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Title | Doc Sidhe
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Author | Aaron Allston
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Cover Art | David Mattingly
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Publisher | Baen Book
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First Printing | Baen Books - 1995
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Title | Sidhe Devil
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Author | Aaron Allston
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Baen Books - 2001
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First Printing | Baen Books - 2001
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Category | Urban Fantasy
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Harris, Gaby, Doc, Alastair, Jean-Pierre, Noriko, Joseph, Zeb
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Main Elements | Faery
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Website | ---
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 Doc Sidhe
Olympic kickboxer Harris Greene's career has just self-destructed, and both his manager and his fiance, Gaby, have dumped him. While looking for Gaby, he interrupts a bizarre trio as they are kidnapping her, and he is hurled into another, very weird, universe. His only hope is Doc Sidhe, this Art Deco universe's greatest champion of justice.
Sidhe Devil
When fight arranger Zeb Poole meets his friends Harris and Gaby for the first time in several months, he decides there is something different about them — and he's right. Their adventures on the fair world, a place that is half magic and Celtic myth, half weird science and gangster-era danger, had changed them forever. They take him there to prove their story. And that's when his own adventures start.
For in the fair world metropolis of Neckerdam, a mad genius is sending fiery destruction against the city's skyscrapers, demanding fortunes to end the terror... and plotting an untimely demise for the city's greatest protector, Harris' and Gaby's friend, Doc Sidhe.
And across the sea, in a land that would be Germany in the world Zeb knows, a dictator has set in motion a campaign of racial purity that is chillingly familiar to Zeb and Doc's grim world allies.
When I got my eReader at the beginning of the year, I went straight to the Baen Free Library. In fact this site was one of the main reasons I wanted to get an eReader in the first place!
Working my way through the free books there, I decided I would give each of them a chance. Allston's Doc Sidhe was the first full novel and the cover was, well, not the kind of book I would normally have picked for myself. Bare chested guy, holding weird gun, standing on dragon gargoyles with lightning streaking in the background. Uh huh...but really cheezy cover aside, the story turned out far better than I'd expected.
It starts with Harris getting unintentionally sucked through a portal between worlds, and what a world he ends up in. I knew it was meant to be the Faery wold based on the title of the novel, but it was no land of Faery that I'd ever read about before. Air ships, art deco buildings, and flamboyantly dressed citizens driving old-style cars. This is no Lothlorien! It took a stereotype and turned it on it's head, and after a few chapters of wrapping my mind around it, I began to appreciate it's uniqueness.
Once again I thought I wouldn't like it because of the bizarre setting, but the characters really got to me. Harris, Jean-Pierre, Doc and the others. I found myself being drawn into this strange world and it's denizens. There's magic here, but only a few who are real practioners. There's also science here, but somewhat lagging our world. There were times when I had to put a little more effort into suspending my disbelief than I felt I should have, but overall the world was unexpectedly interesting.
This book will never go down as a literary classic, but it was a fun ride. Lots of action, some romance, more than one character with attitude and a sharp tongue (sometimes requiring the insertion of a foot in mouth), but as I mentioned before, most importantly characters you actually end up growing fond of. In fact I enjoyed it so much that now I'm left a little out of sorts. There is a sequel out there, Sidhe Devil (Sidhe of course is pronounced "She"), and it's out of print...argh! How cruel to put one book out there for free and make the second impossible to get!
Anyway, a good lesson in not judging a book by it's cover!
January 2024
OpenLibrary has removed many books from its offerings (to be fair, I didn't understand how they could offer so many recently published books for free) you can still find out of print books there, and I think that's a wonderful thing. It's one thing to be required to pay for a book that will send money back to an author, but what if the books is impossible to be find? I couldn't have bought it even if I'd wanted too...well aside from paying a huge amount to a second hand seller and that doesn't benefit the author anyway. So I was so happy when after nearly 12 years of searching, it finally popped up on Open Library!
Of course by now I pretty much forgot everything that happened in the first book, and I know I didn't love it so very much that I was going to spend time re-reading it, so I just dived right into the second one. As I went along I got inklings of things I remembered from the first book and this book didn't require indepth knowledge anyway, what you needed to know got explained to one of the new characters.
I have however in the past decade come to hear about Doc Savage. I've not read it, but I've read other pulp SFF and I see now that this was meant to be in that vein, hence the whole "Doc" nickname. But this book isn't all fluff either, it tackles racism, with a black character in a world where a kind of Nazi Germany is rising, but instead of targetting a religion, they are targetting a skin colour. The one thing I have to complain about is it was too long, the team enters a kind of Olympics and every fight and competition was described in great detail. So if you like your fight scenes, then you'll enjoy this, but I kept wanting to get back to the, you know, actual plot.
The funny thing was, I seemed to recall I didn't like the first book, but having read my review above, clearly I grew to enjoy it quite a bit, and I have to say I enjoyed this one quite a bit too. Fortunately (?) there aren't any more books in the series to spend the next decade searching for, but if there had been one, I'd have kept my eye out for it.
A little side note, the Baen Free Library isn't what it was either, much of the library has been removed since I downloaded those books which I mentioned inspired my acquiring an eReader. I recall this wonderful explanation of why the library existed and how they wanted to give the books away so that readers can experience new authors more easily...and then I came back a few years later to a different note saying that "well, now that we found we can make money off eBooks..." Oddly, the Doc Sidhe duology is still not available to be purchased anyway so why remove from the free library? Perhaps in some alternate parallel world all this actually makes sense!
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