Glen CookBesprekingen
Auteur van The Black Company
Besprekingen
I don’t have a ton of analysis to offer this time, and the main intention of this review is to get you to start book 1 if you haven’t read this series yet. I’ll start by reiterate its selling points.
No bloat. Lean & mean, nothing spoonfed, nothing stretched nor repeated, no world building except for what happens.
No bullshit. No self-serious convoluted magic system, no glossary, no maps.
No borders. Cook writes what he wants, in full freedom and with an unrestrained, original imagination.
No brainwashing. Cook has no political agenda – except maybe showing that morals are messy, and that evil exists.
(...)
Full review on Weighing A Pig
I enjoyed the first book the least, mainly due to the single viewpoint. Also you are thrown into the middle of the story and have to work out stuff as you read.
The 2nd and 3rd books had more viewpoints and the writing has improved somewhat.
I still found the writing somewhat terse. The world, magic system and some of the politics of the setting could use some fleshing out.
I have the next volume, but will read something else before I go back to Croaker and the company...
What I like when it comes to Glen Cook is that author gives what you might call open ending - I am yet to read one of his books that would end with a full stop. Reason is very simple (as far as I can tell) - these books are about people not about struggle for its own sake, so struggle can continue even after main characters find their closure and strength to keep on going. Author's stories are very humane in a way that people interactions are normal, everyday. Spies fall in love with wrong people, people die in hundreds due to misunderstandings, families are put to sword and survivors are sworn to never ending vendettas that can only result in the more cataclysmic events and destruction, aliens behave as actual aliens, even when they are biologically very similar to humans (just look at the Sangaree for this or Dragon/Fishes or even Stars' End over-mind for the other end of spectrum).
All of this takes place against the backdrop of ancient mysteries, unimaginable merciless enemies, politicking and backstabbing in human universe and epic battles ..... but again, let me repeat, people are focus. People that do heroic stuff but eventually end up pretty much damaged after years of undercover (Manchurian Candidate type) work amongst the people they finally fall in with or after years of pursuing blood vengeance and then losing the reason to continue living or having to live with the ones actions that have sentenced billions to death. Maybe most important message from the book is how fixation on only one aspect of existence can spell doom to the entire species.
When it comes to action, shadowy spy work, agents and commandos chasing one another, hijackings for information, psychological programming and various other deadly technology available to operators - all of this is something that would not be out of place in stories about Alpha Legion in W40K.
What I especially like in Glen Cook's SF is realism of space combat. Maybe only Neal Asher and Iain M. Banks come near when depicting insanely fast, combat engagements lasting seconds and spanning thousands of miles.
Book has a bitter sweet ending, but after all, when one looks at it through prism of danger lurking on the horizon, everything seems justified (even that research base destruction - although I am still divided on this one). It kinda brings back the belief that humans are not wolves to each other, which is something that last decades seem to just desire to imprint on everyone. Here we have various societies working together, interacting (again in normal way without too much drama) and coming to the solutions that will benefit everyone (again, this is fiction but again, considering the enemy not something unimaginable). Most importantly all characters are reasoning and coming to solutions, yes there are emotions and some actions do come out of them (aforementioned vendetta), but main focus is on reasoning and not allowing emotions to decide on a species wide decisions.
Only element I have a problem with is role of Sangaree - it seems like author wanted to do something with this violent offshoot of humanity but decided not to. I wonder how would the story shape itself if this approach was more developed.
In any case this is great book, great story, highly recommended to fans of SF action/adventure.
Story starts with Mouse and benRabi entering the service with Sainers, legendary Starfishers, in role of tekkies. Reason is that Seiners need people to help them around their ships for the time being. Result is not that good for Seiners - instead of expected thousands only several hundreds signed in. And in these hundreds majority are members of intelligence services from all over - Confed, Sangaree and various other corporations and mercenary/pirate outfits.
All of these espionage elements have the same goal - find out the secrets of Seiners and how they manage to get to the "gold" from the dragons, "gold" (I truly cannot remember the name of the materiel) that is basis of advanced technology for all species in the universe.
Of course, since we are talking about Mouse Storm, things get complicated with entrance of mysterious Sangaree woman, agent from one of Sangaree Families or maybe the ruling council itself. And here we get a background on the conflict and we are presented with how Mouse fights his own vendetta against Sangarees even while working on other tasks.
Suffice to say (because I do not want to spoil anything, book and trilogy in general is excellent) things get .... problematic (?) .... for our duo and very soon they will come to realize that Seiners are not just dragon herders but there is something more in their actions, actions with which they try to hold something more sinister at bay. And Mouse..... well there is more about him too, but we are yet to found out what exactly is his goal.
