Darkwar

October 12, 2009
Before turning to gritty fantasy-world tales like the Black Company series, Cook wrote some high-quality space opera, as this omnibus reprint shows. In a full-blown and very 1980s space fantasy trilogy, the Silth, wolflike alien witches, use telepathy and enslaved otherworldly beings to explore the Milky Way. Marika, a young Meth whose planet has been targeted by the Silth, discovers that she has remarkable psychic talents. Despite her personal disinterest in power, she finds herself increasingly forced to ruthlessly pursue it, both to protect herself and to force social change on the other Meth in hopes of surviving an impending ice age, vast social upheaval and the appearance of the powerful and expansionist beings known as humans. This is an effectively told if minor tragedy, and an interesting example of Cook's early work.

October 18, 2010
Teaching an old dog new tricks can be a world-shaking task, as documented in this omnibus collection of mid-1980s proto-steampunk science fantasies from noted fantasy author Cook (Chronicles of the Black Company). In "Doomstalker," Marika, a young pup of a matriarchal canid race, has her world overturned when northern nomads raid her packstead and she develops psychic abilities. In "Warlock," Marika learns of the politics behind the raids, involving a power-hungry, space-faring sisterhood and rebellious males including her own littermate. In "Ceremony," her talents and cold logic threaten the social structure of her world as she struggles to save it from global cooling and contact with aliens. Played out against an intriguing and well-detailed culture of feudal guilds contending with wooden spaceships, Marika's tale is affecting even as her path leads over the bodies of many she once loved.