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Shadowboxer | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Nigel Findley | |||
| 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 | ||
Problems, problems. So many problems. Unfortunately, explaining them all will require some spoilers. So read on if you don't mind. If not, just stop right here and trust me, this book is at the very least distasteful, and at worst just awful.
All the dwarven fixer Two Bears has to do is find out the meaning of the word "IronHell." But it isn't going to be any cakewalk. There's a lot of people protecting that word.
Shadowrun is a pretty grim world, a true distopia where corporations rule the world and profit rules people's hearts. Anything can be had for a price, and the price of life is cheap. But Shadowboxer is grimmer than most. Hardly a page goes by where readers won't witness some act of uncaring of hardheartedness, and in most of the rest the text mentions them. All in such a casual, offhanded manner that you know the characters consider it all normal. Cruelty, racism, and betrayal abound, and the worst thing about it is that there is so little reason behind any of it. Why does the Johnson betray her own runners? How can a gang be so racist that they can't stand a troll even walking through their territory? Even in this setting, killing all the metahumans who wander by would surely draw some sort of response! Nothing makes sense. A worlds wouldn't function if it was that bad.
It was also disturbing to find that the main character buys it in a routine firefight. It's meant to be disturbing, of course, a signal that nobody is safe. This mission is so dangerous that anyone can die at any time, no matter how important they seem to the plot. I can understand that. But a good story prepares the way, first. With the main character out of the picture, we readers need someone else's eyes to see through. A story in which the main character dies needs multiple viewpoints, with roughly equal attention given to each, so when the one character is gone the tale can seamlessly shift to the new point of view. Pollotta failed to do this. The story occasionally switched over, but only briefly before returning to Two Bears. It makes his death extremely jarring, almost splitting the book in two. This is Two Bears' part, and this is the rest.
And after his death, the book got worse. Pollotta begins changing viewpoints more often, for one thing. It's almost as if he's making up for not doing so much earlier. But although the point of view changes more often, it is still only for a brief time before returning to the shadowrunners. And some of those switches are simply inexplicable. The reader might find himself suddenly following someone who has nothing to do with anything, and in at least one case they continue to have nothing to do with anything. Why? What does it add to the story? Just confusion, as far as I'm concerned.
I was also wondering why the shadowrunners went as far as they did. The job was simply to discover the meaning of IronHell. Not the location, not infiltration or capture or anything. Just the meaning. So once they find what it means, they just contact their Johnson, give over the info, and enjoy their pay, right? Well, they should, but for some reason they decide to track it down. Once again, it made no sense.
There's also the issue with all the new technology Pollotta introduces. There is such a thing as secret, proprietary research, of course, especially in this setting. But when characters exclaim, "I didn't even think that was possible!" three times in two dozen pages, and the explanation for it being, indeed, possible each time is secret tech, then it is no longer a plausible extention of the established norms. It is an author rewriting the rules in order to let to plot go where he wants it.
Last, and worst, is how the last third of the book is one enormous red herring. It turns from finding IronHell into infiltrating an installation - and that place is not IronHell. And then to end it like he did...
Oh, my, yes. I was definitely not happy. The first part, wher the story follows Two Bears, was flawed, to be sure, with its implausibly militant Miami. But it was the best part. It was hard for me to take, but I could take it. The plot was interesting, the swarf a good character to follow around. But he died, and it all went downhill from there until by the end I felt like it was in the sewer. The story doesn't even have the virtue of contributing something to the larger continuity. Unless you're dead set on owning every Shadowrun novel out there, I say skip this one.
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