Brooders

Choose your Enemies Carefully, Follows on from Never Deal with a Dragon.

Summary:

Sam is still searching for his sister who has undergone “the change”. His Shadowrunning adventures with Dodger, his elven decker pal, lead him to England, ravaged, and mostly in control by aristocracy and corporations. The “evil” druids are performing Human sacrifices, which he and Dodger are compelled to stop. While his magical shamanic self was awakened, he now has to embrace it in order to deal with the magical threat which he faces.

Comments:

Perhaps “Never Deal with a Dragon” was better, this tale follows more the magical nature of England and Sam’s acceptance of his shamanic calling. Because I’ve started, I’ll now have to finish the trilogy. Sort of entertaining, but I almost wouldn’t call it cyberpunk if there wasn’t a brush of AI, Matrix and decking. This seemed far more interesting when I read it 10 years ago …

It is a quick read though and not too taxing on the brain if you want a pulp pseudo-cyberpunk come Dungeons and Dragons read.

Rating: 5.5/10

“Never deal with a Dragon” is the first in the Secrets of Power Trilogy. Someone once described Shadowrun as “Lord of the Rings” crossed with Neuromancer. I don’t think that’s far off the mark.

This novel builds upon the Shadowrun RPG, having the awakened world (orcs, trolls, elves, magic etc) thrust into a dystopic society of shadowrunners doing dirty work for Megacorps to survive. This story has all the raw ingredients, large japanese megacorp installing datajacks in their employees for better information manipulation, deckers, illegal workers (shadowrunners) and a bit of grit.

Summary:

Sam is a faithful Renraku employee who has a newly installed datajack. He awakes from this surgery to find his superiors have reassigned him to a different area, which is considered a demotion, and that his sister has undergone “The Change”. The Japanese culture are not tolerant to those who change to their new metatype (read mythical culture like elf, orc etc) and Renraku seemed to be hiding her from Sam.

Renraku are seemingly evasive on his requests to commuicate with this sister, a brush with some shadowrunners starts playing on his mind about how else he might be able to find her. But it doesn’t stop there, there are magicians, Dragons, Street Samurai, Artificial Intelligence, the Matrix and more.

Comments:

I consider this stuff kind of pulpy but an entertaining read, probably worth it just from escapism value and if your not familiar with Shadowrun RPG this will give you a fairly good idea.

Rating: 6.5/10

David Weinberger wrote about The most secret word ever, your mothers maiden name!

So what’s the 2nd most secret thing?

Date of Birth

Here in Australia, Mothers maiden name and Date of Birth are probably the two key things used as security questions when you call up an institution. As David said, it’s scary how a nasty family member, or anyone with access to your account details at an institution may have access to that.

At least now some of the banks ask you to create a question and answer it.

Anyway .. for a scary tale, a colleague of mine recently lost his passport in a US hotel. He did not realise until he was at the airport. You’d think it would a problem, but no, the airline rang the embassy in Oz, and guess what that security question was to let him on the flight and back into Australia ??

Yup .. you guessed it “What’s your mothers maiden name?”