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Spelljammer: The Cloakmaster Cycle #6
The Ultimate Helm
Amid political intrigue, Teldin Moore battle for control of the great ship Spelljammer in the sequel to The Broken Sphere. Original.
307 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published September 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 16, 2016
Wow, what a sad little series this turned out to be... in this case, a six book series, each book with a different author, none of whom talked with the others about the direction of the story. After the first book, each subsequent author spent varying amounts of time throwing away what they didn't like from before, making the flow of the tale very choppy.
The gist of the story is that Teldin, a human from the AD&D world of Krynn, has a bunch of Spelljammer magical space ships dogfight in the air over his farm and one of them loses and falls on his house. He finds a survivor who passes a magic cloak to him, which turns out to be a highly sought after magical artifact that pretty much any organization in the know would kill to obtain, because it is so powerful, although Teldin has no idea how to use it. So, he gets chased all over Krynn, then in later books, all over the various areas of wildspace and crystal spheres that the Spelljammer ships can get to, as he tries to find out what the hell is going on. Eventually he figures out some of the powers of the cloak that he is the master of (as in the 'Cloakmaster Cycle') and discovers that it is linked to the 'Spelljammer', the biggest, most powerful, enigmatic monster artifact ship in existence, and he goes chasing after it for a few books. At the end of the last book, book 5, he finally catches up to this monster ship and it attacks them! However, at the beginning of this book, book 6, it merely catches up to them and they land badly on one of its wings.
So, after a bad crash landing, all of his crew but one dies, and Teldin and his comatose first mate are rescued by humans, and we learn that the Spelljammer is a space manta ray so big that it has an entire city on its back filled with most of the various space based races, each in their own enclave, which often fight among themselves. Not always though... for example, there is an illithid (mind flayer) enclave, so you would think they would always be killing to live, but the Spelljammer magically creates fake brains for them to eat. Teldin's arrival twigs a bunch of the evil races to old prophesies about the 'Cloakmaster' arriving and bringing various dark times and unspecified types of destruction with him, and all the enclaves break out into fighting almost immediately.
The neogi were already fighting, but the beholders start fighting, the Illithids start as well, and so on. Teldin gets his bearings, and discovers that his elven girlfriend from the first book is already on board! Turns out that the neogi raided her entire family to get to her, in the hopes that she could either lead them to Teldin or be used as a hostage, so she was horribly tortured and so on. His good guy Illithid friend Estriss is on board too, having fallen in with some other, more evil Ilithids. Another elf from his past, Stardawn, who was some kind of captain or admiral, showed up as well, acting as a friend but secretly wanting to kill him and take the cloak for himself (and for the space elf navy). Oh, and I think his Giff (space hippo) friend Gomja is there too, but he doesn't do anything. Plus, Gaye the half kender shows up from time to time as a psychic projection from the Herdspace sphere to help out (something that still shouldn't be possible).
So, Teldin figures out the lay of the land, and we're treated to some of the various player's plans from a first person point of view. The beholders want to take over. The Ilithids want to take over. The neogi want to take over, plus a bunch of the neogi from previous books are there doing their own thing. Stardawn wants to take over. Finally, there is a powerful undead lich (supposedly the first captain of the spelljammer, although there's no explanation for why it isn't a demilich yet after half a million years) living in the conduits of the Spelljammer that wants to kill everyone, including the Spelljammer, which is also alive.
So, pretty much all at once, fighting breaks out, the elven girlfriend gets captured by the lich, and Teldin's cloak starts bonding with the Spelljammer which compels him to bond with it as its official captain. He gathers a smallish group and try to save the girlfriend first, walk into a bunch of traps, fight their way out, get saved by Gaye and an unknown function of his cloak, but it was all a ruse... the girlfriend was an illusion! So, they give up and run around to various magical locations to appease the Spelljammer's compulsion. They learn all about the history of the Broken Sphere, the Spelljammer, and so on, and Teldin finally completely masters the cloak! He is the Cloak Mastah!
