The Cold Commands by Richard Morgan

I hadn't thought Morgan would produce a sequel to The Steel Remains but here it is. Same characters, same world, new story. I thought he wouldn't produce a sequel because the first in this series (if it can be called that) was an obvious homage to other writers of action fantasy. You've got an Elric of Melnibone, a Conan and a female 'wizard' who's the last of her kind, all combined together in a world which appears to be the convergence point for scientific and magical races who have quite some history.

The ideas in here are awesome - the concept of beings who transcend three dimensions, who live in probability space - is really very cool.

More of an issue is that this book seems to take 350 pages to get to the point where the story really starts and then wraps it up in 50. That's a tad unfair as I enjoyed the journey to the third act but nevertheless it's a flaw in the writing. Either the book needed to be longer or shorter...you decide.

As ever Morgan's prose is fun to read and the characters are pretty interesting but for all the preamble I do think that for two of the three there's probably not enough change within them - they go through some pretty intense experiences but don't seem to suffer, develop or otherwise reflect on what happens to them over much. Sure it's action adventure but Morgan has a decent track record of character development and bringing you to really care about his protagonists. That was missing here.

Finally, I hope there's another one because I don't think we've really understood half of what's going on here or what he's got in mind. I get the feeling the birth of The Cold Commands was difficult and I wonder if it was rushed out before it was ready...either way my own view is that it could have been much longer and dealt with at least four unresolved major story lines which remain unaddressed by the end of The Cold Commands.