Book Review: The Adamantine Palace, by Stephen Deas

How can you love fantasy and not like dragons? They're kind of like vampires: everybody uses them, everybody who wants to make their mark on the genre tries to come up with a clever new way to use them, and usually they fail, so as a fantasy reader, you're inclined to roll your eyes at any book with a dragon on the cover. And yet, dragons are still pretty damn cool, when they're done right.

The Adamantine Palace is a mediocre effort in the field. It's not awful, like anything with "Dragonlance" in the title, but it's not great, like the first few books in some series that were pretty good until the author descended into hackdom and just started churning them out as reconstituted work-product. (What's McCaffrey's latest, Housecats of Pern?)

This wasn't a book I would likely have picked up normally, but the author did a good job of pimping it on John Scalzi's site:

The dragons in these books are monsters. They’re not cute, they’re not cuddly, and the only reason anyone gets to ride around on the back of them is because they are forcibly subdued by alchemical potions that are fed to them from birth. In fact, these dragons are so dangerous that for even one to break free could spell disaster for pretty much the entire civilisation (no prizes for guessing what happens pretty close to page one).

So you can, and probably should, read it as a straight epic fantasy with a cast of shady characters and a rampaging dragon that’s pretty ticked off about having been kept in a drugged stupor. I had no pretensions to anything more than a story about kick-ass dragons that ran on rocket-fuel when I set out to write these books; but sometimes when you sit down and write, you don’t get quite what you asked for.

Well, that sounded pretty cool. The idea of an escaped dragon being kind of like a missing nuclear warhead, except the nuclear warhead is sentient, and pissed off, appeals to me, and I was in the mood for a story that's "rocket-fueled" adventure, with dragons.

Did Deas deliver? A little yes, a little no, but mostly not so much.

( Dragons flame, reviewer just singes )

Summary: This is a book that people who still think AD&D novels are cool will probably like. For everyone else: if you really like dragons, then it's worth reading, but wait for the paperback.

Book Review: The Adamantine Palace, by Stephen Deas

How can you love fantasy and not like dragons? They're kind of like vampires: everybody uses them, everybody who wants to make their mark on the genre tries to come up with a clever new way to use them, and usually they fail, so as a fantasy reader, you're inclined to roll your eyes at any book with a dragon on the cover. And yet, dragons are still pretty damn cool, when they're done right.

The Adamantine Palace is a mediocre effort in the field. It's not awful, like anything with "Dragonlance" in the title, but it's not great, like the first few books in some series that were pretty good until the author descended into hackdom and just started churning them out as reconstituted work-product. (What's McCaffrey's latest, Housecats of Pern?)

This wasn't a book I would likely have picked up normally, but the author did a good job of pimping it on John Scalzi's site:

The dragons in these books are monsters. They’re not cute, they’re not cuddly, and the only reason anyone gets to ride around on the back of them is because they are forcibly subdued by alchemical potions that are fed to them from birth. In fact, these dragons are so dangerous that for even one to break free could spell disaster for pretty much the entire civilisation (no prizes for guessing what happens pretty close to page one).

So you can, and probably should, read it as a straight epic fantasy with a cast of shady characters and a rampaging dragon that’s pretty ticked off about having been kept in a drugged stupor. I had no pretensions to anything more than a story about kick-ass dragons that ran on rocket-fuel when I set out to write these books; but sometimes when you sit down and write, you don’t get quite what you asked for.

Well, that sounded pretty cool. The idea of an escaped dragon being kind of like a missing nuclear warhead, except the nuclear warhead is sentient, and pissed off, appeals to me, and I was in the mood for a story that's "rocket-fueled" adventure, with dragons.

Did Deas deliver? A little yes, a little no, but mostly not so much.

( Dragons flame, reviewer just singes )

Summary: This is a book that people who still think AD&D novels are cool will probably like. For everyone else: if you really like dragons, then it's worth reading, but wait for the paperback.