While all this is happening, all the races, armadas and factions that had been tracking either Teldin, his cloak, or the Spelljammer itself show up and enter a huge free for all battle. At first they fight amongst themselves, but then they start attacking the Spelljammer too. I have to say, this part of the story was more like an extreme blow by blow of a tactical board game and got rather tedious.
Finally, Teldin makes it to the captain's helm, completes some completely stupid last second challenges, and merges with the Spelljammer. Stardawn, who had tagged along, took his chance and stabbed him right in the heart! Teldin sort of dies, and the lich, who had been hiding invisibly right next to them, was furious, because that meant his plan (whatever it was) wouldn't work. So, the lich killed Stardawn, then everyone fights the lich.
At this point, the elven girlfriend somehow figured out from her brief imprisonment that liches have phylacteries that house their souls, and furthermore this lich was foolhardy and probably kept it on him, and oh by the way he had a really gaudy amulet on. How she managed this out of the blue is not explained... You would think that in magical lands with all sorts of terrible monsters in them, this would be part of lich 101 or something and be common knowledge, but evidently not. Anyway, Teldin popped back to life (having merged life forces with the Spelljammer), heard her idea, and smashed the amulet. Then a demon showed up and killed the lich (something that should be impossible, since they were out in the 'flow'). Yay!
So, from here on it gets even more weird. Teldin tells everyone that he's the last captain... the Spelljammer is about to die. However, it also just now made a 'smalljammer', a ship that doubles as sort of a Spelljammer spawn, and tells them to get to it and escape. After a bunch of fighting, killing the last neogi bad guys, and waiting for a random falling ship to open some stuck hangar bay doors, they escape.
Meanwhile, the Spelljammer gets nearly destroyed, then escapes at the last minute, blowing up all the ships around it (except for the smalljammer) because magic. The broken sphere, which was where the Spelljammer was created but accidentally destroyed when leaving it for the first time killing everyone inside, is somehow restored, but sealed. Inside, all the old life forms that lived there before (except the evil one, presumably) are reformed, especially the thingies that had all merged together to become the first Spelljammer. Finally, Teldin/Spelljammer somehow reached an entirely new, normal style universe of infinite size, turned into a bigger, more bluely awesome ship, and settled down to wait a few billion years until life evolved somewhere and they randomly blundered into it to say hi. The end.
So, how is the story choppy? Well, in book 1 Teldin, although technically a war veteran of the 'War of the Lance', was really just some kind of supply chain guy, in charge of taking care of mules, and it was stated quite plainly that although he could sort of brawl and could hold a sword without stabbing his own eye out, he couldn't stand up to anyone with the least bit of actual fighting experience. He spends a good portion of the book painstakingly learning how to use a spear (gotta work up to swords!) and finally he is gifted an ancient magical spear from his elven girlfriend's family. Then, the first thing he does in the next book is lose the spear, never to be mentioned again, and picks up sword and does just fine with it. In book 6 here, he even runs into the girlfriend again, and still the ancient magical spear of her now dead-by-neogi family isn't mentioned.
Teldin in general: He was in love with the elf... but it could never be! Then he was in love with the human Julia... but it could never be! Then he was in love with an elven bard... but she was evil! Then he was in love with a half kender lady... but it could never be! Then Julia showed up later, and they had a thing going... but he accidentally killed her! Then Gaye kept showing up... and the elven girlfriend too. Make up your mind!
What else... how about having Teldin barely find the Spelljammer with all sorts of esoteric stolen magical equipment as well as his innate knowledge granted by his cloak/amulet Ultimate Helm, then having half the bad guys and a few good guys somehow make it there first... even though up until then they were just barely managing to follow Teldin?
