Category Archives: Retro Reviews

Retro Review: Black Company

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Retro Review: Black Company:

The Black Company is series of twisted fantasy novels by author Glen Cook, and it’s one of the most unique reads I’ve ever had–which is both a positive and a negative.

The Black Company books follow, not surprisingly, the Black Company, Last of the Free Companies of Khatovar,* the baddest, roughest, toughest, meanest mercenary company around.

*(A fact they are very proud of, despite the fact that they’ve been around so long they no longer have any idea what Khatovar is or what happened to the other Free Companies.)

On paper (no pun intended), the Black Company books are very ordinary. Blah blah ancient evil returns, blah blah last stand against the darkness. The universe is extremely traditional, right down to wizards jealously guarding their true names lest they lose their powers.

What’s unique is the execution. When the evil Ten Who Were Taken escape from their eternal prison, the Black Company is hired by them. When the last stand against the darkness comes, the Black Company is there to help crush the last hope of freedom.

Needless to say, it takes some getting used to. These are very, very dark books, and it can be difficult to identify with the protagonists when the best among them are just not participating in the rape and torture going on all around them–they’re not trying to stop it.

What saves these books is the writing. They’re all written in first person perspective; whose perspective that is varies a bit from book to book (to the author’s credit, each character has a unique voice, and it’s fairly easy to distinguish between them), but most of the time, it’s Croaker, the Black Company’s physician/chronicler. Supposedly, the books are his chronicles of the Company–the Black Company’s devotion to its history borders on the religious.

These books are worth reading just for Croaker’s dry wit and profound cynicism. The most horrible atrocities are just oddly amusing when told through his wry voice. I really have to give Glen Cook credit for the quality of the writing here. It does not feel like you’re reading something written by Glen Cook; it feels like you’re reading a book by Croaker. And Croaker’s about as close to a good person as you will ever see in the Company, so that helps.

It’s also worth noting that the Company is not on the side of the bad guys for the entire series–it’s really just the first few books. Whether or not they ever really qualify as the good guys is arguable, but at the very least, they wind up as the lesser of two evils.

One other thing I need to mention about these books is the Black Company’s two wizards, Goblin and One-Eye. Simply put, they are made of awesome.

Each is described as “older and uglier than sin,” which is an interesting coincidence, since sin is their favourite pastime. One-Eye is a tiny, wiry witch doctor from some primeval jungle in the ass end of nowhere, and is known for his hideous appearance, his eye patch, his association with every black market in every settlement everywhere, and for being the owner of the oldest, ugliest, filthiest hat in existence. Oh, and did I mention he’s the Company dentist?

Goblin is fat and squeaky, and just as steeped in criminality as his cohort. Both spend the vast majority of their time trying to make the other’s life miserable with an endless spree of magical pranks and jokes–such as making each other vomit hundreds of spiders. The only thing more hilarious than their endless brawling is how incredibly blase about it the rest of the Company is.

For the sake of expedience, I’ve been reviewing this series as one homogenous block, but it’s really not at all. This is a very long series that covers several different story arcs. It varies in tone, content, and quality by quite a bit. All I can say is that if you average it out, it’s pretty good. It’s also worth noting that the overall trend in Black Company’s quality is upward–it gets better the farther into it you get. You need to have a somewhat strong stomach, but if you’re in the market for something a little different, I highly recommend this series.

Overall rating: 8/10

These days, the books are usually sold in four omnibuses (the books are both small and numerous, so it makes sense), and my Amazon Affiliate is no exception. For the record, the proper reading order is “Chronicles of the Black Company,” “The Books of the South,” “The Return of the Black Company,” and “The Many Deaths of the Black Company.”

Retro Review: The Three Worlds Cycle + Writerly News

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Welcome to the first in my series of “Retro Reviews,” in which I will be reviewing books, movies, and TV that are not necessarily new or current. I’m doing this because I don’t think something needs to be new to warrant attention. Some of the best books I’ve read have been decades–or, in some cases, over a century–old. I hope to bring attention to works that are of a high quality but not necessarily well known.

My first Retro Review topic is the Three Worlds Cycle, a massive fantasy saga by Australian author Ian Irvine. It is a series so amazingly good that I half-jokingly made it my mission in life to preach its brilliance to everyone who will listen in the hopes they will pick it up and read it.

The Three Worlds Cycle is comprised of eleven books divided into two quartets and a trilogy: “The View From the Mirror,” including “A Shadow on the Glass,” “The Tower on the Rift,” “Dark Is the Moon,” and “The Way Between the Worlds”; “The Well of Echoes,” including “Geomancer,” Tetrarch,” “Alchymist” (also called “Scrutator” in some markets), and “Chimaera”; and “The Song of the Tears,” including “The Fate of the Fallen” (also called “The Torments of the Traitor” in some markets), “The Curse on the Chosen,” and “The Destiny of the Dead.” (God, I love his titles.) Each series has its own plot, but they all form a greater arc, and I strongly recommend reading them in the order I put them.

