The Burning Time (Shadowrun, 40)
2 journalers for this copy...
from amazon.com -
Simple. That's the way he writes. Tommy Talon and his fellows (Troll sam, Orc merc, female decker, female rigger, every character a real surprise) are here again, like always needing the help of full-scale, worldwide important events to keep their story going (and the reader reading - not an easy task). Every conversation is short, simple, and archetypical. If you read SR novels to get a feeling for the SR universe, you will find nothing in THE BURNING TIME you haven't read a hundred times before. Even worse, the text on the back cover lures you into believing that there has finally come an end to Talon and company. Not quite true. Kenson tries to write good SR fiction, but it's not enough. To understand this, compare two scenes (Kenson, Crossroads, and Nigel Findley, 2XS) about a man, coming home and facing a woman threatening him with a gun. You'll see the difference.
Simple. That's the way he writes. Tommy Talon and his fellows (Troll sam, Orc merc, female decker, female rigger, every character a real surprise) are here again, like always needing the help of full-scale, worldwide important events to keep their story going (and the reader reading - not an easy task). Every conversation is short, simple, and archetypical. If you read SR novels to get a feeling for the SR universe, you will find nothing in THE BURNING TIME you haven't read a hundred times before. Even worse, the text on the back cover lures you into believing that there has finally come an end to Talon and company. Not quite true. Kenson tries to write good SR fiction, but it's not enough. To understand this, compare two scenes (Kenson, Crossroads, and Nigel Findley, 2XS) about a man, coming home and facing a woman threatening him with a gun. You'll see the difference.
Borrowed from midwinter.
This reads as a run would be played over several sessions, complete with capsule encounters and the resulting lurch-at-a-time plot, with coarse-grained changes in character development.
This is a good thing: it managed to capture enough of the experience that I found myself yearning for the olden days of sitting around a synthetic-wood folding table (spirited out of a lecture hall, natch), ordering pizza, and proceeding to stink up a too-small study lounge with body odor for the next ten hours in UCAS. The story is redolent of usual adventure hooks--corporate man an unwitting mole, drone seeking to become a decker, yadda yadda yadda--that make the gamer in me salivate. Kenson's nailed a lot of the experience.
The bad news: this book didn't capture enough of the experience that I would prefer it to the company of smelly gamer geeks (and boy, my group could get pretty rank). Once my nostalgia wore off, the plot proved to be a pale imitation of what I'd enjoyed before. Don't get me wrong--Kenson here shows himself to be a more-or-less competent writer. However, he doesn't stray too far from the usual formula, and the usual formula's done much better with dice and character sheets. Furthermore, he describes each new development (environments, technologies, reactions, &c.) in detail, bogging down the narrative. This would be fine, if he was running an actual game for players sharing the duties of building a story. However, it's unnecessary for an author who can telegraph such things directly through the actions of the characters.
Now, if this book had lesbians--like "The Terminus Experiment" by Jonathan Bond--it'd have something different, something that I never got around to doing. Heck, if Kenson could drop the dungeon master voice, this book would be almost twenty percent better. But as it stands, you're better off bringing the books down off the shelf and sitting down with some (hopefully un-smelly) friends for a little shared imagination.
Back to midwinter.
This reads as a run would be played over several sessions, complete with capsule encounters and the resulting lurch-at-a-time plot, with coarse-grained changes in character development.
This is a good thing: it managed to capture enough of the experience that I found myself yearning for the olden days of sitting around a synthetic-wood folding table (spirited out of a lecture hall, natch), ordering pizza, and proceeding to stink up a too-small study lounge with body odor for the next ten hours in UCAS. The story is redolent of usual adventure hooks--corporate man an unwitting mole, drone seeking to become a decker, yadda yadda yadda--that make the gamer in me salivate. Kenson's nailed a lot of the experience.
The bad news: this book didn't capture enough of the experience that I would prefer it to the company of smelly gamer geeks (and boy, my group could get pretty rank). Once my nostalgia wore off, the plot proved to be a pale imitation of what I'd enjoyed before. Don't get me wrong--Kenson here shows himself to be a more-or-less competent writer. However, he doesn't stray too far from the usual formula, and the usual formula's done much better with dice and character sheets. Furthermore, he describes each new development (environments, technologies, reactions, &c.) in detail, bogging down the narrative. This would be fine, if he was running an actual game for players sharing the duties of building a story. However, it's unnecessary for an author who can telegraph such things directly through the actions of the characters.
Now, if this book had lesbians--like "The Terminus Experiment" by Jonathan Bond--it'd have something different, something that I never got around to doing. Heck, if Kenson could drop the dungeon master voice, this book would be almost twenty percent better. But as it stands, you're better off bringing the books down off the shelf and sitting down with some (hopefully un-smelly) friends for a little shared imagination.
Back to midwinter.
Journaling to transfer this back to my TBR list
