Reviews and Comments

This book fails so hard. What starts as a competently written space opera/conspiracy plot turns into a lengthy essay on ethics and what it means to be ethical. Which would be ok, if the author had any idea what he was talking about, and if he didn't force the words ethics and ethical into any longer conversation the characters have. Because sure, why not spend a romantic date with the main character gushing about how ethical he is?
But even that would be alright, if it wasn't for the fact that the ethical solution the author goes for is to genocide the hell out of a planet. Twice.
So the main character is a really, really ethical hyper-competent dudley-do-good wrecked by guilt over things he couldn't control, until the author decides that he needs to end the book and hey, he still has this backup doomsday weapon lying around and the bad guys are all on that one planet...

There is a certain anger to Pratchett's writing that normally is hidden behind the humor of his stories. Snuff is the first book in his Discworld series that made my innards churn at the description of the goblins' plight (which are, of course, heavily inspired by real accounts of slavery and racism through the ages).
The book is technically a send-up on the cozy mystery genre. Commander Vimes goes on a (his first) holiday in the country estate that technically belongs to him, encounters all the "charming" follies of the aristocracy and peasant population of the place, and then is thrown into an investigation into murder and slavery in this oh-so-pleasant little community.
At the same time the watchmen back home also stumble over a terribly mystery connected with goblins.

Well, yes, I think the main problem of this book is, as with other of his later works, that it was dictated by an author who was slowly losing his mental capabilities. It still works for the largest part, but only just. There is no reason for the rather minor plot of Sgt. Colon being possessed, and as such it serves only to drop some more worldbuilding about the heretofore unknown culture of goblins on Discworld, and as a distraction of the main plot. Like it was a part of the formula that just needed to be there.
That said, the main part of the book is still excellent, and easily would be up there with the best of his Vimes stories. It has some nice deconstructions of the usual cozy mystery setting, it has the usual assortment of weird side characters, and it gently furthers the metaplot of the series, slowly pushing the setting further into the steampunk fantasy it was heading to (by introducing an actual non-urban background that was implied but never detailed before), and in typical Pratchett manner, it also takes a one-off joke from his previous book (the goblins mentioned in Unseen Academicals of which Mr. Nitt turned out not to be one) to deconstruct and reconstruct the hell out of it. In fact I think this is one of the most profound treatments of the "always chaotic evil" trope in fantasy fiction I have ever read. I think it is a pity he decided to tackle these issues only so late in his writing career, and the whole genre would have been better off if he had been able to do this to the fullest of his abilities.

Meh.

It's not really that this is a bad book, but it is one of these franchised books that are entertaining but ultimately forgettable. In fact I had to look up the name of the main character for this review.

And so here we have a novel about one Dirk Montgomery, a private dick in Shadowrun's Seattle of the 2050s (meaning there is both cybertech and magic around) who is just good at what he does. A human norm without cybertech and magic, who generally survives on wits alone, despite being pretty much an idiot.
And who still survives attempts on his live at a rate of one per 10 pages or so while beings searched by the police.
Dirk is trying to get some work done when a girl comes up to him and tries to shoot him for killing her sister. After this is taken care off (hint: she doesn't shoot him) she hires him to find the person really responsible for it. His investigations make him uncover a rather unlikely mix of conspiracies involving a megacorporation, a new age religion, a new cybernetic drug, and parasitic insect spirits from another reality.

All in all rather standard Shadowrun fare.

And I guess that is kind of the problem by now, 25 years after this was published. Shadowrun was a setting that thrived on its trailblazing genre mash-ups that nobody thought possible. But 25 years later, and just judging the book by the strength of its story, its just not so great a story. I think it would make a killer rpg scenario, but that doesn't always translate well.
In fact I think that the constant mortal danger the main protagonist finds himself in gets old at around the 50pg mark. I just was not invested enough into the character to think that he might come away with anything more than a scratch from any of these situations. On the other hand his supporting cast (many of which were way more interesting characters) seemed to be rather poised to snuff it. From the agoraphobic dwarvish decker to the cheerful free spirit, they all seemed to be much more interesting characters than Dirk the dick.