Finally, this book managed to kill the one story element that had made it through all of the previous five books intact (well, from book 2 on anyway)... the origin of the Spelljammer. This was Estriss's whole thing after all... the one good guy mind flayer who had dedicated his life to ancient history and just wanted to find the origins of a bunch of artifacts that had a the same weird triple symmetry. This was slowly built up, how many of these things had some triple flower motif, how it was surmised that they belonged to an extinct super race called the Juna or some such. Later, how they must have had trilateral symmetry for their bodies, and strange hand structures to hold weird ancient weapons. Later still, that the Arcane (Mercane?), enigmatic super traders who are the only ones who can make "Spelljamming Helms" (except for those that can totally make their own helm equivalents, but whatever), must have learned their trade from them. Then, they find a super huge planet sized artifact that was taking care of a sort of devolved version of the Juna (but were still psychic) that still had tribal knowledge of the Broken Sphere, giving the last clue to finally finding the Spelljammer!
Well, in this book, it was just "a bunch of humans made it a couple of million years ago in a sphere with a lot of magic in it". WTF? That was... just... so damned boring.
So, aside from lame plot elements going on, there was also a lot that flat out ignored the AD&D setting in general and the Spelljammer setting in particular. A few examples:
1: Nothing is supposed to be able to extend outside a crystal sphere, not magic, not psychic powers... even the gods are excluded, especially so, I guess. The whole point of spelljamming is that it is the only way to get out of the sphere universe and then get back into a new one. Setting aside the whole broken sphere situation, Gaye the half kender should not have been able to project her psychic self out of the Herdspace sphere to help out. (And given that she could, why the hell didn't her super powerful space slug mentor help out too? What a jerk!)
2: The lich shouldn't have died when they destroyed his phylactery, it should have just pissed him off. That amulet would have housed his soul, so if his body was killed, the phylactery would eventually make him a new body or allow him to take over a nearby corpse. Since they destroyed the phylactery first, it would have just made the body of the lich its final body... they still would have had to have killed it.
3: The other part of the whole point of spelljamming is that the only way to get anywhere once you're outside of the crystal spheres is the long way, by using a spelljamming ship of some kind (or be a radiant dragon, or whatever). There is no other way, because out in the 'flow', all forms of planar travel are prohibited, otherwise once you got outside the spheres mages would just teleport to wherever they wanted. But not only do we have Gaye popping up all over the place, but we also have the demon that 'gates' in when the good guys break the lich's phylactery. What the hell? So yeah, first, there shouldn't be any magical travel, and second, the deal with the places between spheres is that they aren't connected to all of that planar stuff in the first place! Sigh.
4: Finally, the Spelljammer is supposed to eject a whole bunch of smalljammers when it spawns, and if the main ship dies one of them spontaneously transforms into the new Spelljammer! However, they make it clear that in this case the Spelljammer only made one smalljammer, this was the only smallhammer, and later... it didn't turn into the Spelljammer. Weird.
So, all in all, this book took me a year to read. It just got so tedious to get through that I put it down and only read a chapter or two when I was between library books. I finally got through it because I wanted to finally find out what happened and because I needed something to read on a plane. I'm disappointed, because the last few interesting plot lines got warped, the battles were very tedious and were only there to pad out the length of the book, and after all that we don't get to know what happened to the survivors. Does the elven girlfriend become the captain of the new Spelljammer at some point? Whatever happened to the whole 'Unhuman War' thing that was going on now that a lot of ships were destroyed by the Spelljammer at the end there. What ever happened to that damned magic spear?
Two stars... I didn't completely hate it.
The gist of the story is that Teldin, a human from the AD&D world of Krynn, has a bunch of Spelljammer magical space ships dogfight in the air over his farm and one of them loses and falls on his house. He finds a survivor who passes a magic cloak to him, which turns out to be a highly sought after magical artifact that pretty much any organization in the know would kill to obtain, because it is so powerful, although Teldin has no idea how to use it. So, he gets chased all over Krynn, then in later books, all over the various areas of wildspace and crystal spheres that the Spelljammer ships can get to, as he tries to find out what the hell is going on. Eventually he figures out some of the powers of the cloak that he is the master of (as in the 'Cloakmaster Cycle') and discovers that it is linked to the 'Spelljammer', the biggest, most powerful, enigmatic monster artifact ship in existence, and he goes chasing after it for a few books. At the end of the last book, book 5, he finally catches up to this monster ship and it attacks them! However, at the beginning of this book, book 6, it merely catches up to them and they land badly on one of its wings.
