![]() Here we have a fascinating study in All Hats Are Gray in the Darkness. Worse, the German forces they're facing aren't just ordinary Wehrmacht, but the elite Waffen-SS. Things have gone wrong, and Eric's unit has been cut off from the main Draka attack. In fact, on a personal level most of them would seem like nice people to have around - until they say something that reminds you that they serve a political and social system that regards only their own caste to be people, and everyone else to be cattle, either already under the Yoke or ferals yet to be Yoked.Īfter we've seen firsthand what Draka society means, it's back to the story-present of the first chapter. They aren't your standard cackling, gloating villains of melodrama and comics, or even the cynical, venal villains that cyberpunk has made popular. We get the fundamental juxtapositions of beauty and cruelty, of tremendous virtue in the service of monstrous evil, that make the Draka so chilling. These chapters give us a sense of what the Draka homeland and their society is, first through the eyes of one of its own (albeit disaffected) and then those of someone from a culture more like the reader's, as Eric plays host to Dreiser. Stirling's very first published novels and there is evidence that it may have been written far earlier and published only after he'd established his street cred from several collaborations in another fictional universe. It's a rather clumsy technique, but this was one of Mr. Dreiser is acting as an embedded reporter, although the term is not used, but his purpose is the same - to convey the experience of the war from the front, and in this case to make the very alien culture of the Draka at least palatable enough to American readers to get them to support the alliance with the Domination against the Nazis and the Japanese, never mind that it's a deal with an even worse devil than the alliance with Stalin's USSR in the Primary World.Īfter that initial chapter, we stop for some backfill, taking Eric back several months to his last visit home. He is accompanied by Bill Dreiser, who's pretty clearly a roman a clef figure for William Shirer, who was author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the Primary World. His deepest longing is to find a way to end the madness, to allow his people to be at peace and live their lives instead of being living weapons. At the same time he's historically aware enough to understand the forces that drive these things, the abyss upon which the Draka teeter every day, kept from falling in only because they are willing to expend every bit of their strength to hold themselves back. The endless conquests, the brutal repression of the ordinary people, the serfs, who are slaves in all but name. Yet he's a man profoundly uncomfortable with the society in which he lives, deeply aware of its flaws. He's one of the elite even among the Draka, the son and heir of a plantation family that goes all the way back to the beginnings of the Domination, when it was just a Crown Colony on the southern tip of Africa. And then we are thrust into the middle of an ongoing battle and introduced to Centurion Eric von Shrakenberg, who is preparing for a parachute drop into a hot landing zone. The framing story of Henry Carmaggio and the reporter serve to give us a slight introduction, the idea that we are going to be tossed straight into a world in which a self-appointed Master Race sought to rule the world. ![]() Rather, it is an omnibus volume that compiles the three original Draka books, Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, and The Stone Dogs, woven together by a framing narrative that continues the story of the timeline Gwen Ingolfsson and Ken Lafarge battled over in Drakon (unfortunately Creative Differences with the publisher seem to have 86ed the planned sequel which would've carried that storyline forward a generation). This volume is not the long-awaited sequel to Drakon. ![]()
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