That said, readable story, nice action scenes, might be good reference material for anyone who wants to GM Shadowrun.

One morning nervous architect Mr. Thipps has the unpleasant surprise of finding a dead gentleman wearing nothing but a pince-nez in his bathtub. At the same time a famous financier of roughly the same description has been found to have disappeared from his own bedroom.
Could this be the same person? As it turns out: no.
Still, there are some very curious elements in these cases that seem to overlap in strange ways. The first case is investigated by Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocrat with the rather unbecoming hobby of investigating crime, the latter by his friend Inspector Parker. They soon come to the conclusion that both cases are somehow linked, and start investigating both together.

This is the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, and it is evident why there would be sequels. It is without a doubt a strong story, quite gruesome in parts, and in others oddly whimsical [hehe]. The novels have been written during the 20s and 30s, and so actually by now are a sort of historical document of criminology (or at least mystery novels) in addition to being good yarns. Wimsey himself is more fleshed out as a character than other, similar copycats would later be. A shellshocked veteran of WWI, Cambridge graduate, gourmet and bibliophile, he easily puts on a mask of an aristocratic buffon whenever he finds it necessary to further his goals. Not that his natural state is so much less of an ass. Sometimes you just want to hit him in the face. I guess it is the sign of a good author that she can create a character that one can both despise and root for at the same time.
Later books developed his character further, and into more positive directions, but this book is already rather enjoyable. If there is one thing that bugs me it is the ending. Without spoiling too much, it was just too neat, too easy in the end. There is absolutely no doubt who did it, because the police caught the perpetrator just as he was writing a detailed explanation of what he had done and how.

One thing that is very noticeable is that the situation the protagonists get thrown in in this book is suspiciously specific for their skillsets. Adumar is a slightly backwards world that has just contacted the New Republic and would be open for negotiations. There is one small problem though: they don't want to negotiate with career politicians, they only will accept starfighter pilots as negotiators.
And so Wedge Antilles and a few others from Rogue Squadron end up on Adumar and have to deal with a lot of culture clash and cloak and dagger espionage business. It turns out that Adumar is actually a balkanised world and that they only were contacted by the most powerful nation there, that the Imperials were contacted at the same time and now are competing with them, and that the Adumari are not only fond of starfighter pilots, they are obsessed with them. And with honor. And with honorable feuds to the death. In one of the funniest sequences in the book our heroes are on a stake out when someone else sneaks in and wants to use the same hiding place.

At one point during the later part of the novel our pilot heroes are so fed up with this world and their idea of honorable combat that they'd like to tell them to screw themselves and just go home. But they are our heroes, and so of course they don't and save the day instead.

The novel is not exactly Shakespeare, but it is definitely one of the better Star Wars novels out there. It is fun to read, the worldbuilding is impressive for Star Wars (remember, this is the franchise that gave us such interesting locales as a desert planet, a swamp planet, a city planet, and a Northern Italy planet), and it works as a coherent story on its own.

Somehow I expected a bit more of this one. It was enjoyable, yes, and the setting was something not seen too often (King later used a similar setting for his Dark Tower series), but all in all it was a bit too flowery in its' prose and too skimpy on actual plot.
Well, technically it is a collection of short stories, although the way they are presented makes them appear more like an actual novel. There is a sense of continuity between different stories. One element from one story will for sure appear in the next, and stories harken back to earlier ones without explanation. Also there is a continuing exploration of the main character's quest.
So, more of a novel then.
It follows the travels of the Traveller in Black who has many names but only one nature, as he travels through a surreal world that seems to be neither here nor there and definitely not really our past or future, trying to bring order to chaos.
His gimmick is that he grants wishes and will do so in the most unexpected and ironic ways possible, sometimes to his own deep regret
It might be interesting to note that this book, similar to The Lord of the Rings, is about the loss of magic. The continuing quest of the Traveller is one that causes the magic to go away and slowly transforms the brutish world he inhabits into something rational, but ultimately more survivable. Where the early stories are very much in the vein of Sword and Sorcery, with gory human sacrifices and questionable morals, later stories more and more evoke a more civilized society.