So, after a bad crash landing, all of his crew but one dies, and Teldin and his comatose first mate are rescued by humans, and we learn that the Spelljammer is a space manta ray so big that it has an entire city on its back filled with most of the various space based races, each in their own enclave, which often fight among themselves. Not always though... for example, there is an illithid (mind flayer) enclave, so you would think they would always be killing to live, but the Spelljammer magically creates fake brains for them to eat. Teldin's arrival twigs a bunch of the evil races to old prophesies about the 'Cloakmaster' arriving and bringing various dark times and unspecified types of destruction with him, and all the enclaves break out into fighting almost immediately.
The neogi were already fighting, but the beholders start fighting, the Illithids start as well, and so on. Teldin gets his bearings, and discovers that his elven girlfriend from the first book is already on board! Turns out that the neogi raided her entire family to get to her, in the hopes that she could either lead them to Teldin or be used as a hostage, so she was horribly tortured and so on. His good guy Illithid friend Estriss is on board too, having fallen in with some other, more evil Ilithids. Another elf from his past, Stardawn, who was some kind of captain or admiral, showed up as well, acting as a friend but secretly wanting to kill him and take the cloak for himself (and for the space elf navy). Oh, and I think his Giff (space hippo) friend Gomja is there too, but he doesn't do anything. Plus, Gaye the half kender shows up from time to time as a psychic projection from the Herdspace sphere to help out (something that still shouldn't be possible).
So, Teldin figures out the lay of the land, and we're treated to some of the various player's plans from a first person point of view. The beholders want to take over. The Ilithids want to take over. The neogi want to take over, plus a bunch of the neogi from previous books are there doing their own thing. Stardawn wants to take over. Finally, there is a powerful undead lich (supposedly the first captain of the spelljammer, although there's no explanation for why it isn't a demilich yet after half a million years) living in the conduits of the Spelljammer that wants to kill everyone, including the Spelljammer, which is also alive.
So, pretty much all at once, fighting breaks out, the elven girlfriend gets captured by the lich, and Teldin's cloak starts bonding with the Spelljammer which compels him to bond with it as its official captain. He gathers a smallish group and try to save the girlfriend first, walk into a bunch of traps, fight their way out, get saved by Gaye and an unknown function of his cloak, but it was all a ruse... the girlfriend was an illusion! So, they give up and run around to various magical locations to appease the Spelljammer's compulsion. They learn all about the history of the Broken Sphere, the Spelljammer, and so on, and Teldin finally completely masters the cloak! He is the Cloak Mastah!
While all this is happening, all the races, armadas and factions that had been tracking either Teldin, his cloak, or the Spelljammer itself show up and enter a huge free for all battle. At first they fight amongst themselves, but then they start attacking the Spelljammer too. I have to say, this part of the story was more like an extreme blow by blow of a tactical board game and got rather tedious.
Finally, Teldin makes it to the captain's helm, completes some completely stupid last second challenges, and merges with the Spelljammer. Stardawn, who had tagged along, took his chance and stabbed him right in the heart! Teldin sort of dies, and the lich, who had been hiding invisibly right next to them, was furious, because that meant his plan (whatever it was) wouldn't work. So, the lich killed Stardawn, then everyone fights the lich.
At this point, the elven girlfriend somehow figured out from her brief imprisonment that liches have phylacteries that house their souls, and furthermore this lich was foolhardy and probably kept it on him, and oh by the way he had a really gaudy amulet on. How she managed this out of the blue is not explained... You would think that in magical lands with all sorts of terrible monsters in them, this would be part of lich 101 or something and be common knowledge, but evidently not. Anyway, Teldin popped back to life (having merged life forces with the Spelljammer), heard her idea, and smashed the amulet. Then a demon showed up and killed the lich (something that should be impossible, since they were out in the 'flow'). Yay!
