Inne Pieśni (English: Other Songs) is a dungeon punk alt-historical fantasy novel by Polish writer Jacek Dukaj.
Aristotle was right. He discovered the principles by which the world works. Because of that, his pupil Alexander conquered the known world. This is also why now, many years after the fall of Rome to the Hellenistic powers, the world is divided into the domains of the kratistoi, men and women of immense will who can shape very reality around them.
Such an area of influence over the Form, morphe, of others, is called an anthos.
Hieronim Berbelek is a lowly merchant who once used to be a powerful military commander. An encounter with the kratistos Maksym Rog cost him his entire Form, leaving him a meek and helpless individual. But when he is contacted by an agent of the Moon Witch, a kratista who once fell to a coalition of other kratistoi but has since then rebuilt her power base in exile on the Moon, he is set on a course to regain his past stature. The Moon Witch, however, does so because she foresees a future need for one such as he used to be.
This novel contains the following tropes:
- Alternate History: Not only Aristotle was right, this also inlfuenced global history.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: Essentially, various powers work like this, although the catch is that you first need some will to power to even begin. Some people just don't have it in themselves and stay on the bottom, others have varying levels and end up in appropriate places on the social ladder. There also are specialists — known as the teknitoi and the demiurgoi (e.g. a teknites of soma is a doctor) — who clearly have enough will to impose themselves on reality in some aspect of it, but not always on other people, and form a middle class.
- The Conqueror: Maksym Rog has this reputation, and well deserved: think of him as Wizard Stalin.
- Create Your Own Hero: Rog could have killed Berbelek, but once he left him alive, he let it possible for him to regain his Form with a big chip on the shoulder.
- Cruel Mercy: This is why Rog did not simply kill Berbelek. There is also a hint that Rog wanted to demonstrate how pissing off a kratistos differsfrom pissing off any random fellow.
- Defiant Stone Throw: Having faced Rog, who forced his entire garrison into suicidal despair simply by showing up to the siege, the broken-down Berbelek spat in his face.
- Democracy Is Bad: In-universe, where Dare to Be Badass is a law of nature, to say that people are equal to each other means pretty much being a Granola Girl with a tendency for wacky activist antics.
- Eldritch Location: Skoliodoi, "the Skewing", a place in the centre of Darkest Africa where everything is in a state of flux. Any expedition needs a crew of medical specialists to fix the daily changes.
- Elemental Powers: The classical four plus aether, which is found in the Solar System. Everything is a mix of them. The stablest combinations are those that are expressed with prime numbers.
- Fisher King: The kratistoi, who influence entire countries and peoples and who can't ever meet each other in person since that'd be like fire and water meeting; it would be necessary for one to overpower the other. And besides, their domains would move with them. In the domain of a sybarite, everything is prettier. Under Maksym Rog, everyone sucks up to his superiors and bosses over his underlings. And under a good-natured pacifist, everyone becomes too soft to stand up against an invasion.
- For comparison, there also are "normal" kings who do not exhibit this trope and do the day-to-day ruling.
- Impossibly Cool Weapon: There are two in the story. One is a dagger produced by a black-market weapon dealer, imbued with a poison so potent it can one-shot an elephant, the other a sword made of essence of corruption forged specifically to take on an Eldritch Abomination. (And in a downplayed case, there also are the rotating-barrel muskets of the Moon people.)
- Loss of Identity: Happens in a fashion to Berbelek. He does not lose his memory, but he loses his, uh, identity as a powerful military commander.
- Magic A Is Magic A: Everything runs on scientifically explorable principles, these just aren't the ones we have. A thrown stone flies because a thrower exerts his or her will on it, until it leaves the thrower's anthos and behaves like anything made mostly of ge (the element Earth) does — ie. falls.
- No Such Thing as Wizard Jesus: Averted. The common view in-universe is that Jesus was a failed kratistos, whose doctrine of peace and forgiveness directly undermined any attempts at empire-building He might otherwise commence and ultimately resulted in His premature death, with a perenially notorious loony sect of "Christians" being all that came out of it. His story is one of a few examples listed as a reason why a kratistos should not be too good-natured.
- Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: Space Bats.
- Starfish Aliens: The adynathoi, who are so alien, they managed to come from nowhere in Aristotelian universe. (Would be clear Eldritch Abomination if they were a single individual. Which they may well be.)
- Survival Mantra: Berbelek's is to count. Powerfully, occurs in the culminating scene, where he either manages to overcome corruption of the adynathoi and re-establishes his Form for a killing strike, or succumbs to it. (Hard to say.)
- Zeppelins from Another World: Perhaps inevitably, the common means of fast and luxurious travel are the "flying hogs", large blimps capable of travelling to the Moon on top of overland travel.
