There's nerdy and then there's nerdy

Non-nerds stop reading, as this one has the nerd power of three Death Stars and a Super Star Destroyer.

Ok, so I started Gardens of the Moon, one of the more highly touted fantasy debuts in the last few years. It is part of a ten, count em ten, volume series. And this has to be some of the densest fantasy I have yet read. It is is highly militarized like the Black Company books of Glen Cook, but is set in a much larger and more developed universe. The politics is equally obtuse with many different nations and polities hazily described. This makes the books seem like a giant computer role playing game with characters hacking and slashing their way across endless campaigns, the point of which is mostly lost to them. The main characters are midlevel military leaders, so you get some sense of the big picture but only enough to be confusing for most of the time. There are also vaguely modern military designations for military units, which is a little unhelpful. Just how big are these units and how many of these units are they? So that unit was destroyed, does that mean that 1% of the Empire's armies are gone, or 20%? There is a real context problem. I am going to stick with it, as the battles are interesting, but this one, so far at least, would be for the hard core fantasy reader only.