Is a side quest a short story?

Reading and playing The Witcher

I’m currently in the middle of the odd experience of consuming a story from the beginning and end at the same time. I’ve been fascinated by The Witcher series from afar for years because of the circuitous path it took to reach the American mainstream. The books, written by Andrzej Sapkowski and published between 1993-1999 (with a later prequel in 2013), are huge in their native Poland—in 2011 Polish prime minister Donald Tusk gave Obama several of the books when he visited the States—but it really only gained widespread name recognition in the U.S. when the video game developer CD Projekt Red began adapting it into a series of games. But even there, it’s odd—it seems, from my limited perspective, that basically no one has played The Witcher (2007) or The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011). The standard way into the franchise, the one I have followed myself, is to jump straight into The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) and just not worry about anything that might have come before. Then came the Netflix series starring Henry Cavill (haven’t seen it), but given the deeply fragmented state of television in the streaming era, it’s unclear to me how popular that is either. The Witcher is thus a fascinating case study in a franchise that is massively successful yet somehow still far from the center of the zeitgeist. 

But let’s back up and get the formalities out of the way. The Witcher saga follows Geralt of Rivia, a witcher, that is, a monster hunter who roams a generic medieval fantasy world taking contracts to exterminate troublesome monsters, dispensing justice, and generally getting beaten up a lot. His best friend is the famous poet Dandelion, a cad and a womanizer with no ability to defend himself who nonetheless often tags along on adventures to gather material for his ballads. In the course of trying to save Dandelion’s life after an unfortunate encounter with a djinn, Geralt meets Yennefer of Vengerberg, a beautiful but icy sorceress and Geralt’s great, tumultuous, destined love. The second book introduces Ciri, an orphaned princess, child of the Elder Blood, and inheritor of a vast destiny of her own who becomes Geralt’s adopted daughter.  

The Witcher video games take place after the events of all the books and are considered non-canon. The third makes numerous little winking references to the books—specific phrases, a few asides in the vein of “this reminds me of that time in Cintra”—but it’s funny how much it doesn’t spoil the book series. Firing Wild Hunt up cold, you learn that Geralt has an adopted daughter, an inconclusive romance with Yennefer, and previously had amnesia during which time he was in a relationship with another mage, Triss Merigold (whether this amnesia relationship is from the books or the previous games I still don’t know). I assume the books build to some grand conclusion involving Ciri and Geralt’s dual destinies along with a prophecy about the world ending in the cataclysm of the White Frost, but whatever that conclusion is, it never bears mentioning throughout the game’s voluminous script. 

Video games are notorious for having bad stories, bad voice acting, for the nigh-insurmountable barrier to delivering pathos from the mouth of a mediocre 3D model. The Witcher 3 immediately surpassed my expectations. Geralt himself was the first pleasant surprise—given the grimy fantasy setting and his status as a mutated, veteran monster hunter, I was expecting some real broody Batman shit. So how nice that he’s instead an affable if hard-edged guy capable of cracking a joke before cracking skulls. Yennefer too, despite being burdened in the early game with a lot of exposition laying out the main quest, was written to a higher quality than I expected. Geralt’s personal journey takes place amid an invasion by the southern empire of Nilfgaard into the Northern Realms; their armies are pushing toward the free city of Novigrad, a rough analog to Venice during its period as an independent republic. This political dimension, though hardly Game of Thrones in its complexity, also piqued my interest in the setting and the books. 

It’s been hard to find the time to read lately and I’m pretty burned out on all my regular podcasts but I still have a lot of driving and doing dishes time to fill so I decided to take the UNPRECEDENTED step of listening to the first Witcher book, The Last Wish¹ as an audiobook. This will probably make people mad but I don’t consider listening to an audiobook reading. Obviously you are receiving the contents of a book but, I’m sorry, listening and reading are different things and involve different mental processes. This isn’t a moral stance! I don’t think you’re lesser if you prefer audiobooks over print, I just think you’re doing a different activity.

I can feel the difference in myself. I’ve now listened to the first and second book, Sword of Destiny², in the series. Knowing as well as I do how I relate to a book I’ve read in print—word for word memory of specific passages, an ability to remember where on the page a quote I want to find was—believe me when I say that my relationship to these books is quite different for having listened instead. Here’s one small example: Geralt is frequently denigrated as “The Butcher of Blaviken” in the game but no one explains what this means or what he did. At some point in one of the books—the fact that I don’t remember which kind of proves my point—someone calls him that as well. I laughed, thinking to myself, “Oh okay, this has been part of his backstory from the beginning and has never been explained.” But checking something on Wikipedia just now, I’ve discovered that the third story³ in the first book, “The Lesser Evil,” is in fact the story of how he earned the moniker (it was a misunderstanding, his killing was justified—the “lesser evil” you might say). Now I remember that story well enough but missed entirely that it takes place in Blaviken. That never would have happened if I were actually reading it, but listening along it’s very easy to let a fantasy name slip past.

