Greatly Belated Book Reviews: The Dragon Never Sleeps

This is one of those books I'm really of two minds on.

I've never read any of Glen Cook's other stuff (not that I recall, anyway), so I don't really know how typical TDNS is of his works. It is an absolutely incredible exercise in worldbuilding, with an incredibly detailed universe that could have supported ten books. (More on that in a bit.)

On the other hand, it's obtuse. The first few chapters are crammed with unfamiliar terms like "WarAvocat" and "P. Jaksonica," and it takes quite a few (although they're short chapters) to pick up the rhythm. (WarAvocat is basically the Guardship's captain, although he has to listen to the Guardship's electronic brain council, refered to as either Deified or Immortals-these are past officers whose minds were recorded onto the Guardship's big tactical brain. P. Jaksonica is the name of a planet. Unfortunately, nearly all of the planets are named that way, so it's sometimes tricky to tell them apart.) Not only that, but it reads like a book in the middle of a series. Of course, there is no Guardship series...

Whether the payoff is enough to compel you to read the book despite the difficulties depends on what you think of its epic worldbuilding. (Whether you like the plot, which could be accurately described like this, depends on your tastes, too.) The Web is a huge, mysterious thingy that can be used to travel faster than the speed of light. It can support the Guardships (to give you an idea of what they're like, read the bottom-most item here), but nothing bigger than that. (Who needs anything bigger?) The Guardships were made four thousand years ago by enormously powerful hereditary corporations called Houses, and are thought to be the pinnacle of technology. The Houses intended them to keep the law in "Canon Space," the region which is, well, guarded by the Guardships. Over the four thousand years of their history, the Guardships have repeatedly put down invasions and rebellions, most recently Enherrenraat, some kind of rebellion against them by the very Houses that created them. (It's five hundred years later-many of the Houses are still suffering for it, and the one that warned the Guardships of the insurrection apparently is doing great because it's got exclusive deals with them now.)

Probably the single worst of these attacks was launched by the Ku, a now-rare alien race that invaded three thousand years before the book present. Using techniques developed by the legendary warrior-sage Kez Maefele (the Ku are mystics of a sort), the Ku discovered one of the few weaknesses of the Guardships and managed to capture one, although it self destructed before they could do anything with it. As it happens, Kez Maefele is still alive.

Yes, you read that right. The Ku warrior and wizard (I think that means strategist) castes, as well as Kez Maefele, who was a sort of hybrid of the two, were genetically engineered to live forever, as they were extremely useful when they lived a long time. And while he was defeated, Kez Maefele survived, hiding with the unassuming alias of Turtle on some random world in the slums. (I'll call him Turtle after this, as he thought of himself as Turtle after all these years.)

Turtle is found by one of the Guardships, and rather impetuously is shown the Guardship starbase. He escapes because the Guardship was a little schizophrenic, and eventually meets up with some aliens who have the power to fight the Guardships toe to toe.

Oops.

These aliens are "methane breathers" (you can't breathe methane, for crying out loud!) which are some kind of huge, weird, Lovecraftian colonial organisms, armed with telepathy that uses the Web to communicate. Their technology is second only to the Guardships' stuff, and in fact the Guardships have only one hardware advantage, guns called Hellspinners which are considered pretty impressive. (They can be fired through screens, the setting's defensive forcefields. Normally if you want to do that, you have to open a hole. This actually had something to do with the tactic the Ku used to capture a Guardship.) And when Turtle meets up with them, he uses their coordinating abilities (FTL transmission is only possible through the Web, but the Canon society doesn't know how to do it) to launch a harrying offensive against the Guardships like they've never seen.

And that's not even the half of it.

It's a crazy universe, and one that I kind of wish had been allowed to play out a bit more leisurely than it did. As it is, The Dragon Never Sleeps is one of those books I'll keep around to re-read every now and again to see if I'll be able to follow it any better.

-Signing off.