Brenner’s been around for a long time. So have his books.<\/p>\n
Originally published by DAW in the late ’80s to mid-90s, Brenner’s series of novels, The Dance of Gods<\/strong>, managed to find a core of dedicated fans. Unfortunately the volume of them just wasn’t enough for DAW to keep the novels in print. Fast forward several years, through the advent of the Internet, and Brenner decided it was time to give the novels another chance.<\/p>\n A Good friend of this blog, Chris the Book Swede, liked the first novel: <\/p>\n Catastrophe’s Spell, although extremely humourous is also an engaging, interesting story and an excellent start to the Dance of Gods series. I would very much like to see this book back in print.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So what went wrong? Why was The Dance of Gods such a hard sell when it came out? Some possible reasons:<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Too much plot and too many characters:<\/strong> the books are built around a sprawling crowd of raffish characters, too smart by half for their own good and more than a little self-reflective, in a series of overlapping and colliding storylines. Some of the cast members who appear in the first book in the series, Spell of Catastrophe (originally published as Catastrophe’s Spell), include:<\/p>\n Maximillian, the Vaguely Disreputable<\/strong> – free-lance adventurer and nostalgic technologist<\/p>\n The Creeping Sword<\/strong> – hard-boiled nom-de-plume<\/p>\n Zalzyn Shaa<\/strong> – physician, occasional bureaucrat, and man with a curse<\/p>\n The Great Karlini<\/strong> – research thaumaturge<\/p>\n The former Lion of the Oolvaan Plain<\/strong> – retired barbarian<\/p>\n Jurtan Mont<\/strong> – youth with an unusually melodic seizure disorder<\/p>\n Haddo<\/strong> – animal wrangler and pilot<\/p>\n Assorted gods, revolutionaries, insurgents, servitors, and cataclysms<\/strong> – the traditional cast of thousands<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Insufficient reverence for traditional tropes<\/strong>: for example, many of the characters are less than impressed by the use of magic. Rather than experiencing a sense of wonder, they’re more likely to respond to a spell casting with a muttered “yeah, whatever,” and try to bang you over the head with a skillet while your invocation is still taking shape.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 An approach to magic more suited to engineers or programmers than mystics<\/strong>: more procedure-based than object-oriented, perhaps, but communing with nature is usually the last thing on these practitioners’ minds. For that matter, I’m not sure the combination of magic-code hackers, molecular nanotech, and network-mediated consensual reality of the gods is something that could ever be summarized on a back-of-the-book blurb.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 No grand battles between good and evil<\/strong>: more of a struggle between self-interest and unintended consequences.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Too funny to be serious and too serious to be funny<\/strong>: it’s the characters, really, not me! Not my fault they approach their roles with a jaundiced eye and a sarcastic streak…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It may not have worked now, but it certainly seems like the genre has evolved enough in the past twenty years to allow a story like Brenner’s to thrive. And hey, it’s free! You can’t beat that price.<\/p>\n You can read an excerpt HERE<\/a> and download full electronic versions of the novels HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brenner’s been around for a long time. So have his books. Originally published by DAW in the late ’80s to mid-90s, Brenner’s series of novels, The Dance of Gods, managed to find a core of dedicated fans. Unfortunately the volume of them just wasn’t enough for DAW to keep the novels in print. Fast forward… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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\nFrom his web site:<\/p>\n