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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
I personaggi e l'ambientazione continuano a piacermi ma ho la sensazione che l'autore non stia sfruttando al meglio le grandi potenzialità che questa storia potrebbe avere. Di fatto non succede quasi nulla se non nelle ultime 100 pagine e per questo la lunghezza del libro si fa sentire. Comunque rimane una lettura interessante per gli amanti del grimdark.
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The second books in a trilogy from Richard Morgan always seem to be the weird ones. Kovac #2 was wearisome to read and A Land fit for Heroes too. The prose, although so harsh and cynical, was most of the time difficult to read. Weird and diffuse things happened, the plot was hard to grasp, the story felt unnecessarily stretched and the scenes repetetive.
Overall, I can't give more than two stars.
Overall, I can't give more than two stars.
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Although I loved the first book in this series, this one was a resounding disappointment. The plot felt contrived, the characters aimless, and the sex and violence stale and gratuitous (and I love sex and violence). I didn't really feel the point behind any of the story. The whole thing felt like a setup for for the third installment, which I am still holding out hope for. I was also really excited about the sci-fi/fantasy crossover but Morgan leaves all the potential untapped.
So I took a star from TCC and gave it to TSR but I'm hard-pressed to say why. Strangely, on re-read, TSR seems a lot tighter than TCC. In fact, this time around, TCC felt very much like a sequel: the follow-up to TSR, the setting-up of TDD. There's a lot of threads just sorta left dangling, while both the fantasy and science-fiction aspects to Ringil's world have been blown wide open with possibility. Can't wait for April 2014.
Another great read from Richard K. Morgan. For those of you with prudish characters, this may have scenes which you cannot stomach. For those of us with more open minds, it is a refreshingly different way of looking at the fantasy genre. This is a bit more realistic than the more sanitised fantasy we are used to.
Great fun and looking forward to the next one.
Great fun and looking forward to the next one.
What it's about: The story of the three antiheroes, Ringil, Archeth and Egar continues. Ringil cuts his way into the centre of yet another dwenda conspiracy, Egar gets himself into successively worse situations, and Archeth, having received a dire warning, mounts an expedition to find a lost Kiriath city in the North.
Notes:
Verdict: Disjointed, hyper-violent, and initially confusing, The Cold Commands nevertheless opens up enough questions to keep the reader invested.
I give this: 4/5 space crabs
Notes:
- This is an odd middle novel. It feels less like the continuation of a first part and more like the start of a sequel series to the first book. Part of the reason was because the first novel could have been a standalone work with a number of minor modifications. The Cold Commands also opens with the characters, particularly Ringil, in very different circumstances - Ringil himself has developed magical powers the provenance of which is not made clear until quite a ways into the book, and is now an outlaw that hunts down and kills slavers.
- In that sense, it feels a bit disjointed at first, because of the introduction of new world elements that were not really present in the first book. The ikinri'ska magic that Ringil seems to have picked up out of nowhere, the vague portents and weird things that keep happening to him, and his mysterious vanguard of wraiths - the cold commands of the book - that show up at just the right time to slaughter his enemies when he's on the verge of being overwhelmed, and the weird time-warped relationship between him and the mysterious, out-of-nowhere Hjel and his band of followers.
- Clearly, the deities and powers-that-be in the book are trying very hard to set Ringil up to be the hero-savior keystone to basically solve all the accumulating plot-threads he's weaving together - power-leveling him through tribulation after tribulation and giving him all sorts of weird powers, even as the series tries to subvert the very idea of there being a world-savior type hero. Ringil suffers from an extreme form of plot armour, emerging unscathed even after a dwenda bites a chunk of his face off - but it could be construed, to a certain extent, to be deliberately seeded as part of the meta-narrative. But the way in which he rebounds is a testament to his pure, shonen-like bloody-mindedness.
- The other two threads featuring Egar and Archeth aren't nearly as weird, but they do take the series in interesting new directions. The full weirdness of the Kiriath wasn't quite apparent in the first novel, but there is significant development in the second that really hints that they are essentially a technologically advanced race that just keeps up appearances with the barbarian locals in an effort to "uplift" them to their own standards of civilization. There's even that intimation that their helmsman servants are just glorified AIs. I have a weakness for that sort of thing.
Verdict: Disjointed, hyper-violent, and initially confusing, The Cold Commands nevertheless opens up enough questions to keep the reader invested.
