Customer Reviews

Shadowrun #6: A Fistful of Data: A Shadowrun Novel (Shadowrun)

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

 

 

While I doubt that anyone would ever confuse Shadowrun novels with "high art", I have been impressed with the quality of the last few releases. The stories have been interesting, the writing more than adequate, and the material has covered areas that haven't been well-explored by the previous books in the world. Very good for a genre novel, and not half bad on its own.

Unlike many previous novels this one pits the underdogs against the big corporations... no wait, that is like all of the previous novels. So what makes this one a 4 star novel? The character driven plot line. The greedy corporate exec is attempting to kick out the squatters only the squatters happen to be shadow runners and they push back hard. I definitely recommend this novel to all Shadowrun fans. This one is not about the toys or the action, it is about the character interactions and the implications to past and future relationships between the mercenary tools of the corp and the shadow runner squatters. The novel is well written, well edited, keeps pace well while providing ongoing information about the characters. The novel is worth the time to read.

I remember when I first played Shadowrun back in the early '90s. I thought it was the most ingenious sifi/fantasy idea ever, and I still do, because it combines the best of both worlds - sifi and fantasy. So, I was dissapointed, but not surprisingly so, when I read this, my first Shadowrun novel. As with so many promisingly good sifi/fantasy cocepts, missing is the good storytelling - the "why should I care" factor. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't make myself care what happened to the characters, good guys or bad. The confrontations were anticlimactic and the diolog hokey and contrived. No story, reguardless of concept or setting, can be a success if the storyteller doesn't create empathy in the hearer/reader. But if the storyteller creates an emotional connection with the reader so that he/she cares what happens to the characters, well, it doesn't matter what the story is about. This book just doesn't have it.