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Wolf and Raven | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Michael A. Stackpole | |||
| 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 | ||
Dr. Richard Raven is a consummate do-gooder. He helps the weak and powerless when corps and street nasties do their best to grind them beneath their heels. And Wolfgang Kies is one of his associates, the one that's lasted the longest in his company - thanks in no small part to being a werewolf. For standing up for the disadvantaged can be a dangerous affair, and Raven and his crew has a lot of enemies. Within these pages are seven stories of Wolf, Raven, Kid Stealth, and the rest as they rescue damsels in distress, save the UCAS's favorite pasttime from scandal, and take on gangs and shady preachers.
This is the first anthology of Shadowrun short stories. To date, it is also the only one. Although this book appears fairly late in the series, the stories it contains are, in fact, some of the first written for the setting. Indeed, the first story, "Squeeze Play," is the first piece of Shadowrun fiction. And all but one of them had been published previously, if seperately, in gaming magazines. There really is only one new story here.
Unfortunately, that new one is also the worst of the bunch. It's more because I didn't agree with what Stackpole does to baseball in the high-tech world of Shadowrun than for any flaw in the mystery he presented. While the magical side of the setting is largely ignored (in all the stories, really, which is odd given Wolf's ability), the ability for nearly anyone to add cybernetic implants is definitely a big part of the story. And the changes this makes to the game are almost physically offensive to me - and I'm not even a big fan of the game. Additionally, an awful lot of pages are devoted to explaining these changes, how they came about and what they do to the game. There's actually not much left for the mystery they're trying to solve. It would have been far better in my mind for Stackpole to have just invented a new sport that does things this way, or at least a new sub-league of baseball.
The other stories, though, are much better. The short plots are a nice change from the intiricate macheavellian machinations Shadowrun books usual consist of, in exchange for a bit of simplicity. Meanwhile, Wolf and the others get shot at quite a lot as they solve crimes and do good deeds, which any fan of the series should enjoy. The tales generally have much the same feel of the pulp adventure stories of the 1930s and 1940s - which is only fitting, as Raven is modeled after Doc Savage. My only real complaint is that Wolf, who is the viewpoint character in all the stories, sometimes gets into a bit of a fix and needs someone else to bail him out. It's never a deus ex machina, but it's still not good. Happening once in seven stories would show readers that wolf isn't perfect. Happening three times just weakens him as a character.
I'm also not so sure I like Stackpole's version of lycanthropy. It lacks the... purity of Nyx Smith's. All in all, they're good stories, and they make for a decent book. I enjoyed them, mostly, despite their flaws. But I wasn't able to entirely ignore them, either, and because they were written so early in Shadowrun's development, they add nothing to the ongoing arcs that periodically show up through the rest of the series. They're also slightly off-kilter as to specifics of magic and the Matrix and cyberlimbs, as well, for the same reason. Wolf and Raven is a tiny chunk of Shadowrun history, and it's not a bad piece at that. But it's hadly required reading, in any sense of the term.
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