A review by sentry
Antimage by Alexander Olson

adventurous informative mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75


Review contains various spoilers. 

Pros

The author did a lot of research to make Nathan feel intelligent. I usually don't like stories that put a huge focus on how smart a character is since it tends to be harder for me to enjoy for a couple reasons. 
 1) prone to author making mistakes & unable to future-proof, things that seem smart today might be wrong in 5 years. 
2) their interactions and comparisons with other characters - whether it's tropey, a poorly written low eq/high iq, or simply dumbing down all the other characters to prop up the smart one

But Alexander Olson did a good job balancing Nathan's intellect and researching things for this story. Olson must have some sort of background in academia because Nathan mentions small aspects and things about grad school life that I've only learned about/experienced from having a partner complete a PhD. 

The main character would often, but briefly, go into more complex scientific, mathematic, and technical knowledge, which I enjoyed. It only felt forced once or twice,(name dropping for seemingly no reason) but to be honest it was easy to ignore. The whole premise of how he uses his intellect to grow and adapt to this new world is well done and happens at an enjoyable and believable pace. Helping a mage with electricity magic by teaching then having them derive the complex mathematics behind how electricity works, for instance, was fun and was an element of something I don't see very often in portal fantasy/isekai stories. I'm a big fan of the Earth knowledge conversion aspect that this story's foundation is built on and I think it does it extremely well. 


The main plot/narrative itself was somewhat simple and so were character goals, but it works with in this fun story. An evil wizard pisses off the MC so much he makes it his life mission to destroy that wizards country/city. (world building note: the reader doesn't learn much about the world outside his new home city, it's kept pretty vague how large things are in general which is pretty neat. I think the mystique works well for a portal fantasy, though I hope future entries in the series open things up a bit more.) 

The cast of chatacters was large (too large at times, but I'll get to that below) and had lots of pretty memorable moments. 


Nathan's motivation drives most of the story. Halfway through the story he decides to make this world his new home and I think that decision and a few others are really good character defining traits. 


Mehs:

The pacing was good, a bit wonky at times. Sometimes it's moment to moment. Sometimes days go by without anything happening. 

Besides one breif but entertaining kidnapping attempt, Giants Rest was a non factor all book which I was a bit disappointing. 

(actually side note here, the team that took the job essentially broke the oath and were exiled, but the why was pretty meh. Were they given a big paycheck? I think it said they wanted access to hunt/adventure near Giants Rest? That was it? Was their team human? What was the point of their team making that choice?) 


Nathan doesn't really have any flaws. He's a good guy and wants to do good. He comes across as sort of a boring self-insert at times. 

Nathan's relationships are all boring. I'm not one to complain about lack of steam, but in general besides a few passing mentions of other people being attractive, there are literally no interesting new relationships that form. 


Cons: 

Some side characters didn't get enough love, besides Nathan, I can't really remember many details about the other characters in the story. A few characters stuck out to me and had somewhat good characterization like the main antagonist being a racist high intelligence low wisdom archmage, the old crone enchanter, some of his teammates, or the leader of the adventuring guild, but others we don't really get enough time with and they kind of muddle the story. If we met a character we got a basic initial description of them, but after that I couldn't really tell you who was who or what they looked like. A lot of side characters almost felt like they were expositive overload, like Olson was just trying to build the cast/world out too fast. 

Ending was okay, I think ending with the oath being sworn was good and impactful. But to be honest, the politics of the city were so anti-climactic. The dual, which Nathan was trying to convince others that it was barbaric in the first place, was short and one-sided. The warring politics just fell a bit flat unfortunately. I didn't know anything about the challengers. 

Nathan himself calls them petty squabbles at the start of the confrontation and my two cents are that I just don't think the two sides were built up enough. I didn't really know who was who going into the dual. The initial introduction between the two sides were good, the progressive current leadership vs traditionalists. But it kind of fell by the wayside. It was mentioned why the two sides disagreed at one point and it boiled down to "Oh well our city adventurers are the cream-of-the-crop, why should we waste resources on stinky village adventurers." just comically dumb or maybe selfish characters when violence is everywhere in this world. 

My opinion is that the main focus of the story should have been kept on implementing Earth knowledge and technology to combat Giant's Rest and keeping the city and surrounding villages safe. 

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