February 2006 - Dragonchasers

I’m back to playing World of Warcraft again, and as usual I’m totally caught up in this world that Blizzard has created. They’ve crafted such a rich history, but we only get glimpses of it. I have to cop to buying the paper & pencil RPG sourcebooks just to get more backstory. Yup, I’m a serious geek.

Which brings us to Cycle of Hatred by Keith R.A. DeCandido. Here is a novel set in the Warcraft world, and specifically it takes place between the end of The Frozen Throne (the last Warcraft strategy game) and the start of World of Warcraft (the MMRPG). Somewhere during that time the alliance between humans and orcs broke down, and I hoped from the title that maybe this book would describe what happened.

This isn’t my first Warcraft novel. I’ve read three others, and they varied between pretty good, and pretty bad. So my expectations were pretty low. And still I was disappointed. The book is totally without substance. What scraps of plot it has are routine, the characters are all cardboard cutouts and the only reason the world feels the least bit alive is through the Warcraft tie-in. It does nothing to add to the mythos of the world, or fill in any gaps in the history that Blizzard has crafted. The only thing this book has going for it is mention of places and people that Warcraft players “know” via the games.

Avoid at all costs.

I actually finished reading Mike Stackpole’s The Secret Atlas quite a while ago, but I’ve been holding off on writing this review. Why? Because I like Mike Stackpole and I really wanted to like The Secret Atlas and, well, I didn’t.

We have here an interesting world that has been torn asunder by a cataclysm and is slowly rebuilding itself. There are political shenanigans going on as a few Machiavellian princes vie for power. There’s a subtle (at least at first) kind of magic that seems to arise from someone getting really good at something. There’s a whole passel of characters running hither and yon. In short, there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

But sadly, the execution fails. There are too many story threads going on here (four main ones) and the chapters rotate through them. So chapter x is about plotline A chapter x+1 is about plotline B, x+2 is about plotline C, x+3 about D, and then chapter x+4 is about plotline A again. And maybe I’m just getting old and senile, but by the time I come back around I’ve forgotten what’s going on and why I should care.

You see, the plotlines are so cleanly divided that it almost feels like I’m reading 4 books at once, reading a chapter of each before returning to the top of my stack.

Also, this is very much a volume 1. DO NOT read The Secret Atlas until the next volume is on store shelves, because there is very little closure at the end of this book. I think that the series can come together and be really fun, once you have them all in hand (and assuming you read your books in big chunks…these days I’m happy if I can squeeze in a chapter a night, which really made the rotating plotlines a big problem for me). But Atlas starts with a traveller entering a town, and half-way through the book, about 7 or 8 days have passed and we’re still in this town, talking a lot about the Big Adventures to come, but not actually going anywhere. We get a LOT of base material, though..we learn a lot about the world Stackpole has built, and it seems very rich indeed.

So although I didn’t like The Secret Atlas as a stand-alone volume, I still have hopes for the series as a whole, and I will read the next book when it hits store shelves.