So, I found myself rereading an old favorite this week, as sticking my hand into the bookshelf looking for for something wound up drawing out Ragnarock by Stephen Kenson. While this particular volume is not my favorite of his tales of Talon, it's probably the most plain fun of them.
This is actually set in the Sixth World of Shadowrun, an RPG set in the mid 2060's, where technology has hit Cyberpunk levels of advancement, and magic has reentered the world, leading to metahumans and dragons being prominent. (This is a largely oversimplified description of the setting, it's kind of like what would happen if D&D created a setting encompassing Philip K. Dick's writing.) Shadowrunners are essentially semi-criminals who do work for various employers, often one of the megacorporations trying to one up another one. The largest of the Megacorps is Saeder-Krupp, which is run by one very large great dragon named Lofwyr, and they're the ones employing our hero Talon for this book.
Talon is an Arcane Mage (the other type of pure mage in the setting is a shaman.... I think there's a lesser magic user called an Adept, but it's been years), who runs a fairly standard team, with two meta humans (an orc and a troll, who are brawn), a computer specialist (who more or less project their conciousness into the Matrix, think a VR version of the internet), and someone who does something similar with vehicles of all kinds. Along the way, they wind up joining forces with the Elven Paladin Speren. Talon's team gets a rather juicy contract to track down a professor who found a magical artifact that is being sold at auction in Germany and bring him to Lofwyr.
Straight forward assignment that gets complicated quickly as the Professor is working with a group of Human supremacists with some fairly large magical resources. Followed quickly by taking the artifact directly into Lofwyr's presence, where it nearly kills the great dragon. Fleeing from a very angry corporation, we eventually find out there's a lesser known great dragon behind this plot, and our climax happens at a music festival where two very large dragons have an astral battle over top of a thrash metal band.
I've pretty much mangled my description of this, and I hope if Steve ever reads this, he'll forgive me for that.
Anyway, the reason I say this isn't my favorite in this series has to do my first exposure to Talon. See, I was totally unfamiliar with the setting, and ran across Crossroads at one of the local gaming stores while dice shopping. It looked interesting, so I bought a copy and wound up getting sucked into it, getting particularly excited when I found out that Talon is gay. Given how rare this is in Science Fiction, Fantasy and RPG materials, let alone to have a main character who happens to be gay... well, it was awesome. Particularly since most of Talon's arc in the other books has to do with dealing with his shadow self, something I could relate to at the time. Anyway, I was discussing it with a friend of mine, who pointed out Steve's husband was author Christopher Penczak, whom I had never read, but who also has written a few books dealing with gays and spiritual matters. He's written more than that, and there's more to both of them, but again, simplify.
End result. Fun series, with more going for it than one would expect.
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