3 and a half , what a glorious confusing time to be had reading this book! Read this if you don't mind being confused for half the time and love intrigue! ( )

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Title: The Dragon Never Sleeps
Series: ----------
Author: Glen Cook
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 449
Format: Digital edition

Synopsis:

Humanity rules their part of space, The Canon. With the unstoppable force of the Guardships behind them, Canon forces enforce peace, their peace, whereever they go.

One House wants to stop that. One alien wants to stop that. One other branch of Humanity wants to stop that. But that House is ruled by a megolomaniac who wants to live forever through his forbidden clones. But that alien lives by a code of honor that is unbreakable. But that branch of humanity is enslaved to psychic mind leeches.

On the Guardship side of things, you have insane Guardships. You have nascent sentient Guardships. You have humans who live their lives over and over through cloning without ever remembering their past. You have a Humanity that is stagnating and possibling beginning the long road to its twilight.

And the stories take place with all of those characters and characteristics. Greed, War, Peace and Survival.

My Thoughts:

I had no idea of the background for 99/100ths of the time. I really enjoyed my time, but if you try to figure out the backstory or the history, you're sunk. It doesn't exist except in Cook's mind and he doesn't let slip hardly anything. This is a very “here and now” kind of story, even while taking years in story time.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself while reading this. I didn't feel like I had to understand anything. I just sat back, let the story unfold and let it roll over me. It was extremely complicated but since I wasn't trying to disentangle anything, it was actually rather simple. I was along for the ride. If I had been in an investigative mood I'm sure this would have driven me bonkers. But I wasn't, so it didn't.

I don't know that I could have told you that this was the same Glen Cooke who wrote the Black Company novels. It was a standalone book and even its style seemed standalone. I will say that it was dense and while it claims to be only 449 pages, it felt like the longest 449 pages I've ever read. Not a bad thing, but it was a long read.

★★★☆½ ( )

I'm torn in how to rate this one. Complicated characters, plot with lots of twists, at times difficult to keep up with. ( )

A distant future of a civilization so old that it has stratified and calcified into static heirarchies. Over it all, a tyrannical force of super-ships police Canon-space, ruthlessly maintaining Humanity's hold on the worlds therein.

This is really the story of the missions of One of the Guardships, the VII-Gemina, and her crew: a Crew that has been its crew for so long, recreated/reborn over and over such that they don't even know of any time BEFORE they were crew.

The Story starts off with a focus-- but halfway thru the book and several outrageous plot characters too many and you are just taking the ride through a very colorful universe where ancient superships maintain a Law that No-one remembers who first imposed it, fighting against ancient alien rebels who never die. The Plot just kinda spirals off into dark and there's no point in chasing it. That's the main negative of this book.

And then you hit the part where it seems that the Superships have minds of their own, mixed in with the uploaded consciousnesses of dead commanders-- and the whispered thought that NO LAWS govern them in the end.

A Weird, Strange future that I found entrancing to contemplate. If only the author had been disciplined to stay inside a more cohesive plot structure. ( )

A region of peace has come over the galaxy dictated and enforce by immortal Guardships run by humans. The Guardships travel on an artificial construct called the Web. However the population of humans is decreasing and Others are moving in. The Others at the periphery are looking to destroy the Guardships under the coercion of a an alien race with psychic powers and sadistic habits. The Others capture an ancient foe of the Guardships from a defeated warrior race. Meanwhile, a commercial House conspires against the Guardships and suffers from deadly internal politics.

I can understand why authors want to write a stand alone novel, but this book should have been at least two or three books. I loved the characters. I loved the premise and the plot, but the action was sometimes too fast and furious and sometimes much slower. If the book(s) had been longer, many of the passages that were rushed over in the first half would have been made much clearer. ( )