The Death Gate Cycle/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Complete Monster: The serpents. There is nothing remotely sympathetic about any of them. They are literally evil given physical form.
    • Sinistrad too. Bane was a Complete Monster in training but was killed before completely realizing that potential.
    • The blood dragons of the Labyrinth are immensely powerful and almost as evil as the serpents. Unless you have an army with you (or are Xar) an encounter with one of these things should be treated as "run or die (slowly and painfully)".
  • Critical Dissonance: While popular with the Weis and Hickman fanbase, certain critics seemed to have it in for the series. Publishers Weekly in particular got increasingly scathing and vitriolic with each entry.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Hugh the Hand.
  • Genius Bonus The discussion in one of the appendices of how magic works (by manipulating the "wave" that governs the probability of events) seems a fairly clear reference to/inspiration from quantum mechanics.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Sang-drax is one in Hand of Chaos when he first appears; he unfortunately comes off as more of a (literal) Smug Snake in the last two books. Kleitus is also one to a lesser extent, at least before he gets turned into an Ax Crazy undead.
  • Moral Event Horizon: It's impossible to have any sympathy for Sinistrad after learning how he used and abused his teenaged wife Iridal and son Bane though Bane didn't exactly take it lying down...
  • Squick: The Haplo/Alake subplot in Serpent Mage. Not for the squeamish.