Craft Wars Predictions Update - what will happen in Wicked Problems and beyond?
Before Dead Country came out I made a predictions post about what I thought might happen in the Craft Wars series. With 25 days to go (if I counted right) before the release of Wicked Problems, it’s the perfect time for an update.
Did I get anything right? What was wildly wrong? And having read Dead Country, what new predictions do I have for the rest of the series?
Note: although I have indeed now read Wicked Problems, this article was drafted prior and thus has no spoilers or spoiler-informed speculation.
Full text of each prediction can be found in the original article; I’ll just be summarising them here.
Dead Country prediction outcomes
Right, let’s get started.
1. Space spiders / skazzerai as the Big Bad
Starting out strong! As evidenced by my series on the skazzerai, I think it’s fair to say YES I was right on this one. The skazzerai are coming for the Domain, and will most likely be the Big Bad of the Craft Wars series.
Score: 1/1
2. Grimwalds will do something
Alas, not a single reference to the Grimwalds in the whole book. 0 marks for me.
Score: 1/2
3. Serpents as chekhov’s gun
…not doing so well now, am I? No sign of the serpents in Dead Country. No points.
Score: 1/3
4. Denovo’s influence or allies will be important
Oh thank god I’m back in the game. I refer you once again to the skazzerai series. Denovo is back (thankfully not literally) and his actions shape the entire plot.
Score: 2/4
5. Characters will continue coming together
Sigh.
No joy. Dead Country is constrained in both location and character, so we don’t have any fun crossovers with characters we already know and love.
Score: 2/5
6. Fixing war damage / finding balance
One could argue that finding balance is present as a thee, with Tara’s considerations about the Craft industry and education system, but it’s not central. We see war damage, but the focus isn’t on fixing it.
Going to generously give myself 0.25 marks here.
Score: 2.25/6
7. Elayne will sacrifice herself
Thank god this hasn’t happened. Yet. Elayne Kevarian wasn’t even in this book, so definitely no sacrifice - though I still have a voice at the back of my head saying it’ll happen before the end of the Craft Wars.
Elayne, please live forever I love you.
Score: 2.25/7
At this point we move on from speculation based on previous books into baseless suggestions I personally just quite like. Will I be any more accurate? Let’s see…
8. Caleb will have a kid
…no I will not be more accurate, alas. Once again, we don’t see Caleb so get no confirmation either way on whether he has a kid.
Score: 2.25/8
9. Tara will be in a relationship (with shale??)
Oh thank go another full point finally. There was no Tara/Shale, but Tara is very much is a situationship with Connor Cavanaugh, and that counts as a relationship for the purposes of this article. Shale was worth a bonus point, so just the one mark here for me.
Score: 3.25/9
10. We’ll see a religious or cultural festival
Hmm. Inclined to say no to this one, as there definitely wasn’t a festival or holy day, but we did get insight into Edgemont’s funerary traditions and a wake. So I’ll allow myself 0.5 marks.
Score: 3.75/10
11. Belladonna Albrecht will show up
No sign of our off-screen reigning Queen Belladonna. This was always a longshot.
Score: 3.75/11
12. Mina will be back
Like all my character-focused predictions, no sign of Mina Almotil and no points for me.
Score: 3.75/12
13. We’ll see the demon world
While we did get visions into a terrible world / future, it was not specifically the demon world so no points.
Score: 3.75/13
14. Character cameos
Why oh why did I go so hard on character predictions for the shortest book with the fewest crossovers??
None of the specific characters I referenced showed up, but we technically got the return of characters briefly mentioned in Three Parts Dead. That is not, however, what I meant by this prediction so no marks for me.
Score: 3.75/14
15. We’ll see new locations
Edgemont doesn’t count as we’ve been here before, and that is virtually our only location. We certainly don’t see any new cities.
However, I’m going to generously give myself half a point because of a) the cool Badlands canyon, b) the Tellurian Annex, and c) we hear more about Alt Selene than we ever have before, and I specifically mentioned wanting more information about Alt Selene in the predictions post.
Score: 4.25/15
16. pOP CULTURE
We hear a tiny bit about books Tara grew up reading, but not enough to count this one as a point. No more marks.
Score: 4.25/16
Barely 25% right! Not my best work. In my defence, Dead Country is a vastly different book than its predecessors, making it much harder to predict.
