Review: Forged for Destiny by Andrew Knighton

With an unwitting protagonist sculpted into the role, Andrew Knighton’s Forged for Destiny works to upend, critique and examine the idea of a Chosen One in fantasy settings

If you have read any fantasy published in the last five decades, you know the Chosen One motif. A child who is destined, by fate, destiny, the Gods, the Force, to rise up against a tyranny, throw down evil, get the girl, and usher in a new time of peace, prosperity and goodness for all. You know the shape of this narrative well enough by now. Even if you have not read fantasy, cultural osmosis means you’ve been exposed to it.

This is, however, not a typical Chosen One story. What if that story was falsified, made out of whole cloth? What if its elements were all manufactured, including the Chosen One himself? Andrew Knighton’s Forged for Destiny is an epic fantasy that looks and deconstructs the Chosen One narrative through the eyes of its unwitting protagonist.

That theme is right in the title. The full title of the book is Forged for Destiny: A Heroic Fantasy with a Chosen-One Twist. The novel is definitely not hiding what it wants to do, and does it with a pun in the title in the process. Further, the novel makes it clear in its prologue that the prime movers behind Raul’s “Destiny,” Valens and Prisca, are trying to bootstrap it from the start. Finding a random baby as the city of Pavuno is falling. Taking the time to have that baby branded, marked, in accordance with the legend and prophecy and destiny they are weaving for him. Going out to the hinterlands and having him grow up in rural isolation. A theater troupe who comes to the village on their circuit to nurture ideas of the old kingdom, and old good king Balbainus standing up for what’s right.

Raul is being groomed by both Valens and Prisca to be the point of a spear to oppose the Dunholmi invaders who have conquered the country for the last two decades. What Valens and Prisca don’t count on is that Raul is not a perfect puppet, and even with all of their plans, he does have a mind of his own.  And so, armed with a sense of his destiny but willing to go off-script for his own inculcated virtues and values, Raul’s story does not play out quite according to plan. He’s a genuinely good person who tries to do the right thing, time and again. I think Knighton’s goal was to make us feel for Raul and identify with him since he IS being so manipulated into his role.

This book is very concerned with the power of story and its ability to persuade, and perhaps, to create a reality out of nothing. It’s fascinating to see Valens and Prisca try and again to set up the path for Raul from the very beginning, and to see Raul fulfill, sometimes too well, their lessons and expectations.¹ To that end, the worldbuilding of this world and the socio-political setup is what I want to focus on. This is a world where the invading Dunholmi are wary of both literacy and the small magics that people use. As a result, most actual books are banned and not allowed. Professions of copyists and the like are not allowed either, although a few people are allowed to be scribes (and they are watched like hawks). Books and the like are valuable treasures that are among some of the things that Raul and his insurgents, once they get going, look for.

Also, take the theater troupe. They are allowed to perform, but have a permanent sword of Damocles over their heads. Displeasing the Dumholmi in a play is a great way for a theater troupe to lose their liberty, or their heads. The novel explores the problems of censorship and restriction of the flow of ideas too. And yet, later in the book, we get the reasons why the Dunholmi are doing what they are doing. It’s not caprice or needless cruelty. The novel undercuts that, too.

All this comes to the power of story, and the manufacture and nurturing of story and its ability to change people’s lives and motivate them. Tell the right story, and a people can rise up to oppose tyranny, or come to accept the new state of affairs. Raised on, and learning the heroic stories of, the fallen monarchy shapes Raul and his character. He believes in the old stories, in the chivalric virtues; he is immersed in them. But he is not a tabula rasa. Raul is at his heart a genuinely good person. Time and again, he acts in a heroic or merciful manner where the “Script” would have him act differently.²

But the novel further complicates it all in several ways. Prisca supposedly can see the future. Or so she says. She uses this to push and motivate Raul at various points to keep him on the path she has chosen, or try to. If this were the world of Leverage, we could definitely see her as the mastermind of the operation. Valens might be inculcating virtue and fighting skills to Raul, but this is, really, Prisca’s long hoped-for plan to restore the monarchy and drive out the Dunholmi invaders. How much of her oracular gift are lies? We do get stuff from her point of view, and magic is real, but the preponderance of the evidence as we go along is, indeed, that she is trying to mostly bootstrap a non-existent prophecy and destiny onto Raul and onto the people of the land.

The novel does intriguingly at points break Raul’s point of view to look at his story from elsewhere and the tropes it is critiquing. Take Yasmi, for instance. She is the young star of the troupe, and clearly meant to be the Dulcinea for our knight Raul to have as his pole star to keep him on the path. In a bog-standard Chosen One narrative, especially a couple of decades past, that would be the entirety of her role, with about as much characterization and autonomy as a number 2 pencil.³ Yasmi, however, wants to be a star with a capital S, and given opportunity once they get to the big city, has ambition enough to be willing to leap for the golden ring. This, of course, is yet another crook and twist in Prisca’s plans. She also wields the most overt magic in the book, with a set of masks that allow her to take the shape of various animals (the wolf being her favorite).

