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Changeling | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Chris Kubasik | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Shadowrun | Never Deal with a Dragon, Choose Your Enemies Carefully, Find Your Own Truth, 2XS, Changeling, Never Trust an Elf, Into the Shadows, Streets of Blood, Shadowplay, Night's Pawn, Striper Assassin, Lone Wolf, Fade to Black, Nosferatu, Burning Bright, Who Hunts the Hunter, House of the Sun, Worlds Without End, Just Compensation, Black Madonna, Preying for Keeps, Dead Air, The Lucifer Deck, Steel Rain, Shadowboxer, Headhunters, Stranger Souls, Clockwork Assylum, Beyond the Pale, Blood Sport, Technobabel, Wolf and Raven, Psychotrope, The Terminus Experiment, Run Hard, Die Fast, Crossroads, The Forever Drug, Ragnarock, Tails You Lose, The Burning Time, Born to Run, Poison Agendas, Fallen Angels, Drops of Corruption, Aftershock, A Fistful of Data | ||
When Peter Clarris goblinizes into a troll in 2039, his world comes to an end. Once the teenaged son of a wealthy researcher, he is suddenly the victim of hate and fear. His own father, already cold and withdrawn, abandons him to his tutors - tutors he is convinced Peter can't use. He's only a troll, after all, and trolls are stupid brutes.
But Peter was a genius before his transformation, and even afterwards he's pretty smart. Shunned by family and society alike, he sets out to make a name for himself. To prove his father wrong, he is determined to find a cure for metahumanity. He will, he vows, be human again someday.
This is an excellent look at prejudice as seen from the inside. I think it's perhaps a little overdone, though - I don't think it's this bad, anymore, and I think it's unlikely to get this bad again. It's certainly unlikely to become any kind of official policiy, institutionalized in companies and governments around the world. Still, that's hardly the point. We're seeing how bad it could be, and why tolerance is so necessary.
Changeling also has a pretty good depiction of the world prior to the "present" of the early 2050's. The book itself starts in 2039 (although you have to either know the setting very well or pay attention and do some calculating in order to realize this), and spends a third of the book back then, showing Peter trying to cope with his new form and the world's reactions to it. It's not too much different from the world of 2052 that the rest is set in, in most places, but events and attitudes are a little changed, and there are of course certain specificevents that happen that readers heard about but previously only saw in brief flashbacks, if at all.
Lastly, Peter is a very well developed character. He's not deep, mind you - in fact, he's really kind of shallow. But it's a believable shallow, as if Peter is focused on one or two things to the exclusion of all else - which of course is exactly the case. But I'm talking avout his emtions and motivations. The way his father and others interact with him have such dramatic but very real impacts on his psyche that I felt this almost had to be based on reality, in some way.
The one downside I could find was that Kubasik gets a little preachy about two-thirds of the way through. For most of the book there were hints that his quest was unwise, his goal impure. But they were subtle, letting the reader decide if he agreed. Then it sudden;y blows into the open as one character vehemently rants at Peter, pointing out exactly what he's doing but from a slightly different perspective. It would have been far better, I think, for Peter to come by these thoughts on his own, and readers are unsure which side of the argument is really the one to cheer on.
I truly enjoyed this book. Trolls are seriously underused in the Shadowrun series, used almost exclusively as dumb gunners. And while they certainly are very strong and not too bright, surely they can do more than carry a big gun and hit hard. And here we see that indeed they can. Kubasik wrote from the trolls perspective, if still in third-person. While the character plays a heavy to make a living, we see what he does when he's not projecting the persona of a dumb brute.
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