Running with the shadows of the night

 Robert N. Charette's final volume of Secrets of Power, Find Your Own Truth, is very exciting, and deftly maneuvers around several plot threads right up until the end, when it falls flat on its face during the dismount. 

We start with Twist/Sam off in Australia doing his best Indiana Jones and trying to recover a stone filled magic to heal his sister Janice of her Wendigo transformation. What he doesn't know is that said stone is a keystone keeping the totem of Spider in check. (Note to readers: most totems in the setting are "good". Insect and arachnid totems aren't.) 

Any rate, Sam's big ritual to heal his sister doesn't work, so he going looking for Howling Coyote, the Amerind shaman responsible for the Ghost Dance that reshaped North American politics not long after the Awakening. The Elves are looking for the stone, and Sato of Renraku who played a small part in book one is looking for Sam. Dodger is looking for the ghost in the machine he keeps running in to. 

Finally, in the third act, everyone finds what they're looking for, as Sam manages to recreate the Ghost Dance, and we get what feels a LOT tacked on as plot threads long ignored suddenly get tied in to the finale. Which is fine, it just feels a bit like a GM liking a players' idea enough to rewrite a plot line that they suggested into the canon. It happens, but it also feels very very tacked on. 

Was reading this trilogy worth it?

Yeah, even if the setting has developed well beyond the scope of what this early fiction presents. Which I'm not going to complain about, since it's fascinating to see how things evolved over the years.

Nice to know relations didn't improve

Robert N. Charrette's Choose Your Enemies Carefully picks up the tale of Twist/Sam and his search for his sister a few years after the events detailed in the first book of Secrets of Power. Although this time, we actually get to meet Janice, the goblinized sister. Indeed, she gets rescued from the Yomi walled neighborhood in Hong Kong in the first chapter. We gets glimpses of her as she works with another of her kind (implied heavily to be an orc or troll, although the big reveal at the end proves that assumption wrong), as she moves around the world. 

Her brother Sam, aka Twist, on the other hand is trying to raise money to go rescue her from Yomi, proving again to be an ethical Shadowrunner. He does wind up getting sucked into the books main plot through deceit by the people he cares about, winding up in England, dealing with a Circle of Druids trying to oust the Elves of Tir, which used to be Ireland. Said Druids first attempt recreates an old Christopher Lee movie (I'm ignoring Nic Cage's remake; this book predates it, plus no one is screaming about bees), then morphs into something else. 

By the end, Sam/Twist has dealt with betrayal from both Dodger, his hetero husband; and Hart, who was trying to kill him in the last book, and is now his side piece overseas. At the very end, after all the ugly chains of story resolve and we find out who all has been using everyone else throughout, we watch as Sam and Janice reunite briefly, and the consequences thereof, which will likely be one of the plot threads in the finale. 

While this book was not quite as readable as the first volume, it remained a pleasant experience. I mean, we're watching someone who's essentially a pawn learn to move outside of his programmed parameters, and how his relationship with his Dog totem is making him more of a Shaman of Justice more than anything else.I'll be interested to see how everything works out.

Falling Up the Corporate Ladder

 Thanks to the rerelease of the original Shadowrun novels as Legends, I managed to get the original Shadowrun kickoff novels, Robert N. Charrette's Secrets of Power trilogy, starting with Never Deal with a Dragon (which, based on the narrative here, is sage advice.)

Anyway, we're focused on Renraku data analyst Sam Verner, who starts off as a pet of the Director, until his siters undergoes Goblinization (aka her genetics activated and turned her into something else, like an ork, troll, or elf), at which point he gets unceremoniously transferred to the infamous Renraku Seattle Arcology. 

Not long after arriving in Seattle, like not even gotten off the plane, he and some coworkers get kidnapped by a team of Shadowrunners. Sam ends up helping the runners after figuring out their original mission was going to wind up not doing what they thought it would, which earns him the enmity of Security lady Crenshaw, who spends the rest of the book trying to prove he's in cahoots with the shadowrunners, despite his odd corporate loyalty. 

So, eventually Sam decides to get himself extracted from Renraku and choose a new path. Which doesn't go well, since the team extracting him are using the extraction to cover putting a doppelganger INTO the arcology. 

And everyone seems to be double crossing one another, from the runners, to the corporate types, to the 3 dragons that show up at various points. (By the end, we've met the Eastern Dragon Tessian, and Western Dragons Lofwyr and Haesslich.)

We, as readers, get some idea of exactly how events seemingly unrelated manage to trap Sam in a life he never expected, although we never get a real picture of the actual game he's a pawn in. I mean, we are kind of left to assume that one way or another, the actual extraction was supposed to be the sentient AI trapped in the Arcology, but who wanted it and why remain a mystery, as do the promise of freedom it was working towards. 

Sam also learns that he has access to magic, and indeed a Dog totem somewhere in the mess that leads him down the Pacific Coast and to Montreal before winding up back in Seattle again. He also meets an elf decker named Dodger whom he forms a Bromance with. (I realize the publication on this predates the emergence of Bromance and probably the concept of Metrosexuals, but honestly Sam and Dodger appear to be queer coded, even if Sam is making the beast with two backs with Sally Tseung by the end.)

Was it a fun read? Indeed. Nothing amuses quite like Sasquatches with their own dragon backed agendas, fish out of water characters, and a sci fi pulp feels. Do I wish they had revealed one particular characters motivations earlier, since we find out a major factor in her pursuit a few paragraphs before she exits the narrative? Yeah, because while it makes her motivations a lot clearer, it also feels like something thrown in with no real connection to the rest of the story, or exactly how much said plot point would likely trigger a few readers. That side, it was worth reading, and I look forward to seeing what the next two volumes bring.