Teaser

For thousands of years, the Guardships have maintained peace. Peace enforced at gunpoint. Yet there are some threats that even the mighty guardships cannot overcome . . .

Review

Do you believe in reading slumps? A lot of readers will use the phrase to describe a time in which they, for one reason or another, find it difficult to read anything. This occurs most frequently with self-described ‘mood readers.’ What happens when they’re not in the right mood to read? For myself, reading slumps don’t really happen. Barring medical reasons or sheer business, I rarely struggle to read. I just keep on chugging along. The problem with my approach is I keep on picking up new books and slogging through them, even if I’m not enjoying them. Usually, a good book comes along and all is well. However, The Dragon Never Sleeps is now the third book in a row that has proven to be a real slog. So maybe I am in a slump after all.

Like most people, I suspect, I primarily know Glen Cook as a fantasy author. His Black Company novels are well-renowned in the genre. I myself read the first a fair few years ago. Unfortunately for Cook, I encountered his work right at the nadir of my relationship with grimdark literature. I did not have a good time, though I could appreciate the series’ place in the annals of fantasy fiction. That must have been about ten years ago, so when I found out that Glen Cook also wrote science fiction, I was willing to give Cook a second chance.

The Dragon Never Sleeps is ambitious in scope, I have to give it that. A lot of authors would turn this story into a whole series, but not Cook. It’s rare to get a full-blown space opera as a standalone novel, but that’s what we have here. Unfortunately, there’s a little too much going on here. In a little over four hundred pages, we meet somewhere in the region of a dozen characters, each with their own plotlines and character arcs. All jostling for space and time that simply isn’t there.

It’s not just characters that Cook throws around either. At one extreme of storytelling we have the super-detailed approach to description. Stephen King and Robert Jordan fall into this category. Authors who will tell you the exact price of a length of thread, and where that thread was sourced. At the other end of the spectrum are people like H. Beam Piper or David Gemmell, who rely more on being vague and evocative, relying on the reader’s imagination to fill the innumerable gaps in the text. Cook somehow threads his needle between these two halves, creating a vast world from scratch and then stubbornly refusing to describe any of it. I leave The Dragon Never Sleeps with no real clue what I’ve just read. I have no sense of the world’s history, its geography, its society.

And yet, I can’t lay all the fault at Cook’s feet. The book is paralysingly inaccessible, but maybe that was just me. Every time I turned the page, I bounced right off whatever was written on the next. For whatever reason, I simply could not get into this book.

So who can say? Maybe I am in a reading slump after all.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published by Popular Library
• First published in 1988
• 422 pages