#also featuring bob the seer! he's completely bonkers and i love him!

[words-writ-in-starlight]

what's DFZ?

DFZ! DFZ! DFZ!

Okay, so, the DFZ series(es?) is kind of a catchall name for a couple of series by Rachel Aaron that take place in the same urban fantasy universe, the DFZ books and the Heartstriker books.  Urban cyberfantasy?  You could throw a lot of adjectives into that descriptor if you wanted to.

The general premise is that once upon a time Earth had magic.  A lot of magic.  Absolutely god-creating levels of magic.  And then, mysteriously, it all drained away some thousand years ago, leaving humanity to forget all about it while the creatures who needed it to live either withered away completely (spirits, gods, etc) or went into hiding and hibernation (also some spirits, dragons, etc).  And then, like a switch being flipped, it all came back at once in 2035, and suddenly humanity had a lot of magic to throw around and no idea what was going on.  That was a few decades ago at the start of the Heartstriker books, which are a couple decades before the DFZ books.

(Incidentally, I really like that choice.  It would have been very easy to write a novel about humanity getting magic back and running around like chickens with our heads cut off, and don’t get me wrong I would have read and adored that book, but setting things a little later means that magic is just Part Of The Deal and it’s so much goddamn cooler.)

Which brings us to the DFZ proper, also known as the Detroit Free Zone.  When magic came back, a lot of shit woke up really fast, chief among them A, dragons, and, B, Spirits of the Land.  Like the Lady of the Great Lakes, Algonquin, who was really, really not having it with every city in a hundred mile radius dumping pollutants into her water by the metric ton.  So she wiped most of the Great Lakes states off the map, and took over the ruins of Detroit to make the Detroit Free Zone, where the only laws worth mentioning are:

No murder

No dragons

No polluting the water

Anything else is pretty much free game.  So you can imagine that the DFZ gets to be a pretty interesting place pretty goddamn fast--the most magical city in the world, where anyone can do anything without fear of the law coming down on them, under the iron hand of a goddess who doesn’t much care for humans.

Anyway, if that sounds cool and you like any of the following, you should actually just trust me and go read these books without bothering with the rest of this post:

Immaculately well-constructed magical worldbuilding--the entire second book of the DFZ trilogy is basically “how to out-litigate a curse and the consequences of doing just that”

Humans Are Special trope, but in the “if you could all just slow down on the innovation we’d all be a lot safer” kind of way, which is a personal favorite

Dragons!  Lots and lots of dragons from all over the world!  This is an absolutely spectacular series for dragons, despite Algonquin’s best efforts!

Sentient cities!  The DFZ takes a while to get moving (magic takes time and big magic takes big time) but once she does, oh boy do I ever love her so goddamn much, get wrekt Algonquin

Magic Is Normal tropes coming out your goddamn ears, mixed with a healthy dose of Technology Is Magic (AIs can project stuff straight into your brain by hooking into your natural magical field and y’all...I’d kill for it...that’s so cool)

Really genuinely likable characters--Julius, Marci, Opal, and Nik are all completely fantastic and I would get drinks with any of them, and also the main romances actually enjoy each others’ company in non-romantic contexts, which is remarkably refreshing

Seers, and the finicky game of making the future jump the way you want it to jump while someone else who can also see the future is trying to make it jump the other way

Doesn’t that sound rad?  Yes, it does, I’m telling you that these books are amazing, the first DFZ book is called Minimum Wage Magic, and the first Heartstriker is called Nice Dragons Finish Last, go forth and read.  Either series is a great starting point, I actually liked reading the Heartstriker books after the DFZ books because I loved seeing Opal meet Julius, Main Character Boy for the Heartstrikers, as a competent and universally respected adult, and then getting insight into his brain which is just that one gif from Community with the pizza and the fire, all the time.

As per usual, more details under the cut.

So, magic comes back and Algonquin wreaks destruction and the DFZ happens.  Smash cut sixty years into the future for the Heartstriker books, starring Julius Heartstriker, the youngest and most regrettably tenderhearted dragon in the massive Heartstriker clan.  Julius’ primary problem in life is that he does not enjoy lying, scheming, manipulating, threatening, murdering, or power tripping, which means that his entire family pretty much takes carte blanche to kick him around like a soccer ball.  This comes to a head when his mother, Bethesda Heartstriker, puts a curse on him so that he can’t access his draconic form and dumps him unceremoniously into the DFZ, where dragons are executed on sight, with strict orders to find something to impress her, or else die quietly out of the way.

Julius, to his credit, throws himself into trying to become a Real Dragon as best he can, but he’s just so goddamn nice, he goes out and saves lives and makes bargains and enforced democracy instead of unilateral dynastic rule and falls in love with a human (hi Marci) and makes a name for himself as “the dragon you go to when all your other options would kill you or laugh in your face.”  It’s absolutely delightful to watch.  He’s doing such a good job.

Basically, the Heartstriker books go like this: Julius doesn’t like the way his world works!  And fuck you for telling him that he needs to be less kind in order to work in the world!  He’s not changing himself, he’s going to change the world instead, and because he’s very, very nice, he’ll even let you live there once he’s done!

Next up, the DFZ books, twenty years later, star Opal Yong-ae, who moved to the DFZ from Korea for reasons that become apparent later but mostly boil down to “freedom.”  Since Julius’ first arrival in the DFZ, a lot’s changed--Algonquin is gone, the Spirit of the DFZ is a sovereign entity who has her own motives and desires, and what was once a no-dragon zone is now a neutral territory governed by the Peacemaker, who you might remember as a twenty-four-year-old baby desperately out of his depth and is now a straight up force to be reckoned with, feared and respected around the world.  (I’m so proud of my son.)

Opal’s problems are that she’s a mage who hits like a tank when she’s desperate but can’t handle even the most basic tasks, and she’s scrambling to pay off a massive debt to her father in order to prove that she should be allowed to remain in the DFZ.  These are both old news.  The dead body she finds in an abandoned apartment that she’s been hired to clean out and get ready for renting, on the other hand, that’s a new, kicky, fresh kind of problem, especially once someone starts shooting at her about it.  

She joins up with another Cleaner named Nikola Kos, who she mostly knows as “that scary guy in black” and is an absolute tank who is also secretly very soft.  Their dynamic is so much fun, very intensely “Small Chaotic Drags Big Exhausted Into Drama” with the added bonus that Nik is a very cool cyborg fighter type.  Opal is so determined that it verges on being completely unhinged and I would read 15 books about her.  Also, the third book is out, so that brutal cliffhanger at the end of Half Price Gods is a problem for Eight Months Ago Me, rather than Present Day You.