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The Shadow War Of The Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City. Prologue (2011)

by John Scalzi(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Tor

review 1: I got sucked into this book by reading the opening Kindle excerpt - a lengthy description of how incredibly dark and black and un-see-throughable the night was the dark evening the Night Dragons attacked. An entire paragraph lampooning the over-the-top style of the Dungeons and Dragons books, overly serious, and ridiculous as a result, and I was hooked.This isn't really much more than a long blog post, so my review will be brief. There are incredible shades of Terry Pratchett hidden in this short entry, and I feel as though John Scalzi could easily pour himself into a humorous fantasy novel based on the introduction we've seen here. He definitely has the comedy chops - see contained within the Emperor's magician experimenting on the correlation between blood loss and battl... moree-effectiveness using leeches and a game of chess.It's straight out of Discworld, really, although a little bit more mean spirited, which turns out to be a good thing. I doubt he'll continue as this was an April Fool's joke, but I'd read more from this Shadow War of the Night Dragons series. Without a doubt.If you like Discworld and want something that reads fast and plays funny, this is right up your alley.A small aside: the hook at the end was actually good enough to make me want to read more. That's good writing.
review 2: It was only after I read this story that I learned it had been written as an April Fool’s joke. That clarified so much about why I disliked it. This is an incoherent story that apparently was supposed to be humorous, but fell far, far flat. Only the power of Scalzi’s popularity with fandom, and the overall weakness of the short story category, explains how fluff like this gets nominated for a Hugo award. less

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