So, from here on it gets even more weird. Teldin tells everyone that he's the last captain... the Spelljammer is about to die. However, it also just now made a 'smalljammer', a ship that doubles as sort of a Spelljammer spawn, and tells them to get to it and escape. After a bunch of fighting, killing the last neogi bad guys, and waiting for a random falling ship to open some stuck hangar bay doors, they escape.
Meanwhile, the Spelljammer gets nearly destroyed, then escapes at the last minute, blowing up all the ships around it (except for the smalljammer) because magic. The broken sphere, which was where the Spelljammer was created but accidentally destroyed when leaving it for the first time killing everyone inside, is somehow restored, but sealed. Inside, all the old life forms that lived there before (except the evil one, presumably) are reformed, especially the thingies that had all merged together to become the first Spelljammer. Finally, Teldin/Spelljammer somehow reached an entirely new, normal style universe of infinite size, turned into a bigger, more bluely awesome ship, and settled down to wait a few billion years until life evolved somewhere and they randomly blundered into it to say hi. The end.
So, how is the story choppy? Well, in book 1 Teldin, although technically a war veteran of the 'War of the Lance', was really just some kind of supply chain guy, in charge of taking care of mules, and it was stated quite plainly that although he could sort of brawl and could hold a sword without stabbing his own eye out, he couldn't stand up to anyone with the least bit of actual fighting experience. He spends a good portion of the book painstakingly learning how to use a spear (gotta work up to swords!) and finally he is gifted an ancient magical spear from his elven girlfriend's family. Then, the first thing he does in the next book is lose the spear, never to be mentioned again, and picks up sword and does just fine with it. In book 6 here, he even runs into the girlfriend again, and still the ancient magical spear of her now dead-by-neogi family isn't mentioned.
Teldin in general: He was in love with the elf... but it could never be! Then he was in love with the human Julia... but it could never be! Then he was in love with an elven bard... but she was evil! Then he was in love with a half kender lady... but it could never be! Then Julia showed up later, and they had a thing going... but he accidentally killed her! Then Gaye kept showing up... and the elven girlfriend too. Make up your mind!
What else... how about having Teldin barely find the Spelljammer with all sorts of esoteric stolen magical equipment as well as his innate knowledge granted by his cloak/amulet Ultimate Helm, then having half the bad guys and a few good guys somehow make it there first... even though up until then they were just barely managing to follow Teldin?
Finally, this book managed to kill the one story element that had made it through all of the previous five books intact (well, from book 2 on anyway)... the origin of the Spelljammer. This was Estriss's whole thing after all... the one good guy mind flayer who had dedicated his life to ancient history and just wanted to find the origins of a bunch of artifacts that had a the same weird triple symmetry. This was slowly built up, how many of these things had some triple flower motif, how it was surmised that they belonged to an extinct super race called the Juna or some such. Later, how they must have had trilateral symmetry for their bodies, and strange hand structures to hold weird ancient weapons. Later still, that the Arcane (Mercane?), enigmatic super traders who are the only ones who can make "Spelljamming Helms" (except for those that can totally make their own helm equivalents, but whatever), must have learned their trade from them. Then, they find a super huge planet sized artifact that was taking care of a sort of devolved version of the Juna (but were still psychic) that still had tribal knowledge of the Broken Sphere, giving the last clue to finally finding the Spelljammer!
Well, in this book, it was just "a bunch of humans made it a couple of million years ago in a sphere with a lot of magic in it". WTF? That was... just... so damned boring.
So, aside from lame plot elements going on, there was also a lot that flat out ignored the AD&D setting in general and the Spelljammer setting in particular. A few examples:
1: Nothing is supposed to be able to extend outside a crystal sphere, not magic, not psychic powers... even the gods are excluded, especially so, I guess. The whole point of spelljamming is that it is the only way to get out of the sphere universe and then get back into a new one. Setting aside the whole broken sphere situation, Gaye the half kender should not have been able to project her psychic self out of the Herdspace sphere to help out. (And given that she could, why the hell didn't her super powerful space slug mentor help out too? What a jerk!)
