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.

Gallows Humor

 Finishing up Stephen Kenson's Talon Trilogy with The Burning Time, which wraps up Talon's story quite well. 

I'm technically skipping the second book here, Ragnarock, since I read it last year, but ok.

Anyway, Talon and his crew get sucked into a new adventure thanks in part to a run gone bad. (I mean, that's pretty much Shadowrun for "You meet at the local tavern"...) In this case, trying to get something from Cross Applied Technologies, which ends up bringing Roy Kilaro involved. Roy, who wants to become a Seraphim, is in Boston from Montreal investigating an odd data stream he found from one of Boston's chip heads. 

On the home front, Trouble, the cabal's Decker, falls back in with her ex, since the gay street mage obviously ain't interested in the slotting she's offering. Talon, in the mean time, keeps running across his ex's ghost. And it would seem Mama Iaga is using Gallow to help pull off whatever plan she has for the Christmas return of Halley's Comet. (I get the distinct impression this particular book was written right before a new edition, since a second wave of goblinization known as SURGE starts happening towards the end, who lead to less rigid character creation in the system.)

By the end, everyone gets something akin to a happy ending, other than Mama Iaga, who pretty much gets what she had coming. 

I rather enjoyed this book, particularly towards the end when Talon more or less takes an Orphic journey to find Jason, his ex. While my love life has never been QUITE as dramatic as Talon's, the emotions we get through his adventures ring quite true. These are well worth picking up if you can find them.

Pop, Six, Squish, Uh uh, Cicero, Lipschitz!

 So, when I was looking up Fourth Down and Out, both Amazon and the library suggested Andrew Welsh-Huggins edited Columbus Noir, part of a much larger series of noir anthologies set in different cities around the US. (I kind of doubt Columbus is big on that list; given the series started in 2013 and Columbus is 2019....)

Anyway, while the stories are ok, and set in places I know, not many of them would be what I'd consider noir. No leggy women coming in to a detective's office, and leading him by the nose into trouble, no real black humor, no jazz playing in the background...

No, we mostly get women murdering their boyfriends or husbands, or getting other men to do it for them. Admittedly, some of it is interesting, like the editor's story about the governor cheating on his wife, and how his aide takes care of the problem on behalf of the governor's wife after he sleeps with her...

Oh yes. Almost none of the people in here are faithful. With a few exceptions, like Yolonda Tosette Sanders' Whitehall story that involves an alcoholic woman trying to solve her brother's murder years later, most of this is people killing off significant others, either theirs or someone else's. Usually over drugs, sex, but occasionally real estate. (Craig McDonald's German Village story being a major example of this.)

I was again sad that, even in Columbus's Gayborhoods, very few gay people played a major part in any of the stories. (One minor exception being Daniel Best's story set in the Short North, but even then the gay person in question in playing sugar daddy to his drug dealer, shows up for 2 paragraphs, then we get back to the felon killing his business partner and sleeping with said guy's wife.) This made me doubly sad, given how much queer coding was built into the old noir and pulp fictions that inspired this anthology. 

On the other hand, Khalid Moalim's North Side story does address several real life issues while giving us a parable on how gossip ruins lives. (In this case, a Somali girl who's much more assimilated makes her father angry by getting engaged to a black man. While this resolves itself in one dead body, and two important people in her life going to prison, it is a look at the weird dichotomy of how African immigrants deal with BIPOC in a culture where they themselves are often viewed as BIPOC.)

Do I wish it was more like what I was hoping for? Yes. I would have even settled for more realistic Tales From the Crypt style stories, where the morality play is there, but wrapped in such shenanigans to make it easier to swallow.

Me-OUCH!

 One of the stores in the Platform I work in sells Andrew Welsh-Huggin's Fourth Down and Out, and after reading the summary on the back, I decided to check it out of the library to see if it was worth buying for mom. 

What I found was, even if Mom would likely not enjoy it, I certainly did. 

Our story opens on Private Investigator Andy Hayes getting the stuffing beat out of him over a laptop in the back of his van, with the assailant also pointing out he lost a bunch of money on a game thanks to Andy. 

We flash back to the start of this adventure, as Andy gets hired at the Cup O' Joe in German Village to find out who's blackmailing his client with a video of said client cheating on his wife with an 18 year old. Which leads to the boyfriend of the 18 year old,  which in turn leads to his parents in New Albany. 

As the book progresses, we find out several people have reasons to want the laptop, from the lady who's been writing English assignments for Buckeye football players to keep eligible; the fixer, who hired her to write said assignments; the dad of the blackmailer, who has some shady financial deals on the laptop; and Andy's assailant, who was paid to retrieve it and got a bullet to the chest and a swim in the Grandview Quarry for his trouble. 

