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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5584913" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 236: December 1996part 5/8Fiction: Legendary heroes by Ben Bova. Finally, we get back to proper fiction in here. And by a proper regularly published author at that, with a story in his established universe & continuity. Actually, continuity is a very interesting issue for the Orion series, for it's brilliantly designed to produce standalone stories that can be read in any order. The immortal hunter gets incarnated into various times and places with orders to kill or protect certain people and thereby change the course of history for his godlike masters. This is complicated by the fact that he hates his master and goes against him where he can get away with it, with help from the other "gods" who are playing political games with the whole of history at stake. This premise allows things to make sense (or not) in nearly any order, (especially as Orion suffers a degree of memory loss between incarnations,) and even revisit eras, as the nature of time travel means the timeline can go into flux repeatedly and different issues need to be solved to get history on the right track each time. Plus you get to use historical figures as characters. It pretty much rivals Riverworld as an incredibly flexible tool for the author to draw upon various material and feed it through the lens of his imagination to make new stories. But that's enough exposition. This time, it's the legend of Beowulf we're revisiting. Now handling stuff like this can be tricky, because there's the danger of having your own hero upstage the original protagonist, revealing they were actually a fool, oaf or lucky braggart. Fortunately, this is not the case here, and Ben manages to strike the right balance between making beowulf competent and badass, but also flawed, and Orion useful, but not show-stealing. He then sets things up for further stories weaving other legends together with amazing smoothness. In short, after the annoying nature of the 5th age material, this makes me go <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> YEAH!!!!! AWESOME!!!!! vmv Let's hope we'll be seeing more of you in the magazine. Oh look, it's survey time again. This time with the potential reward of a poster if you fill it in. We didn't need that the previous times, so I'm not sure why they need it now.  Once again with the little signs of desperation. The role of books: Mosaic by Jeri Taylor is a star trek novel about the early life of Janeway, from the person who created her. It gets rather a critical reception, as from the way she is described here, she is not a good candidate to be put in charge of a starship, and would completely mess it up. One of those things that proves many of the flaws in Voyager stemmed right from the original writers, rather than just poor execution of those concepts. The glass cat of oz by David Hulan continues this sprawling series well after the original author's death. And it manages to draw upon and stay consistent with both the established setting details and characterisation of minor characters while continuing to introduce new ones and build upon Oz lore. This is another one that a bibliophile could spend years researching the expanded universe of.  Kingmakers sword by Ann Marston starts another trilogy. Fortunately, it's the kind that's mostly self-contained, and has well constructed worldbuilding. This seems like another of his generic mostly positive reviews that appears every few columns. City of diamond by Jane Emerson seems to be a soap opera - IIIIINNNNNN SPAAAAAACE!!!! (that never gets old, does it. ) The number of subplots may sprawl out, but the pace keeps up, and the various viewpoints are handled adeptly. Don't let the labels put you off. And peace shall sleep by Sonia Orin Lyris is a Magic: the Gathering novel. It's a rather interesting one though, that doesn't fit the normal mold of gaming fiction. High tension, and full of politics, I suppose it shows what it's like when the whole setting is being used as a battleground for a game. John hopes that WotC won't stop producing books like this in the wake of the CCG craze's leveling off. Looks like it's all positive reviews this time. That's no good. After you've started alternating with ones that are more like pure promotion, you ought to put a bit more effort in to differentiate yourself.</blockquote>

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