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Never Deal with a Dragon | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Robert N. Charrette | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Shadowrun: Secrets of Power | 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 | ||
This is the first novel written in the Shadowrun universe, and it starts out with a little trilogy of its own. Shadowrun is a fairly unique universe in my experience: it is 2050, and magic has returned to the world. But that doesn't mean war is suddenly fought with swords and axes. The march of progress kept right on going, and people can get cyber limbs and implants to communicate directly with computers. Corporations have replaced governments as the major powers. The name of the universe refers to those mercenaries who perform some services outside the law, often in the form of armed corporate espionage. It's a mixture of fantasy and cyberpunk, and very cool.
Sam Verner is an ordinary guy with a new datajack, the head implant that allows him to interface directly with computers. But when he awakens from the operation, he finds he has been transfered for no reason he can see, his sister has "goblinized" and turned into... something, and to top it all off some shadowrunners kidnap him and the group of salarymen he was with. Sam only wants to find out what happened to his sister, but he is thwarted at every turn by a system designed to dump her and forget about her, a racist and unsympathetic division head, and a security officer convinced he's up to no good. So he goes outside the system, with the same runners that kidnapped him.
Shadowrun began as a role-playing game (RPG), and the novels and stories came later. But Charrette was one of the people who created the game, so he's pretty familiar with it. And as the first book of the series, he has a lot of explaining to do. And he does so admirably well. The basics of the setting are displayed early and quickly. If you had never head of the game and somehow the cover didn't tip you off, you still would not be surprised when magic makes an appearance.
And more than magic is explained to readers. The core concepts behind the entire setting are laid on the table within the first few dozen pages. And Charrette does most of it by showing it through events, also, not pure exposition. Sixty pages into the book, he has shown readers the huge technological advances, the existence of the nonhuman races called metahumans, the corporate and street lifestyles, the Matrix, and even included a short little shadowrun.
Verner is a very well written character. Usually all I look for is consitency in how a person acts, but Charrette went well beyond that. He showed us his thoughts, which in some ways is very common in third-person stories. But thanks to his unusual personality - unusual in this setting, at any rate, in that he is more concerned with justice than money, and a rigid adherence to logic in the face of magic - it is especially interesting to watch him reason why this or that must be. Especially when it so manifestly is not!
Understanding a character's misconceptions through their thought processes is most useful, however, with his nemisis. Crenshaw's suspicious nature just won't let her accept that Verner is exactly what he appears: someone trying to find out what happened to his sister. But her reasoning, while badly skewed by her own nature, is entirely understandable. Readers can see why she thinks Verner is a spy, a thief, and a traitor to the company, even though they know he is none of those until she her herself drives him to it.
Despite all this, I found it a little hard to completely enjoy the book. Part of the problem is simply the overall mood. Shadowrun can be a very oppressive, depressing setting, extrememly dehumanizing in a literal and figuretive way. Another part is a matter of motivation. In a world as dark as this, nobody does anything for nothing. But that is exactly what too many people do. In one case it makes sense, and a gew cases that appear to be free help truly are not. But the shadowrunners Verner hooks up with have no stake in the fight, no reason to put their lives and equipment on the line. It soesn't make sense that they do exactly that in the name of justice - a concept most of them don't really believe in.
People who enjoy cyberpunk, or byzantine plots that a hapless hero must unravel and uncover, will really like this book. The addition of magic and creatures such as dragons and elves to the mix makes the resulting story very intriguing. But although the setting was unique and the story written with no small skill and imagination, I still had a difficult timre reading it in places. The world is just too distopian, the people too selfish, for me to relax much.
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