Not only is listening to a book different than reading it, I found listening to a book weirdly different from listening to a podcast. I don’t want to brag but I’m pretty good at listening to podcasts. But when I first pressed play on The Last Wish I had a really hard time absorbing the material. Somehow the slower pace of the narration made the words harder to follow rather than easier. I’ve mostly adjusted at this point but it was just interesting to feel such a visceral difference in how I was processing what at first glance might look like two identical things.  

This is why I’ve long been resistant to trying audiobooks. Generally what I read is stuff I want to pay attention to and take seriously, so the ease with which details can be missed makes me dubious. Also you’ll note that for once I’ve published something without any over-long block quotes in it. This is in part because these books aren’t worth quoting at length but more so because I have no access to the text. If I wanted to include a quote, well, I’m sure I could find a pdf somewhere online but that’s not the point. If I wanted to include a quote I’d have to hunt it down in the audiobook, which is far too much work. 

All that being true, I still think audiobook was the right choice for this series (so far anyway). I’m pretty sure that I would have put The Last Wish down after just a story or two had I been reading it. On a sentence level it’s fine but for the most part there just isn’t much going on beyond basic plot and dialogue. With the exception of two stories I’ll praise a little more in a second, they are not operating on multiple levels of thematic or philosophical sophistication. Had I been spending precious reading time on them, I would have quickly concluded it was a poor use of it. But as something to keep me entertained while doing chores, I can accept something a little shallower.

The limitations of Sapkowski’s writing in these first two books is somewhat excusable knowing the history of their composition. In 1985, Sapkowski was a traveling fur salesman who loved fantasy literature. At his son’s urging he entered a short story competition put on by the Polish magazine Fantastyka. The story he submitted, which comes first in The Last Wish, is about Geralt doing his job, in this case attempting to break a curse that has caused a princess born of incest to transform into a monster. The story placed third in the competition but got a strong response from readers. Over the ensuing years he slowly wrote more stories, which were eventually collected and published. 

Viewed in this context, the stories in The Last Wish appear less as stories than as writing exercises. “A Grain of Truth,” for instance, is a Beauty and the Beast riff wherein Geralt listens to the tale of a lonely man cursed with the head of a monster. What the story really is is an extended exercise in inhabiting another character’s voice. Almost the whole story is given over to this man’s tale of woe; clearly Sapkowski is practicing maintaining consistent characterization over a long stretch of text. Similarly, the title story, which concerns Geralt and Yennefer trying to subdue a rampaging djinn, is a first foray into managing different groups of characters and shifting between various perspectives on the same events, fairly unsuccessfully in my opinion. 

There is tremendous value in seeing someone working out their craft in real time. Sapkowski clearly has great storytelling instincts but his technique is unrefined and he has a number of annoying habits that he hasn’t learned to suppress yet. I imagine early Stephen King might have something of this quality—overflowing with talent but not yet sure how to control it. One particularly irritating tic Sapkowski indulges in is latching onto a particular phrase and hammering it over and over until you hope you never hear it again. So, for instance, in the story “A Shard of Ice,” from Sword of Destiny, Yennefer says that the truth is like a shard of ice. We’re left to decide what this might mean. I don’t think it tracks as a metaphor—a shard of ice can cut you but it begins melting in the process, whereas anything true is only strengthened by its application. In any case, after this phrase is introduced it’s then applied to every situation and relationship in the story. I think the idea is that its meaning warps and shifts with each new application to create a web of different ways that truth is like a shard of ice but Sapkowski never clears the initial hurdle of making the phrase mean something in the first place so all the following permutations are equally empty. He successfully deploys the phrase “a little sacrifice” in the story “A Little Sacrifice” in several different ways⁴ but by that point it’s hard to appreciate because it’s just become one of his cliches. Other examples include the phrase “something more” in “Something More” and “the voice of reason” in “The Voice of Reason.” Basically, whatever the title of the story, prepare yourself to hate it by the end. 

