Various Thoughts

A series I initially skipped over due the description raising some red flags, K.D. Robertson‘s Heretic Spellblade novels at first seemed to be just as bad as I feared.

Not only do they drop you straight into massive harem territory with no shortage of sexual content, but the protagonist’s whole ‘I want my women back’ attitude is pretty disgusting. As it turns out, that ends up being 100% intentional and about halfway through the first novel he realizes his mistake. From that point on the series becomes incredibly good for some time… right up until the fifth or sixth novel. Around there the story starts to buckle under its own weight and almost all of the harem holdouts fold; by the end there’s only like two girls who haven’t had sex with him.

Overall I’d still say it’s a great overpowered protagonist paranormal romance, but it does take some work to make it through all the politics, exposition, and ‘defeated by sex’ present in those later novels.

Another series by the same author, Neural Wraith occupies a space between the above and Mob Sorcery in its romance aspects. Like the former there’s an entire strata of girls obsessed with the protagonist (androids this time instead of beastkin), but like the latter the sex is backloaded (and also fairly niche since the girls here are armored combat robots rather than sexbots).

In terms of story and setting it’s completely different from both however. For one it takes place on a cyberpunk future-Earth, for another it focuses on procedural action/drama (it flirts with mystery but most of the clues remain character-side), and most notable of all is that the protagonist isn’t overpowered in any way. Well, besides being catnip to androids. Regardless, the series ends up quite good despite being a bit too exposition-heavy at times.

Finally we come to Demon’s Throne, also by the same author, which was published between the first and second Neural Wraith novels. It’s easily the weakest of the batch for all sorts of reasons, from the questionable character interactions at the start to the abrupt sex scenes, and very generic. I’ve little desire to keep reading beyond this first book… although I suppose it does work as a guilty pleasure time waster.