or the world but which do exist in the general Magic backstory and which are injected into her thoughts by the woefully inept McDermott, that bastard. For example: Glissa is blankly clueless about 90% of her world and its mysteries, but she suddenly busts out with a term like “Planeswalker” like she was asking somebody to pass the freakin’ peas! Please, somebody, poke Will McDermott in the eye! What the flare is wrong with this guy?

So, anyway, after the total lack of sexual tension has been established between Glissa and Kane, McDermott unleashes a horde of levelers on The Tangle, The Tangle, The Tangle. Here is where we begin to see how bad McDermott really is. Can’t develop a character? Well then by all means add them to a long list of tragic deaths that have no purpose other than to remove the burden of thinking and writing from the shoulders of the author. In the middle of the night, Glissa is snatched from her Tangle home by trolls in order to prevent her from being killed by the levelers, which are also definitely not 10/10s and have nothing to do with your library. Because she is an irritating cliché, she escapes the clutches of the trolls when she learns of the levelers attacking her house, steals a ridiculously powerful sword, and rips a house full of levelers to pieces, but too late, as they have chawed through her entire family, which McDermott details very very badly. Glissa is then caught by the foot in the mouth of a leveler, passes out and is dragged from The Tangle back to their lair, which turns out to be a random location in the middle of nowhere and I mean that literally, as it’s never explained by the author.

Glissa wakes up in the company of a goblin named Slobad. He probably did dirty goblin things to her as she slept. Slobad says “huh” a lot. Every time he says something, huh? He’s the smartest character in the story, huh? Slobad is a wanderer and a jack of all trades and is, unfortunately, the only interesting character in the book, aside from Bosh the Giant Lump of Iron Dumbness introduced later. Slobad knows his way around the world. He takes Glissa through the Glimmervoid to the place where the Leonin live. I suppose the Ancient Den is there somewhere. The Leonin are all lame. I hate them. Glissa causes the death of the king’s girlfriend, but it was no great loss because it was yet another passionless and vague relationship because Will McDermott equals crap. After bringing death and destruction upon the Leonin, Glissa and Slobad move on to the black mana section of the book. (We have covered green and white, for those not paying attention). In the black mana section of the book, stupid crap happens. They go to the Vault of Whispers. They also find Bosh in the swamps. This is boring. Next is the red mana section. The Great Furnace. More violence and stupidity happens. Boredom.

At some point they go back to The Tangle. Flare me if I know which part. I know it was after they find Bosh. So they go back in order for Kane to be violently killed along with the leader of the trolls. It was unmoving and stupid. Also, Glissa has to chop the fingers off this vedalken archmage guy so that later on she can use them to access a room with magical identity scan protection on the doors. She makes a necklace out of the fingers.

They go to the blue mana section of the book last. Blue is the color of the bad guys because of course blue is bad and red and green are good, kiss my entire ass. More people die I think. The story gets fuzzy here because I was beyond caring at this point and I was desperate to finish the book so that I could set it on fire. They are attacked under the quicksilver sea by a million eels and a giant monster. Glissa inhales quicksilver. In case you didn’t read that closely: A sea of highly toxic liquid poison is traversed in a submarine, the main character is not only submerged in the mercury, she breathes it into her lungs, and she lives. This book is total shit.

Did I mention that all the while these flying ornithopter-like things pursue the heroes, half the time spelled aerophuis and the rest of the time spelled aerophins? Well, they were. All the time. How lame.

So the bad guys are these big-head wizards who routinely process and ingest this stuff called “Spice” no, I mean “The Serum” which allows them power and vision and mutates them as a side effect. It did not in any way remind me of Dune. Heck no, it is totally unique and original and nothing like Dune. Dune, in fact, is nothing like this story, because Dune did not feature a ruling class that lived in an oceanic environment. Oh, no, wait…Yes it did. My bad. Oops. This was entirely like Dune.

They have no trouble infiltrating the Seat of the Synod. Glissa defeats all the guards and outsmarts the super-intelligent wizards with the help of stupid bitch with a chip on her shoulder number two, Bruenna, a human mage of no apparent mana color correlation. Perhaps she was gold. I might call her blue-white. Anyway, all she can do is manipulate wind. She sucks. She almost dies but doesn’t, so, you know, “boo” etc.

The book ends at what McDermott apparently thinks is a cliff-hanger but which is, in fact, not compelling in any way. The most interesting thing that happens in the final scene is Glissa vomiting. She gets vertigo. After careening from tree to tree in The Tangle, flying like mad on the wings of some sort of beasty thing and generally being used and abused, she gets dizzy and barfs by simply entering a tunnel.

McDermott is bad. McDermott is wrong. There needs to be a word that means worse than bad or wrong, like badwrong – or badong. McDermott is badong. And I will stand for the opposite of McDermott: Gnodab. The book is full of spelling errors, even in the cases of the names of things invented by McDermott and the proper names of characters! The word choices are generally poor and his descriptive ability is two-dimensional. Plot-wise, he is worse than amateurish. His solution to any problem is violence and extortion. His characters are thin copies of one another, and their relationships to one another are canned and immature.

This was a horrible, horrible book. I hate the fact that a person made money from producing it and I hope that there is a special place in purgatory for anyone who pays to have it produced.

Buy this horrible book at Amazon.com!

Discuss this article in the Magic: the Gathering Forums!

Related Stories

• Where Are They Now: Is There Life After Magic Super-Stardom?
• Behind the Mirrored Din
• Wizards To Pretend Mirrodin Unknown Until At Least November