For my first review for the Frumious Consortium, I’d like to start with a bang, a triple play. Three books at once, all part of a trilogy inscribed in the same universe, all by the same author, and all uncommonly uniform enough in style and execution as to try and pass a single review as if it where worth for three whole reviews, all at once.
Background
Shadowrun is a universe that was designed for and stems from a Cyberpunk RPG. It is set on earth in the second half of the 21St century, an earth where not only have different cathaclisms changed the socio-political structure of humanity and mega corporations have consolidated, bringing on new and perfected technologies and a typical cyberpunk setting, including a matrix and all, but where also magic has been discovered to be real and to come and go in cycles, being the 2000s the start of one such cycles, producing in the end a mixed environment of corporations and high tech with magic and varied creatures, both sentient and not sentient, which makes this universe a particularly rare one, and tends to divide readers and players into pretty well separated camps of fans and detractors.
I’m a fan of the universe, as much as of “traditional” cyberpunk.
The books
Like a few other RPG franchises, apart from the different tabletop games, and old and recent computer games set into the shadowrun universe, the publisher, FASA Corporation has licensed and published a total of 40 books inscribed into the universe, as a way to expand the game outside the play itself, beef up the background, and create famous characters for the universe.
Never Deal With A Dragon, Choose Your Enemies Carefully and Find Your Own Truth by Robert Charrette are books number 2, 3 and 4 published on shadowrun by fasa. And they all deal with the fall of a single character, Samuel Verner from corporate grace and his entering of the shadow world,and his quest to find and save his sister, all that’s left of his family.
Being part of the first four books ever produced into the canon, these three thankfully waste very little time introducing us into the world, and do so in a cursory manner as it accompanies us through Verner’s troubles and tribulations, yet things are written clear enough that someone with no experience on the universe wouldn’t have that much of a trouble grasping most of what is happening, if at the cost of missing a little of the why.