As always this is great action SF. Technology is integral part of the story and it is very cyberpunky but it does not run the show. People and story do - and here I have to say author's military background comes to the front - entire plot, action and espionage sound and feel very authentic and real (entire SF setting not withstanding).
Excellent book. Only minus that I see is that it does not have a definitive end (it is book number two after all) and it ends on a cliffhanger.
Now to read that final book in the series :)
Highly recommended.
Beware, you are entering a dark and scary universe. (Well, of course you are, it’s a Glen Cook book ;) ) We’ve got: an empire of slave raiders, mercenary captain-kings, space warfare, planetary surface warfare, betrayals and more betrayals, lovely back-stabbing families, torture and more torture, cold-blooded murder, just plain “I hate you, you bastard” murder, cycles of vendetta that take years and years to complete. Did I get it all down? Phew.
I always like that Cook’s writing is so deceptively plain and simple. But it’s masterful, really – just a few strokes of a pen, and there is your character, and there is nothing simple about her or him; there is your battle, unfolding, and you can feel it all happening.
It’s been a while since I read anything by Glen Cook, so it was nice to revisit his work. I still like the Black Company books best of all, but I ended up enjoying this one a lot. I had trouble getting into the story at first and decided that it was going to be a three star read, at most – I was annoyed by Pollyanna. “Is this character misogyny personified, author, what are you doing?” As the novel progressed, it turned out that Cook was messing with the readers (of course he was). Pollyanna was frighteningly damaged, complex, and badass when it mattered. Well done, author, well done. There were a couple of instances of very weird gender stuff, and the book as a whole is very male-centric. But I am usually able to cut older sci-fi some slack.
Imagine my happiness when a lightbulb lit up in my head: OMG, Glen Cook is retelling Norse mythology as a space opera!!! Cool! Awesome! I love this kind of literary game, I was jumping for joy. It’s all there: Odin and his ravens, Thor, Loki and his many treacheries, Fenrir the wolf, Balder’s death, etc etc etc. Is there Ragnarök, too? Of course.
The ending was a bit rushed, but I am very curious about the rest of the series. I am not in a hurry, though – the story of Shadowline is complete.
I’ll end with one of the best quotes:
“How we love to play at being paladins,” he thought. “Hired killers pretending to knights of the Round Table. Dragons slain. Maidens rescued. Ogres dismantled. No, no, that’s not really innocent blood taking the shine off the old armor. Just a spot of rust.”
For reasons I don’t totally understand I didn’t like this book. I like The Black Company but this one just didn’t do it for me.
So this is the spiritual/genre predecessor to Malazan, apparently. And I totally see that. Actually, the first book of the Malazan decalogy owes a tremendous amount to this. I'd have to reread it (Ha! Not going to happen anytime soon!), but I feel like that was *very* directly inspired by this in style and voice.
This is much better, in my thinking. An engaging world! Action! Characters! Less than 1100 pages long! Significantly less!
I want to read some of the other books in this series because it got me hooked, but I also burn out of this genre fast, so I will hold off/toss that on the "someday" pile. (While the "we took this commission, so we're finishing it, even if we all think it is serving 'evil,' but what can we do, the other side is 'evil' too, we're just a band of brothers, and we're pretty ugly ourselves, too, if you look even a little close..." thing works for some, and others claim it is 'more realistic', I find the whole thing a little bit trite.)
I think I may personally stop at this first instalment, but here the experiment was in fact time well spent, & the series well deserves its status as pioneering classic.
It starts a little slow and confusing, since it uses a new setting and completely new characters, but then everything starts to fall into place in surprising ways - and some of the known (anti)heroes gradually show up to interfere with the apparently independent events. The psychological evolution of the main character (Shed) is extremely credible, well-done and fulfilling, the events evolve in surprising and captivating ways, the bigger picture is skilfully drawn-up, the very dark atmosphere succeeds in creating a grim and oppressive feeling.
It is a great mystery, noir and espionage book, less so a war one (similar to the first, it has very little actual combat for what is supposed to be a military fantasy).
I have just 2 minor complains: the first will probably get twists/changed in the next books (the side the Company goes to in the end, I disliked that); and the writing, which is very straight forward, with an endless stream of very short sentences (I find that tiring, not to mention unartistic - no Gene Wolfe here). Still, the great story gets through despite the unpolished style, and is so good that it creates an addiction: I feel I have no choice now but to read the next books in the series, as soon as possible (good thing I already have all 9 of them).
Highly recommended for grimdark fans.
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There were no interesting or sympathetic characters. None of them seemed even human. They were all some combination of grim, cold, cruel, or vapid; and uniformly two-dimensional. The plot (such as it was) was about a feud between two feudalistic families, but I didn't care one bit what happened. And because of the bad writing, I was confused much of the time.
Don't waste your time on this.