On top of this, we have a secondary investigation into whether or not a professor's wife is having an affair, which ends up being a red herring for the real mystery here. 

Towards the end, we finally find out why Andy's relationship with the fixer is so strained, and get a really good look at (in this case fictional) dirty dealings within the athletics department at Ohio State. (I realize this situation is fictional, I said that in the last sentence. However, given what's come to light since 2014 when this was published...)

I enjoyed it, even if some of the biggest fiction in here was finding parking in German Village less than a mile away from where you were trying to go. I doubt non residents of Ohio would find much of interest here, although you never know.

Seriously?

 So, I picked up Brian Thomsen's Once Around the Realms at a long ago library sale, along with a few other Dungeons & Dragons novels, but never got around to reading it until now. There are reasons, for this, like the fact it got jammed on to my shelves and buried until I was digging around looking for something else, but... 

Anyway. I'll make it clear that the Forgotten Realms setting is likely one of my least favorite D&D worlds for much the same reason other people love it. The planet it's set on is huge, and can support any kind of adventure. Problem being, even world shaking events in the setting really only seem to create local tremors, rather than big shakeups within. (I mean, if DragonLance was set there, the people on the east coast would probably not hear about it until 2 years after the war ended.) Also, many of the really fun D&D settings that were kind of one offs, allowing adventured flavored with martial arts or Arabian things wound up getting sucked in to Toril eventually, and everyone pretty much ignores anything that isn't on the West Coast anyway. 

But, rants aside, this starts with Volothamp Geddarm meeting a traveling actor about to be arrested in Cormyr. Volo (not to be confused with Marco Volo) saves the actor, Passeport from arrest, and uses his reputation as a writer of travel guides for the Realms to get free food and lodging. Which works out well, until a certain West Coast Wizard named Blackstaff challenges Volo to travel the entirety of the Realms without crossing his trail. To prove it, he gives Volo a bag of Necromancer's gems, that will turn red (and highlight a map) when he's achieved a travel goal. 

So let's see. Early on, we meet Captain Queeg, and a Captain Bligh Ahib, who's family was cursed by a banshee, thus he's chasing a big white wail. 

Later on, we wind up travelling to a Magic heavy kingdom, where they get a stolen airship flown by a dwarf named Jonas Grumby. And of course, the airship is named The Minnow. 

 

By far the worst though, not counting the final chapter involves a landing in Maztica (a pre-Columbian setting) where Mr. Rork and his halfling servant Herve await to fulfill their dreams.

The Boomer TV references aside (seriously, there's a Jaws joke in here), it's actually a fun story with a lot of silliness. Even if you do need a map to figure out where the heck they are half the time.

Bawston

 If you can't tell, I'm on a Shadowrun kick of late, mainly because I bought the recent Harebrained Schemes games set in the world. Any rate, this inspired rereading Stephen Kenson's Talon centered books. Crossroads, the first Talon centered book, takes us from DC to Boston as someone in Talon's past has an axe to grind. 

Talon, a street mage, starts as part of Assets Inc., an established Shadowrunning group who made a name for themselves stopping an astral incursion. When we meet him, he's knee deep in trouble as an Ant Shaman is trying to turn a young girl into a Queen. (Gee, I feel like this was part of the plot of Shadowrun Returns!) Anyway, he gets back to his apartment in DC to find a female decker waiting on him. The femme fatale, Trouble, ends up dragging him back to Boston 

Here, we meet the runners who played a part in Technobabel, as Talon hires the group to help track down the person hunting him. What follows is a game of screw your neighbor, as several villains emerge, and Talon must learn to control his anger. (But honestly, I found myself sympathizing with him for much of it. I mean if someone killed my lover, I'd be inclined to summon a fire elemental to burn them myself.) 

Of interest in particular is Kenson's descriptions of how Mage magic works in the setting. Without getting really technical, of the three magic classes, Shamen run on Charisma and have a totem, Adepts are much more physical, and their magic gives them combat edges, Mages run on Intelligence, and generally work more with elemental forces. Given the Mr. Kenson's husband is a fairly famous author of books concerning modern witchcraft, the focus on the details of magic shouldn't probably be a surprise. 

As I've stated previously, seeing any kind of gay representation in an RPG book was a nice surprise. While the first time I read this, I knew next to nothing of the setting, Now, it's more fun, feeling like I have an in to the story. A lot of fun for fans of mildly pulpy scifi.