I give this: 4/5 space crabs
Oh no, this crossed a line.
I feel like Gritty, Grimdark books are always rewarded for being unpleasant and bigoted; like they're telling some truer, realer story, and coarseness is obviously the only way to achieve that. That readers ought to push through their discomfort in the pursuit of High Art.
This! Is! Horseshit!
This book is everything offputting about the last one, and with nothing good to offset it. The last one had rape as wallpaper; this one has rape as character development for the rapist. Fuck that. Someone read the definition of antihero, said 'hold my beer', and leapt straight through to repulsive. Normally queer goes along with some amount of feminist, but this one just comes off as homophobic, sexist, just nasty.
It's incessant. It's pervasive. "chasing some piece of pussy" "maybe some other willowy slave gash would be grateful" cheap blowjobs, women walking around naked, constant sex and violence against women, the entire character of Ishgrim who exists to be ogled, and perhaps someone thought it very progressive to have a female character ogle the young slave woman as well as the males, endless references to jumping slaves, 'the cheap whore couldn't have been older than fourteen' just - fucking - stop
Oh and I was skimming other reviews and someone pointed out how Islamophobic it is as well, which I'd missed earlier on but by the end, yes, is not subtle.
The worldbuilding is great. The prose is largely beautiful, there are some great one liners and thoughts. And the world and the story that have been built and so luridly described is desperately ugly, in service of a meandering, pointless story. No one needs this.
(If you don't care about any of the above, the book is also completely fucking directionless, all three protagonists muddling around doing nothing, looking for a quest, in a plot so flat not even constant PoV shifts can hide it. Middle book syndrome to the extreme, and it reveals how extremely pointless Egar was, if you forgot that from the last one. It is never explained why the three main characters are such good friends to stick their necks out for each other to this extent, but the book ends up hinging on that. It's very weak.)
plus literal deus ex machina has to keep bailing the main character out of trouble, multiple times
I'm angry that male authors can write this sort of book, with grand gestures, no story, and an avalanche-of-brutality and get lauded as brave. And as a reader who picked this up for the LGBT tag, I feel pretty bait and switched.
I would suggest 'the stone in the skull' as a similar book that is not awful
I feel like Gritty, Grimdark books are always rewarded for being unpleasant and bigoted; like they're telling some truer, realer story, and coarseness is obviously the only way to achieve that. That readers ought to push through their discomfort in the pursuit of High Art.
This! Is! Horseshit!
This book is everything offputting about the last one, and with nothing good to offset it. The last one had rape as wallpaper; this one has rape as character development for the rapist. Fuck that. Someone read the definition of antihero, said 'hold my beer', and leapt straight through to repulsive. Normally queer goes along with some amount of feminist, but this one just comes off as homophobic, sexist, just nasty.
It's incessant. It's pervasive. "chasing some piece of pussy" "maybe some other willowy slave gash would be grateful" cheap blowjobs, women walking around naked, constant sex and violence against women, the entire character of Ishgrim who exists to be ogled, and perhaps someone thought it very progressive to have a female character ogle the young slave woman as well as the males, endless references to jumping slaves, 'the cheap whore couldn't have been older than fourteen' just - fucking - stop
Oh and I was skimming other reviews and someone pointed out how Islamophobic it is as well, which I'd missed earlier on but by the end, yes, is not subtle.
The worldbuilding is great. The prose is largely beautiful, there are some great one liners and thoughts. And the world and the story that have been built and so luridly described is desperately ugly, in service of a meandering, pointless story. No one needs this.
(If you don't care about any of the above, the book is also completely fucking directionless, all three protagonists muddling around doing nothing, looking for a quest, in a plot so flat not even constant PoV shifts can hide it. Middle book syndrome to the extreme, and it reveals how extremely pointless Egar was, if you forgot that from the last one. It is never explained why the three main characters are such good friends to stick their necks out for each other to this extent, but the book ends up hinging on that. It's very weak.)
plus literal deus ex machina has to keep bailing the main character out of trouble, multiple times
I'm angry that male authors can write this sort of book, with grand gestures, no story, and an avalanche-of-brutality and get lauded as brave. And as a reader who picked this up for the LGBT tag, I feel pretty bait and switched.
I would suggest 'the stone in the skull' as a similar book that is not awful