James Nicoll Reviews

Glen Cook’s 1972 The Heirs of Babylon is a stand-alone post-holocaust novel.

Two centuries earlier, Germany was reduced from one hundred million people to one hundred thousand. The survivors’ descendants are concentrated in the Baltic Littoral. Germany and the neighbouring nations were lucky. Some nations, such as China, were extirpated¹.

The Baltic Littoral’s people live hand-to-mouth. Little can be spared to rebuild. Blame the perfidious Australians.

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1979’s A Shadow of All Night Falling is the first book in Glen Cook’s A Cruel Wind fantasy trilogy, set in his Dread Empire secondary-universe.

The great city of Ilkazar actually heeded the grim prophecy that the city and its grand empire would fall because of a witch. Every witch, real or supposed, who fell into Ilkazar’s hands was prudently burned alive. Problem solved … or so the city’s rulers thought. 

Varthlokkur’s mother was one such witch. The authorities took mercy on the boy, handing him over to doting foster parents. The bright young boy grew into a taciturn, grim, focused adult.

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The odds are fairly good that if you’re aware of Glen Cook, you know him for series like Garrett and Black Company; if you’re of a certain vintage, you might have read his early Dread Empire books, or perhaps the Starfishers space operas. The Black Company (novel, not series) would have made a fine inaugural book for my new review series, Military Speculative Fiction That Doesn’t Suck. However, it happens that I prefer SF to fantasy [1], so I will review something that (thanks to Stupid Publisher Tricks back in the Late Reagan) was unjustly obscure: 1988’s The Dragon Never Sleeps.

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