There’s one exception to the rule in The Last Wish, the story “A Question of Price.” In it, Geralt has been hired by Queen Calanthe of Cintra to attend her daughter Pavetta’s sixteenth birthday party and take care of any unexpected trouble that might emerge. Geralt is adamant that he’s no common mercenary and can’t be hired as a bodyguard, to which Calanthe responds repeatedly that of course he can be, it’s only a question of price. An unknown knight enters the hall and claims Pavetta’s hand in marriage, claiming that she was promised to him sixteen years earlier. Apparently Pavetta’s father, traveling abroad, was saved from certain death by this knight, who named as his price of repayment whatever the king found when he returned home that he did not expect—the “Law of Surprise”—that is, his unborn daughter. Chaos erupts in the hall, fighting ensues, Pavetta unleashes a magical scream that threatens to bring down the castle, and Geralt intervenes and saves the day. It becomes clear that Pavetta and the knight, Duny, have already been in contact, if you know what I mean. When Duny asks Geralt how he can repay him for working out their betrothal, Geralt is ruthless. He also names the Law of Surprise, claiming their unsuspected, unborn child as his to take and make into a witcher. Sapkowski accomplishes his goal in this instance—a phrase that starts as a queen’s condescending dismissal by the end proves true, but in a way she could never have expected, costing her far more than gold. 

The other best story in The Last Wish is “The Edge of the World,” in which Sapkowski introduces some interesting worldbuilding and political dimensions. Hired to drive out a monster, Geralt and Dandelion end up the prisoners of a band of elves. In this world, elves, dwarves, and the other non-human races have been displaced and driven to the hostile fringes of the world by humans and their relentless expansion. Geralt and Dandelion’s captors say all this and more, and their rage at their dispossession and marginalization feels fully justified. When Geralt objects and says basically that they need to face reality and accept the world as it is, the elves respond compellingly, “Oh, sure, play the hand you humans have dealt us, a losing hand. The ‘way the world is’ is the way you humans have made it. Assimilating means assimilating on your terms, which will always be to our disadvantage.” It’s hard to fault their reasoning. They doubly denigrate Geralt for being a foot soldier in the disenchantment of the world, a pawn of human hegemony, even though, as a witcher, he’ll never really be accepted into society either. He’s fighting for a world that has no place in it for him. 

Sword of Destiny is an improvement in just about every way. Sapkowski is more comfortable with larger groups of characters and gives them sharper perspectives that often seem more persuasive than Geralt’s. Even as he repeats some of his flaws he seems to have recognized the strongest aspects of his previous work. He picks up the thread about the persecution of other creatures by people in the title story, which involves a trip into deep woods held by dryads but threatened by the surrounding human kingdoms. It’s in this story as well that he introduces Ciri, who turns out to be the child he exacted as payment in “A Question of Price.” I’m hopeful that the third book, Blood of Elves, will be another step up as he moves from stories to a novel and focuses on the fledgling father/daughter bond between them. 

Well this is getting long so to answer the question in the headline, no, a side quest is not a short story. For one thing, they are not self-contained but are mere diversions in a longer story, more like one of the case of the week episodes that, say, Justified would mix into its serialized story. But more importantly, even the dumbest, most Kill Monster Rawr stories in Sapkowski’s books have a moral center that takes seriously the implications of Geralt’s actions. It’s all real, so to speak, and it matters that characters think they’re doing the right thing. The game, by contrast, is a cartoon. For all the emphasis it places on Making Choices, there’s an unreality to the whole thing separates it from anything serious. 

Here’s an example: I⁵ was doing a quest tracking down a slave trader. I went to the town where he lives and was told he was off praying. I had two dialogue options: either say I’d come back later or crack a joke about how Hammond didn’t seem like the praying type. I chose the latter, naturally. The guard said that showed I clearly didn’t belong there and drew his sword. Instantly every person in that town was a red dot on my map and I was only going to get to Hammond by killing them, probably fifteen in all. I did so without a second thought. It’s a video game and you kill bandits in video games. Now remember this is a game where Geralt is called the Butcher of Blaviken for an incident where he killed like four bandits to stop them from massacring everyone at a town market. It’s just really odd to have that thrown back in my face when I do something ten times worse than Blaviken approximately every fifteen minutes. 

Anyway, no grand conclusions this time. Thanks for reading my assorted thoughts about audiobooks and The Witcher. Should I watch the Netflix show?

1. It should be illegal to put the word Last in the title of the first book of a series

2. This title is so generic it circles back around to charming and good, actually

3. Both The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny are short story collections. The third book and on are novels.

4. Cue Tom Colicchio on Top Chef saying, “whenever I get a dish that’s something three ways I wish it had just been one way.”

5. Here’s a bit of linguistic confusion: was it “Geralt” on this quest or was it “I”? Video games can be very slippery the way they elide the distance between character and player