Shadowrun #5: Aftershock A Shadowrun Novel [Paperback]

Jean Rabe (Author), John Helfers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 5, 2006

The troll known as Hood and his fellow Shadowrunners steal some biotechnological agriculture from the Plantech Corporation-only to find themselves framed for murder and tied to an even greater conspiracy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Roc (July 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451461010
• ISBN-13: 978-0451461018
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,129,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars No more elves..., April 23, 2008

By 

T. Emory - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shadowrun #5: Aftershock A Shadowrun Novel (Paperback)

I wasn't a huge fan of the book. I felt it did a good job setting up the Shadowrun world, but some of the characters beyond irritating.

You have a male elf who the author makes out as perfect. He's fighting small armies single-handedly and throws out terrible one-liners all while keeping a grin on his face. I hated everything about this character and his creepy, incestuous-implied relationship with his sister elf.

The male elf has a sister who is a caster. The irritating thing with movies/books that involve magic is it's like watching an episode of the old batman show; there is always a magic gadget (spell in this case) that saves the party from impending doom. It's nice to know that the caster can muster up powerful magic on a moment's notice that she has next-to-no experience with.

The orc hacker is odd - at best. She has no real purpose in the book except to make problems for the runners. She had potential to be interesting but gets all but written out of the book halfway through.

Not all of the characters are bad. Hood (troll), Roland (human), and Jhones (dwarf) kept me reading.

The story itself does a good job recreating the Shadowrun world. It's a silly at times and the ending was a little disappoint.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too Far Out of Character, August 23, 2006

By 

Marc Ruby™ "The Noh Hare™" (Warren, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Shadowrun #5: Aftershock A Shadowrun Novel (Paperback)

This is the second of the revival of Shadowrun that I've read -- the fifth in the new series. By rights I should be delighted with it. I've missed having these books around with their vision of a future where legendary races have re-expressed themselves, where magic and technology coexist on uneasy terms, and politics are upside-down. Shadowrunners are the heroes of the underworld of 2063, living by stealing from the megacorporations that dominate the world.

For some reason, though, this book doesn't click with me. A small team of shadowrunners is hired to steal some plants from a biotech firm of all things, and what should have been a fairly easy run goes all kinds of bad. Caught in between lawmen for hire and corporate troops, they are betrayed at every turn, their survival in doubt right to the end of the book. This is a classic Shadowrun plot, and would have worked except for the make up of the team.

The two elves, brother and sister, physical adept and mage, both on the run for past misdeeds, are fairly straightforward. A very out of character troll is the team leader. He is wealthy, addicted to a very refined lifestyle, with a surprising background and an intense reluctance to kill. Some if this oddity (for a troll) can be explained by the fact that he was originally human, not born a troll. Hood never quite rings true - sometimes he is trollish and sometimes not, but he is always marginal.

The real disaster is Max, an orc hacker. This is a very unusual role for an orc, and in this case Max is clearly the wrong person for the job. Her avarice and unwillingness to play a team part cause most of the run's problems. With Max always to blame, the plot becomes secondary, refusing to develop along Shadowrun lines. Orcs can be sympathetic characters, but all Max does is demonstrate the worst of the orc stereotype.

I'm sure that authors were simply experimenting with the Shadowrun parameters, which can be limiting, but this time it didn't quite work out. It would be interesting to see more of Hood, the troll. But Max's character needs to be rewritten if she is to appear in later volumes.

4.0 out of 5 stars Much better the second time around, January 7, 2012

By 

J - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadowrun #5: Aftershock A Shadowrun Novel (Paperback)

I won't lie... the first time I read this book, I hated it. I had started playing Shadowrun in the 90s, and was a fanatic. When we moved up to 3rd edition, I stumbled, but soldiered on. Then came Wizkids/Fanpro. In the interest of diplomacy, I'll just stop there.

When I saw that the fiction had been restarted, yes, I nerdgasmed. Aftershock was the first of the new breed of stories I picked up. It was also the last. I read through it, cover to cover, and hated every second of it. Every character, I despised. Especially our runners. It completely obliterated any desire I had ever possessed to read the setting or play the game ever again.

Recently, I've been feeling the old itch. So, I started picking up some of the new Catalyst sourcebooks, and decided to give Aftershock a re-read just to get a crash course on how Matrix 2.0 works.

As I read, I noticed something. It wasn't the characters I hated. It was that things changed. I didn't hate Max, for example, as much as I hated a wireless Matrix, and having a PAN. Why did I hate them? I wanted the world I enjoyed escaping into to remain the same. It didn't, and I felt betrayed. Nothing more, nothing less.

Once I saw this, I saw how genuinely good the book really is, and it reminded me why I fell in love with the setting in the first place. It changes. It evolves. It moves forward one year for every real life year, so yes... things change. So, I chose to embrace the changes.

Interesting that the book that caused me to abandon Shadowrun is also the one to reignite my love affair with the 6th World.

Max is still obnoxious, though...