I don’t often set much store by originality. As someone who has studied story-telling, I am well-familiar with the fact that an original story is an oxymoron. Those who do attempt to be original often try too hard and create something bizarre and unpleasant, ignoring the often reused but time-tested tenets of good story-telling. But that said, that doesn’t mean that creativity is completely impossible, or that I don’t appreciate it when someone does a good job of it.

This is what is so brilliant about the Three Worlds. It is a brilliantly original take on the fantasy genre, yet it still preserves all the action, adventure, deep history, and epic scale that makes fantasy so great.

Don’t expect to see Elves, Dwarves, and Dragons in the Three Worlds. Irvine utterly rejects the old fantasy archetypes and creates an entire universe of his own unique non-human races, such as the majestic Charon, the melancholy Aachim, and the wretched Whelm. Although, admittedly, the Faellem–a slight, nature-loving race–do bear a certain resemblance to Elves.

Nor should you expect another carbon copy of feudal Europe. On Santhenar, the world upon which most of the events take place, it is an accepted fact that women are equal to men, and religion and spirituality are virtually non-existent. Most mysticism is removed from magic; it is treated more like a craft, a science. It often feels more like reading sci-fi than fantasy.

The struggle of good and evil is also something Irvine has little interest in. He described “The View From the Mirror” as–I’m paraphrasing–“A Darwinian tale of four species struggling to survive, in which each believes they have more right to survival than the others.”

With a lot of prolific writers, their work all tends to seem to the same after a while. (I’m looking at you, Terry Brooks.) Not so Ian Irvine. Each series within the Three Worlds has a very distinct flavour and feel, to the point where it can be rather jarring to start a new one and find yourself reading a completely different (but equally awesome) kind of story.

“The View From the Mirror” is a globe-trotting adventure focusing primarily on two or three characters. It’s a similar kind of story to “The Hobbit” or Frodo’s trials in “The Lord of the Rings.” A brilliant move he made in this series was to choose a historian as one of his main characters, giving an easy way to provide large amounts of information on his universe’s rich and detailed history without it seeming awkward or out of place. It also has the single greatest opening chapter I’ve ever read. There is more emotion and epic story in the first few pages of “A Shadow on the Glass” than in some entire trilogies I’ve read.

“The Well of Echoes” is a dark, intense war story. It strongly reminds me of Ron Moore’s reimagined Battlestar Galactica, right down to the bitchy, mortality-obsessed, daredevil blonde woman. It’s probably the low point of the Three Worlds in terms of plot, but it is where he introduces all his greatest characters.

“The Song of the Tears” is the closest he’s come to traditional fantasy. For the first time, Irvine depicts a battle of good versus evil. The first two books are roughly equivalent to “The Well of Echoes” in quality–great, but not as good as “The View from the Mirror”–but “The Destiny of the Dead” was a masterpiece and may be the best of his books.

He plans a final trilogy to wrap up the story, tentatively titled “The Fate of the Children,” but to my great anguish, he hasn’t gotten around to writing it yet.

Most good authors I know excel at one particular thing. Christie Golden writes amazing characters, Terry Brooks does action like no one else, and Mercedes Lackey is a world-builder without compare. Ian Irvine excels at everything. His characters, his action, his plot twists, and his world-building are all excellent. His prose is perhaps nothing special, but there’s nothing wrong with it, either.

I have only one consistent complaint about the Three Worlds, and that’s that Irvine’s names are wacky, and the rules for pronouncing them are even wackier. To make matters worse, he stopped adding pronunciation guides after the first four books. I’ve just plain given up on trying to pronounce “Tiaan Liise-Maar.”

Overall rating: 9.8/10

The entire Three Worlds Cycle is available on my Amazon Affiliate. If you have even the slightest interest in sci-fi or fantasy, I strongly encourage you to give it a try–and not just because I could use the money.

This post has become terribly long-winded, but I would like to include some news briefly.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t covered patch 4.2 yet, it’s because I may have landed a deal to do an article on it for a gaming magazine, and I want to save my efforts. The short version is the Thrall quests were the Best Thing Ever, the new dailies are absurdly grindy but also absurdly fun, and I have gotten into raiding T11 since the nerfs, but it turns out these things are still damn hard. Or maybe I just suck.

Also, my long-running Star Trek fan fiction series, Dispatches from the Romulan War, will soon be coming to an end due to a lack of interest. I do plan on doing a final arc to wrap up the story, though. If you haven’t read it before now, I encourage you to check it out before it’s done for good.