Like many of these books, while following Raul and seeing him stumble, try to right, and for a while follow Prisca’s plan without deviation, what these sorts of books, including this one that is critiquing the tropes of antagonist and villain, is where a lot of the juice lies. Sure, you can have faceless guards, barely sketched lieutenants, and a villain with barely any characterization, and make a serviceable book. But if you have a complicated villain with some depth and characterization to them, it makes Chosen One narratives richer and deeper. And if you can get stuff from that point of view, even better.

Enter Count Brennett Alder, who is administering Pavuno. We do get some scenes from his point of view scattered throughout the book. He doesn’t think much of the city in its now parlous state. He has a scheming Chamberlain as his second in command. But he is erudite, ambitious, intelligent, and willing to use a variety of tools and techniques to try and quell the rebellion Prisca is brewing around Raul. One can sympathize with him, his goals and his point of view. Is he a foreign tyrant and governor of a conquered province? Absolutely. Is he having a big monument to that conquest being built in the city? Again, absolutely. Does he keep up the restrictions on magic and books? Again, absolutely. But (unlike Tur, who is his dark shadow) he is not capricious about his evil and his goals. And in his confrontation with Raul at the climax of the book, the cards are on the table and we truly get him. And that’s why he’s such a good foil for Raul and the rebellion.

The book is well written and entertaining and a good read even as it fulfills and inverts the Chosen One tropes. It’s not innovative in style; its innovation and creative forces are mainly focused on looking at those tropes critically, even as its protagonist is forced/guided/coaxed onto that path. The novel ends with an incomplete total story, and with Raul launched into a new phase. But if you wanted just to ride off into the sunset with the Chosen One trope examined and done, you could stop here.

It’s not really my place to detail where I hope the story goes in the second and final(?)⁴ volume, Forged for Prophecy, but I hope Knighton stays to his strengths. I could see how so very easily the second book could fall into a more standard form and template; my hope is that he does not take that easier path. I think he has plenty to say about these sorts of narratives, while at the same time providing a very readable story in the process.

NB: In January 2024, on this blog, Roseanna reviewed Knighton’s novella Ashes of the Ancestors.

Highlights:

• Right from the title, tells you it is going to invert and play with tropes
• A strongly told story on its own merits
• Solid use of theme and character

Reference: Knighton, Andrew. Forged for Destiny: A Heroic Fantasy with a Chosen-One Twist [Orbit, 2025].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

¹ The book does its best to avoid the “Chosen One must be a dude” by having Valens and Prisca look for a girl, but unable to find a suitable one, get the male baby that turns out to be Valens. There are plenty of female warriors as antagonists to avoid cliched ideas that only men get to wield swords. So we could have had a “Raulia” instead of a “Raul.” I think that might in some ways have made for a slightly more interesting book and would have further critiqued the Chosen One trope from the start.

² Consider Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, who leaves Yoda to go and try and free and save his friends, because it’s the right thing to do. Yoda and Obi-Wan certainly would have had him stay on Dagobah, train and oppose the Emperor later (even if it meant the end for his friends).  But of course Luke IS the chosen one, son of Darth Vader. Here, Raul is a nobody who gets sculpted into that role.  Some comparison to pre- Rise of Skywalker Rey (before we find (to my sorrow) about her “true heritage”)  might be warranted. Or Finn, for that matter.

³ Sadly, that is still too common today, but such books are more frequently found in self-published fantasy and SF catalogues than from mainstream publishers large and small.

⁴ I have noticed a rise in duologies as opposed to trilogies these days. Some of these duologies have felt like trilogies squeezed down; others have been a single book padded out to two-book length. This one does feel genuinely like two halves of a story.

Review: The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

A joyous, enthusiastic time-travelling galactic-sized saga that is just not very good

Have you ever been to a 6-year-old’s dance recital? A 10-year-old’s orchestra concert? A 16-year-old’s theater show? Young artists in the making tend to lack skills but not enthusiasm, and they throw themselves into their performances with a wholehearted earnestness that can be incredibly endearing. But for all that, they are not (yet) good dancers, violinists, or actors, and it shows.

This book is that. The author describes in her author’s notes how she started writing it as a 16-year-old, and that alone explains so, so much about this book. It explains the sprawling, ambitious plot, in which tropes are evoked with such an ardent embrace that they almost feel fresh and new. A Chosen One? Yes, please—in fact, how about three Chosen Ones? No—wait—make it nine! And reincarnation! And cyclical prophecies, and the fate of the galaxy and an evil empire and time travel and found family and teleportation and secret libraries and queer love and coming of age and fighting back against oppression and and and and and and...! I don’t want to say that only a teenager could be responsible for such a bursting profusion of familiar tropes played so fervently straight, but the fact that a teenager was originally responsible for this bursting profusion explains a lot.

