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Aftershock | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Jean Rabe and John Helfers | |||
| 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 | ||
It was supposed to be a milk run ;mdash; just grab a few lousy plants from a corporate greenhouse and hand them over to the Johnson. But this is Shadowrun, and milk runs rarely are what they seem. Hood and his band of merry runners have no idea what they've just dealt themselves into. It's not much better for Roland Ators, chief of security at Plantech, or Jhones Redrock, the Lone Star sergeant investigating the robbery. Lives, careers, and millions of nuyen are at stake, and their lives are quickly devolving into chaos.
Aftershock is rather unusual in Shadowrun — and in non-contemporary fiction in general, actually — for its effective use of language. All Shadowrun books include the old standbys to lend some flavor. Hoi for hi, chummer for friend, and a smattering of Japanese vocabulary are each included in all the novels. Rabe and Helfers go significantly further, however. Each party, and in some cases each individual within them, has a different language they pepper their dialogue with. The ork uses different swears than the elves, the dwarf includes a good amount of Yiddish (making this only the second reference to real religions in the entire series, admirable in its own right, for a number of reasons). And so on. These little details enrich the setting to an astonishing degree.
It was also unusual for having all of the protagonists be honest people out for an honest living. Of course, not everyone in the book is an honorable, likeable fellow. The antagonist is the typical Shadowrun corporate excutive — selfish, arrogant, willing to kill for a profit or promotion. It wouldn't be much of a story if everyone was on the level and played nice, after all. It certainly wouldn't be a Shadowrun story!
But it is remarkable that the authors allowed a corporation to be good guys, out to better mankind and make a buck in the process. My biggest problem with the series in general has always been that everyone, especially those that are actually employed, is a bastard who is perfectly willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get ahead, and then pin it all on their best friends. And the cops here, too, aren't racists and bullies who abuse their power for jollies as they've been depicted in mearly every other Shadowrun book. They're Jhones is flawed, to be sure, but he's not yet corrupt. It's a refreshing change.
It all left me unsure who to cheer for. All three groups stand to lose in a big way if they fail, and all are sympathetic characters that you don't want to see go down. But their goals are mutually exclusive. They can't all be winners. At least one and possibly two sides are going to get burned — aren't they? The conflict is a much more subtle one than is found in most other Shadowrun books, where the sides are much more clearly delineated.
But if the real conflict is subtle, the surface one is anything but. Aftershock is filled with all the firefights, car chases, fistfights and sense of impending disaster that any longtime fan of the series could ever ask for. This actually works against it in one sense, when the book goes out of its way to describe just how important and irreplaceable a place is to one of the shadowrunners. It's just like the guy in the cop drama showing his partner photos of his grandkids and happily expounding on how he's retiring in two weeks; you just know bad things are about to happen that'll screw it up royally. It ruins the suspense. And if it doesn't happen, then it's a lot of time and pages devoted to something that, frankly, doesn't much matter.
This is definitely one of the best Shadowrun novels out there. It has a good mix of everything, and plenty of action. At the same time, the characters are engaging, and thanks to little details like their use of language, feel just a bit more like real people than most. Most importantly, and virtually unique in the series, Aftershock lacks the pessimistic, dog-eat-dog feel of the rest of the series. The antagonist certainly subscribes to that line of thought, but as the only character who does it seems like they are the exception, not the rule. Excluding the one scene where something was built up more and more and more in order to compel an emotion response when bad things come a-calling, this was a book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.
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