Customer Reviews

Shadowrun #5: Aftershock A Shadowrun Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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...

The other reviewers did a nice job on the recap. In the end, I am a hardcore Shadowrun RPG fan. This book came closest in the series to explaining the new 4th edition environment. It was written at a higher reading level than the other books and I enjoyed it immensely. The first 3 books in the series tie together nicely but are neither challenging, nor original. Books 4 and 6 had some good points but lacked that 4th edition feel.
If you want to see what 4th edition SR is all about read this book. The others were good for a 1 night read or to collect the series if you're into that. Otherwise, borrow them from a friend or local library.

Good solid sci-fi set in the shadowrun world. Just make sure you read the whole trilogy SR 4-6. The troll robin hood with the crazy standard not to "geek" anyone who is shooting and throwing grenades at his team gets a little tedious at times. In a great reveal at the end we find out who he realy is and the reason for his crazy behavior. The troll's team does some crazy James Bond like behavior like chopping down light poles with a mono whip while riding on the top of a swerving van and taking fire from several cars all to avoid killing anyone. Now let me ask you a question if you have a monowhip... How do you not kill people with it?

Let me preface this with some personal background: I'm big on screwing with the common perceptions of people. I've been an SR fan since way back (bought my copy of the first edition in August 1989) when I was in college the first time. I am now studying law for my second tour of academic duty. In between, I have worked construction, on a loading dock and as a bouncer (6'5" tall). Despite being an "Appalachian-American" (a fancy way of saying "hillbilly"), I don't have a twang and can speak six languages aside from English (I also spent time abroad teaching English as a second language). So to look at me, you would assume "brute" unless otherwise informed. That being said, I really enjoyed this book's concept of the hulking thing (Hood the troll) as the brains of the outfit with a serious compunction against homicide. I can also appreciate his fixation on a cultural icon (Robin Hood as presented by Errol Flynn). A similar fixation caused me to learn to fence back in college, a hobby I maintain to this day. The decker/rigger, Max, is an ork, again a member of a race frequently assigned to the brute-force/low-brow roles. Contrarily, the combat powerhouse is an elf physical adept, which is somewhat against type. I agree that the motivations and personality of Max (ork) are not particularly well developed, but for those of us who have played the game, how many times have we felt thoroughly shafted by our employers? For most of us, that happens in real life, we just don't usually have the opportunity to renegotiate our paychecks on the fly. I enjoyed the novel and look forward to more from this author/team.

i disagree completely with the above guy. i'm an old school SR fan and was glad to see someone take liberties with the normal roles of each race. yes, max wasnt very well written, but a refreshing twist on a race that's usually all muscle and no brain. ditto for the character "hood". not since "changeling" (#5 of the first series) has a troll been potrayed other that a brainless bruiser. it was nice to see a troll with taste.