It explains the odd technical details, like robots which apparently have retinas, because they need to get past retinal scans. It explains the writing style, in which a teenage Chosen One who has only ever known a life of oppression laments never having an opportunity to feel ‘normal’—as if she can know any meaning of normality that is different from her entire life hitherto. It explains why characters from 1812 talk about being each other’s ‘boyfriends’—a word whose usage to mean ‘male lover’ was not attested until 1906. (A more accurate term would have been sweeting, or paramour, or lovemate, or honeybird, or sprunny. Yes, you read that right, sprunny.) It explains the extremely odd understanding of history, in which an ailing King George III laments the loss of the American colonies as evidence of the decline of the British Empire, when in 1812 it was only just getting started. Although perhaps we’re in an alternative timeline, since there’s another George—George V??—floating around the joint, son of the regent George IV; and this George, as far as I can tell, never existed. And speaking of monarchy, it explains an odd conversation, in which a king, hearing of unrest among his people, muses that perhaps this is simply the moment when the people rise up and decide to govern themselves, and is that really so bad a thing? This king would not be so blithe, I imagine, if he had heard of what typically happens to monarchs when the people decide they’re ready to rise up and govern themselves. But because he’s a Good Guy he must necessarily despise all things monarchical and be willing to see it go away, because Monarchy Is Bad and 16-year-olds struggle with complexity.

Here’s the plot. In the future, the year 6066, a teenage girl, Asha, has lived her whole life on a planet that is crushed under the rule of an evil galactic emperor. Through cleverness and persistence she works out a plan to steal a spaceship and escape the planet. This plan is put into action when a mysterious visitor arrives, tells her that she is a Chosen One, and that she must find her sister, who was also kind of a Chosen One, but maybe not. It’s all very cryptic for reasons that are never explained except that you can’t explain everything on page 25.

Narratively meanwhile, in 1812 London, Obi is a time traveller who has fallen in love with Prince George. We know that they are in love with each other because they have a very long, tedious conversation about that fact, which serves no purpose beyond establishing their fraught relationship. Oh, and also that George doesn’t like being a prince, because Monarchy is Bad and George is a Good Guy and therefore cannot possibly think otherwise. Then Obi, who has difficulties controlling his time travel, accidentally time travels to the future, landing in the midst of Asha’s escape attempt, where he helps her avoid capture, and they fly away together.

(Oh, and speaking of the spaceships! If the galactic empire is so huge that your spaceships need to be hyperspace-capable to get anywhere, then I have difficulty imagining someone ‘gently steering’ the ship in normal space. Steering around what? A stray hydrogen atom? And why does the hyperspace-capable spaceship need wings?)

An incredible amount of not-terribly-functional plot occurs afterwards. Daring, cinematic escapes, betrayals, chases, rescues. We eventually learn the whole story of the various Chosen Ones—including a kind of cool moment when one previous Chosen One decides he’s not okay with having a role forced upon him, and decides to make trouble. This could be an outstanding opportunity to engage with the Chosen One trope and explore the effect of cosmic determinism on the psychology of the pawns of fate, but remember that 16-year-olds don’t do well with complexity, so instead we get a pretty dull antagonist. We learn through document fragments that the whole story of various Chosen Ones is bound up in a kind of reincarnation thing, so that legends of the previous instantiations of the Chosen Ones portray versions of the same adventures that Obi and Asha experience in the pages of the book. This is rather neat, until eventually it gets repetitive and tedious, and finally culminates in a huge revelation scene, in which Asha discovers how it all works and marvels at something that we, the reader, have known for a few hundred pages already.

Now, to be fair, there were some excellent touches in this book, hints of the kind of writer that Jikiemi-Pearson might become. The resentful Chosen One and the reincarnation of story events I’ve mentioned, but there was also a lovely moment between Obi and Asha, in which they have been rescued from some Bad Guys and have a quiet moment together. Obi braids Asha’s hair for her, in a way that she can’t quite manage herself, and explains that this hairstyle is not meant to be done by oneself. The expectation is that you have someone to help you. I was very touched by this scene—a reaction immediately undone by Obi going off to the bathroom to give himself a face mask, leaving me wondering at what point he managed to find himself travel-sized spa kits in the midst of escaping from prison ships.

There’s a truism floating around SFF writer circles that you have to be a bad writer before you can become a good one. Brandon Sanderson describes on his Writing Excuses podcast that he had to write 7 or 11 or some very large number of novels before he managed to sell his first published one, Elantris. You have to write a million bad words before the good ones start flowing, he says.

I can see the good words getting ready to flow in Jikiemi-Pearson’s writing. But I think there’s still a few hundred thousand bad ones that have to be flushed out first. And fortunately, given her eager, sincere, wildly ambitious approach, she’s well on her way there. But this book is not there yet.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10, problematic, but has redeeming qualities.

Highlights:

•     Tropes played earnestly straight
•     Black teenagers saving the world
•     Many, many Chosen Ones

Reference: Jikiemi-Pearson, Esmie. The Principle of Moments [Gollancz, 2024].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.