Eyes of Silver

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not Stackpole's Best
Review: First off - I am a really huge fan of Michael Stackpole. I've read all of his long SF/Fantasy, and have even delved into the Battletech (tm) books (though I really don't read gaming-linked books, since I'm not a gamer). However, this is not Stackpole's best effort.

Unlike the typical M-S novel, which has a prodigy-hero and shifts back and forth between the past and the present, ultimately linking up in the final few chapters (e.g., Talion: Revenant, Once a Hero), Eyes of Silver has many different threads going, and it's hard to say which character is the true focus of the story.

In the acknowledgements, M-S refers to Peter Hopkin's "The Great Game" which is a seminal work on the political and military events of the middle of the 19th century in Northern India and more importantly, Afganistan, where England and Russia vied for control of the area around the Kyber Pass. England had extensive colonial and imperial interests in India, and the knew that the Russian Tsar wanted a piece of that. Who ever controlled the Kyber Pass (the only fully usable passage from the Asian steppes through the Himalyas, would hold the key to the entire Indian subcontinent (the Russians wanted in and the British wanted to keep them out). The native Afgans were lead by a man called Dost Mohammed - a rather brilliant military leader who roundly defeated the British is the 1840's, but at the same time, managed to keep the Russians out. The political and military maneuvering of the two greatest empires - Britain and Russia, became known as the "Great Game" - a series of advances and retreats, diplomatic forays and imperial posturing, much like a good game of chess.

Eyes of Silver is clearly indebted to the events of the mid-1800s (even to borrowing place and people names) - but the story fails to fully capture the reader (or at least this one).

I applaud Michael Stackpole for his audacity - not many fantasy/sf writers would endeavour to recreate actual complex political events as the basis for a story. Perhaps, if there were fewer characters, and others were more fully developed, the novel would have worked better.

If you're like me - working your way through Stackpole's booklist - leave this one for last.

Rating:
Summary: Great world, great characters
Review: Like most of Stackpole's books, this book has characters that leap off the page and a world that really seems real. Stackpole has a way of paying homage to real-world events without it reading as satire or theft. This book was on the slow-side in terms of pace -- not as slow as Jordan or Goodkind, though. The depth of the world more than makes up for it.

Rating:
Summary: Crown Jewel of a Book
Review: With Eyes of Silver, Stackpole has done what has become nigh impossible in the last 30 years - he's told a compelling fantasy story in under 500 pages. Take that, Robert Jordan!

The universe of Eyes of Silver is a barely disguised recreation of 19th century Europe, with an England and a Russia battling over an Afghanistan - The Great Game replayed on a different board. "Napoleon" had been defeated a dozen years before, and "Genghis Khan" is prophesied to be reborn. Against that backdrop, Stackpole places characters we instantly like, and a plot with enough twists and turns to satisfy the most demanding readers.

Stackpole is best known for his incredible Star Wars X-wing novels. The same flair for crisp action he brought to those novels can be found here. If you enjoyed the X-wing series, you will not be disappointed with Eyes of Silver.