2: The lich shouldn't have died when they destroyed his phylactery, it should have just pissed him off. That amulet would have housed his soul, so if his body was killed, the phylactery would eventually make him a new body or allow him to take over a nearby corpse. Since they destroyed the phylactery first, it would have just made the body of the lich its final body... they still would have had to have killed it.
3: The other part of the whole point of spelljamming is that the only way to get anywhere once you're outside of the crystal spheres is the long way, by using a spelljamming ship of some kind (or be a radiant dragon, or whatever). There is no other way, because out in the 'flow', all forms of planar travel are prohibited, otherwise once you got outside the spheres mages would just teleport to wherever they wanted. But not only do we have Gaye popping up all over the place, but we also have the demon that 'gates' in when the good guys break the lich's phylactery. What the hell? So yeah, first, there shouldn't be any magical travel, and second, the deal with the places between spheres is that they aren't connected to all of that planar stuff in the first place! Sigh.
4: Finally, the Spelljammer is supposed to eject a whole bunch of smalljammers when it spawns, and if the main ship dies one of them spontaneously transforms into the new Spelljammer! However, they make it clear that in this case the Spelljammer only made one smalljammer, this was the only smallhammer, and later... it didn't turn into the Spelljammer. Weird.
So, all in all, this book took me a year to read. It just got so tedious to get through that I put it down and only read a chapter or two when I was between library books. I finally got through it because I wanted to finally find out what happened and because I needed something to read on a plane. I'm disappointed, because the last few interesting plot lines got warped, the battles were very tedious and were only there to pad out the length of the book, and after all that we don't get to know what happened to the survivors. Does the elven girlfriend become the captain of the new Spelljammer at some point? Whatever happened to the whole 'Unhuman War' thing that was going on now that a lot of ships were destroyed by the Spelljammer at the end there. What ever happened to that damned magic spear?
Two stars... I didn't completely hate it.
September 12, 2025
I had low expectations for this series from the start. I only read it because I am trying to read everything that pertains to The Forgotten Realms and this series has one book that was staged in Toril. Although some of the books in the series exceeded my low expectations, this last book wasn't good. It was set up to be bad from the start. Six books with six different authors had the story all over the place with different writing styles and seemingly no coordination was evident. Teldin becoming part of the ship was a predictable ending. This book was hard to read. I'm having a hard time even writing a review. The ending was disappointing. I guess I'll say don't waste your time on this series. If they for some reason decide to extend the series or Spelljammer in general I won't be investing anymore time.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 31, 2025
Partly a review for this book and for the series, which is why I marked it spoilers.
This book, the 6th in the series has a good solid story but is several chapter and a hundred or more pages to long. With several chapters of descriptions of treasure rooms and battle fleets that are just not needed. Also the constant use of a dues exmachina character through out who turns up, fixes problem and vanishes again.
Moving on to the series itself. This book should really have been 2 books, one to get you set up on the spell jammer, properly introduce the characters and location and then the ending of this book would have landed better. Maybe explore as well how suddenly everyone can find the Spelljammer and up to this point that’s been near impossible. It’s handwaved here.
The biggest annoyance is that every single book has killed all bar the main character and the couple who return here, sort of. This book in particular just kill the entire crew that was part of the last one in a needless swat of the Spelljammer. The stakes would have been much much greater if more of the band had survived through.
This book, the 6th in the series has a good solid story but is several chapter and a hundred or more pages to long. With several chapters of descriptions of treasure rooms and battle fleets that are just not needed. Also the constant use of a dues exmachina character through out who turns up, fixes problem and vanishes again.
Moving on to the series itself. This book should really have been 2 books, one to get you set up on the spell jammer, properly introduce the characters and location and then the ending of this book would have landed better. Maybe explore as well how suddenly everyone can find the Spelljammer and up to this point that’s been near impossible. It’s handwaved here.
