A week or so ago I finished reading Deathstalker by Simon R. Green as part of my space opera obsession. This book was a mixed bag for me — sufficiently positive that I’ll grab the next book at some point, but since I know the series has six or seven books in it, the quality will have to improve a bit if I’m going to commit to the whole thing.
As our story begins, there’s a guy named Owen Deathstalker who lives on some backwater planet, where he’s happy to go along his everyday life and not worry too much about the workings of the politics of the Empire in which he lives. His life is shattered when the Empress Lionstone (great name, that) declares him an outlaw and strips him of his hereditary title as head of the Deathstalker clan. Owen finds himself with a series of questionable companions with whom he plans to form a rebellion against the Empire.
Now, there’s some other stuff that happens, too — lots of time is spent detailing the various intrigues within the Imperial court and the clan loyalties that swirl around the Empress. In fact, Green spends too much time on that aspect of his story, so much so that at one point Owen Deathstalker, the title character in this inaugural book in a long and ambitious series about this character, disappears from the book for about 150 pages or so as we follow the trials and tribulations of Clan Wolfe and Clan Campbell.
Other things are problematic as well; Green’s tone shifts all over the place. At times the book is a riveting space opera adventure, but at other times it almost reads like a parody of a space opera adventure. Our main villain, the Empress Lionstone — commonly referenced as “the Iron Bitch” — gets her first major opportunity to vent her imperial wrath and show her lethal teeth when some resistance fighters infiltrate one of her parties and humiliate her with, of all things, a pie in the face. That’s a good indicator of how odd this book feels at times: it’s an at-times graphically violent space opera that takes us to many worlds in its 500-some pages, follows multiple plotlines involving a pretty large cast of characters, gives us warriors who can spontaneously summon tremendous powers from within themselves, gives us clones as secondary citizens and oppressed telepaths, features ancient weapons and artefacts of alien origins, has ships hyperspace-ing from one end of the galaxy to the other at will, and…pie-throwing. Um…OK. Nothing against pie-throwing in principle, of course — I’m a fan of the old edible missile — but here it just had me thinking, “What?”. Some reviews I’ve read indicate that Green is working at actual parody or pastiche here, but I must have missed an awful lot of the jokes.
Other things with the characters don’t fare so well. The Empress basically comes off as your standard autocratic ruler who is sadistic and brutal in her eagerness to remain in power, but that’s about it. There’s nothing to grab onto as a character there. The most sharply-drawn characters are people who seem like they should be minor characters, and the guy whose name is on the front of the book — Owen Deathstalker — gets kind of short-shrift for much of the work. (It gets better at the end.) Also, certain surprising revelations aren’t handled terribly well; one is absolutely no surprise at all, and the other is a surprise but then doesn’t seem to matter when the character in question dies soon thereafter.
But still, for the most part Green keeps the pages turning, and he’s got some gift for prose (I quoted the first couple of paragraphs here, and I still maintain that that is one heck of an opening passage). I just hope the series either (a) settles down a bit in the next few books, or (b) throws caution to the wind.
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Green reuses his jokes way too much — I’ve spotted them in book after book.
Heck, he’s gotten quite meta — reusing ideas, names, people in other books, despite context. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
I found the Deathstalker books (I’ve read the first three) to be decent Space Opera, but nothing special. The rest of his work ranges from “Crap” to “occasionally brilliant”.
If you want an example of his top work — try Blue Moon Rising or Shadows Fall. Deathstalker’s about middling.
On the other hand, I’ve been reading the Dresden Files books — and he’s really grown as an author. His first book in the series was his first published book, and by the time he hits about book 4 you can see his growth as an author.
It’s kind of nice that way. Seven books in the series, and each is still better than the last. Most authors tend to go the other way when they do a series.
I should probably clarify — Jim Butcher writes the Dresden Files books, and I realized upon reading my original post I seemed to be implying Simon Green does. D’oh!