Predictions for Wicked Problems and beyond
I’m going to keep all of the above, because I don’t think Dead Country made any of them truly unfathomable, and I did say that the post was for Dead Country AND the Craft Wars trilogy. So we have 16 already, and I’m going to add a few more based on what we now know.
17. Dawn and the craft-god will be essential, and get point of view chapters
I feel pretty safe in saying Dawn will be essential going forward. After all, the book ended with this quote:
“We saw something, when we came through the bridge. A figure like a tower of light. She fought us briefly, but when Lord Kos set his weight against her, she fled. She was not ready to face Goddess and God and Guardians at once.”
“She will be,” Tara said. “Now that we know she’s there, she has no choice. She’ll move fast, grow faster. She’ll eat us to save herself, to save the world. She’ll do what she has to.”
So Dawn is definitely showing up again, and I think it’s pretty likely she gets point of view pages. It doesn’t feel very Gladstone to have her off-page only to rock up at a key moment, but we’ll see.
18. Seril and Kos will join the fight
Seril and Kos already intervened on Tara’s behalf (see above quote) and I can’t imagine they’ll fade into the background. Kos may have been neutral during the last war, but can he remain that way in the next? Will the skazzerai - or Dawn - accept neutrality from a god? Or will they try to eat him nonetheless.
Having lost and regained Seril, Kos is also a different god than he was 60 years ago. I think we’re going to see both the Lord and Lady of Alt Coulumb enter the frey - for better and for worse.
19. Dragons will do battle
This comes out of my dragon research rather than from Dead Country itself. Dragons generally stay out of human matters, but they’re pragmatic creatures. The dragon Tara speaks to in Four Roads Cross says:
“–You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power?
“I wouldn’t have put it that way,” she said.
–I bear these people because Craftsmen, broadly speaking, do not love what they cannot use, and destroy what they do not love. So I make myself useful in some minimal way, as do others of my kind.
“Because you’re afraid of us?”
–No. Because I enjoy flying far and fast, and I find this work more pleasant.
“Than what?”
–War.”
Can dragons stay out of a galactic war? Will Craftsfolk let them? If dragons are as powerful as they seem, with hoards of soul, they sound like a skazzerai’s favourite appetiser. I don’t think dragons will have much of a choice; I think we’ll see them enter the fight.
20. We’ll see more god wars era weapons
The aurora being harnessed by Tara in Dead Country made me think we’re going to get even more weapons in future battles. We’ve seen gripfire, the aurora, engines of war, dragon corpse weapons… what else is coming?
21. And there will be more Craft horrors
The Tellurian Annex was horrifying, but not, frankly, surprising. Vats of body parts, a viviesected god - these are just extreme versions of standard Craft practice. Tara talks about it at school, we just haven’t seen it up close, and we haven’t seen our protagonist be horrified by what they see. If Tara casually mentions, as she does in Three Parts Dead seeing deities “once or twice at school, in a controlled environment” we don’t feel the full horror of what she’s saying. We see it a bit more in Two Serpents Rise when Caleb sees the godlings of Seven Leaf Lake, but it’s nowhere near the level of the Tellurian Annex.
With Tara coming to terms with the terrible side of the Craft, I think we’ll see even more of this going forward.
22. Kopil, king of snark
Right, we’ve had a few heavy predictions and Dead Country was a fairly depressing book in all honesty. Let’s lighten the atmosphere a bit with the King in Red.
I’m manifesting the return of Kopil, his overdramatic performances, and his snarky af dialogue. If we all pray really hard, surely it will come true?
Maybe pray isn’t the right word. Sign a contract in blood? Hand over part of our souls? Something along those lines.
23. We’ll see Valentine get to know Tara’s new life
I absolutely adored Tara’s mother, Valentine Ngoye Abernathy, in Dead Country and I really hope we see much more of her. She ends Dead Country at Tara’s bedside in Alt Coulumb, so hopefully that’s a good sign this will come true? Tara and Valentine built a much stronger relationship over Tara’s time in Edgemont, and I would love to see Valentine see Tara in action, meet her friends, experience the whirlwind life she now leads.
There we have it! 23 predictions for the rest of the Craft Wars series. Let’s see how many I get right this time…
What do you think? Let me know - and don’t forget you can subscribe to be the first to hear about new articles and fun projects in the pipeline.