The biggest annoyance is that every single book has killed all bar the main character and the couple who return here, sort of. This book in particular just kill the entire crew that was part of the last one in a needless swat of the Spelljammer. The stakes would have been much much greater if more of the band had survived through.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 15, 2023
It just seemed so long and drawn out. The same things seemed to happen over and over and over again. Fight, break, fight, break, reveal, fight, break... About a hundred pages could have been taken out and it might have been better. Lots of characters from previous books were thrown in for fan service I guess, some appeared and there was no reason for them to be there. Some suddenly had all the answers needed that they never had before. Some appeared and made you wonder why it was so easy for them to get there but not the cloak master, and if it was so easy for them, why didn't they tell Teledin and save him all the trouble getting to the Spelljammer? All in all kind of a let down.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 30, 2019
Full review here:
https://jamesgenrebooks.blogspot.com/...
While the finale is actually really good, the build up to everything is rushed and silly. But I'm happy I read it anyway.
https://jamesgenrebooks.blogspot.com/...
While the finale is actually really good, the build up to everything is rushed and silly. But I'm happy I read it anyway.
March 28, 2025
This is the end of Teldin Moore's journey to the Spelljammer. It was a good end to the series. Like the other books it had you guessing and it introduced some new characters and had some returning characters. It was how I thought it would end though.
October 25, 2022
Disappointing ending. The shift in tone of writing was jarring.
April 24, 2023
Overcoming my lethargy about writing reviews to hate-review this book. This was the capstone to a series of novels in one of TSR's settings: The Cloakmaster Cyle, about wizards and warriors who adventure around a swords and spells galaxy in flying ships. Sounds kind of heavy metal, right? Like, the European comic style.
Sweet! Bring on my air guitar licks.
This book, tho. The series started out with a book that was just a bore. No space ships except for one crash that sends the series protagonist in the direction of his cosmic adventure, and then some gnome on neogi violence at the end. The other books were pretty close to entertaining, flitting between planets and battling some crazy monsters and foes.
And then, this. The authorial voice becomes stilted and grandiose in a way that turns the anonymously likeable everyman farmer-turned-macguffin into a massive Chad. Every other single character, even the recurring characters, become massively forgettable. And it is the most hackneyed travelogue of a giant manta ray shaped space ship with a city on it's back I have ever read.
It was a chore to read, and I did it out of a love for this weird little sub-genre I adored the idea of as a college student.
Sweet! Bring on my air guitar licks.
This book, tho. The series started out with a book that was just a bore. No space ships except for one crash that sends the series protagonist in the direction of his cosmic adventure, and then some gnome on neogi violence at the end. The other books were pretty close to entertaining, flitting between planets and battling some crazy monsters and foes.
And then, this. The authorial voice becomes stilted and grandiose in a way that turns the anonymously likeable everyman farmer-turned-macguffin into a massive Chad. Every other single character, even the recurring characters, become massively forgettable. And it is the most hackneyed travelogue of a giant manta ray shaped space ship with a city on it's back I have ever read.
It was a chore to read, and I did it out of a love for this weird little sub-genre I adored the idea of as a college student.
September 30, 2015
This book has something of a bad reputation as being an unworthy conclusion to this series. It's easy to see why, it's hardly the best of the series, but it's also not terrible. Howard juggles a few too many plot threads and factions here, many of which end up going nowhere, but it's all brought together competently enough with an ending that, while a little trite, also brings some closure to the entire story and makes sense within the context of the universe. Worth a read if you like the setting or have read the other novels.
September 15, 2011
Easily the worst book in the series. I'd recommend not reading it and just pretending that the series was instead never finished.
May 3, 2017
I really enjoyed this series even with all the frustrations of losing people and magic items along the way. It had some of the best thought experiments about size and proportions in space that I've come across in science fiction. I also loved to watch the evolution of the cloak to its final state. A magic item that grows with the user is a great idea. That much power is not meant for anyone so the ending was very similar to Spellfire but with a positive twist.
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