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Into the Shadows | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Jordan K. Weisman | |||
| 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 | ||
Themed anthologies by multiple authors are usually pretty good. The editors are able to pick out the best of the submissions, and even if some they choose don't appeal to a specific reader, otheris will be perfectly acceptable so long as the theme itself meets their approval.
It's a lot harder to pull off a braided anthology. This is where each author contributes a short story that, while complete in and of itself, also adds to a greater tale. Eventually the book culminates in a short story that is essentially devoted to wrapping up that larger arc. But different authors have different writing styles that sometimes clash. And no matter how close the communications may be when everyone is determining what plot points in the larger story get told where and how and by whom in the smaller ones, there are almost guaranteed to be inconsitencies, contradictions, and plot holes.
The editor is also tied to his initial choice of writers, thanks to that same collaboration. He can't just decide to drop one story because it's flawed, because it includes some plot point that is crucial to understanding the larger story. Nor can they hire extra writers and pick the best among them. The story was written specifically for this volume, so the author can hardly try to resell it. That their story will be used, for good or ill, because there is no other real choice.
Into the Shadows is, unfortunately, no different. It has plenty of facts told in one story contradicting events in another. For that matter, one of the stories isn't really a part of the overall story at all! While most of the book is peripherally or directly about an executive bid for power, that one is talking about insect totems, a plotline the rest entirely ignore. Worse, that story is particularly poor, and is also the first story. All of which gave me a very poor first impression that the remaining tales were never able to overcome. Not that they really were all that good, either, really.
No, I really didn't like this volume much at all. Half the stories are vague in their explanations of why characters are doing what they're doing, or in how what they're doing is important - or not, as the case sometimes is revealed to be. A lot of effort is spent on character and mood, and not enough on explaining just what is going on in the larger picture. And sometimes that even means the larger picture within that single story. Only the last two really mesh together well, and that's hardly a surprise - they both have the same author! They try to tie in most of the other stories, too - mentioning a warehouse fire that was prominent in one and a break-in from another, among other things - as clues to understand the master plot, or steps along its progress. But thanks to the narrow focus of those other stories, where the only obvious links were a character mentioned here that appears there, or associations with a particular corp or two, it just seems like a retcon than a truly integrated plotline.
(Those last two stories also have a peculiar problem all their own. They take place after, use characters from, and refer to events published in Wolf and Raven, a compendium of Michael A. Stackpole's Shadowrun stories published twenty five novels later in the series!)
This was an interesting experiment, a worthy attempt. But, in the end, it just didn't work. It adds nothing to the Shadowrun universe as a whole, either, and it's often too puzzling to really enjoy. So unless you're dead set on owning all forty novels in the series, I'd just skip it.
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