Title Northworld Author David Drake Cover Art --- Publisher Baen - 1999 First Printing Ace - 1990
	Title Vengeance Author David Drake Cover Art --- Publisher Baen - 1999 First Printing Ace - 1991
	Title Justice Author David Drake Cover Art --- Publisher Baen - 1999 First Printing Ace - 1992
	Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Nils Hansen, North, Fortin, Sparrow Main Elements Alternate Dimensions, Battlesuits, Gods Website david-drake.com

Northworld

Vengeance

Justice

I downloaded this book for free from the now mostly defunct Baen Free Library. This kind of SF doesn't really appeal to me, but when I started a god/angel/demon themed year and saw this one was based on Norse mythology, of course I had to include it, to get a little SF twist to a theme that is mostly fantasy based.

Well, I was right, it wasn't a trilogy for me. I'll list the things I didn't like, but those may very well be things that appeal to the target audience (which was clearly men).

1 - Our protagonist is a warrior, so of course, there were a lot of battles, the vast majority taking place on the a certain world I take to be Midgard, i.e. the "Vikings", their souls being culled for a later Ragnarok that doesn't happen. They fight using battlesuits, think Gundam anime. They have plasma arcs that blast out of their gauntlets and a lot of people got sliced, diced, cauterized, exploded, guts spilling out everywhere...you get the idea. To be fair, the only battles I've found I've enjoyed reading about are the Gunpowder fantasy ones, so I found myself not only not caring who won, but I couldn't even keep track of who was fighting and on which side, it wasn't important, just a lot of people getting killed and Hansen eventually having a little PTSD over it.

2 - Women were sex toys...ok, yes some were Valkyries and thus warriors but even they were ready to strip naked at the drop of a hat. And ugh...in the last book there is a character called Lena, so fat she moved like a beached whale in her command chair, and she had two boy toys whom she constantly fondled in from of her father (and commander) and well anyone else who walked in. If she wasn't fondling them they were fondling themselves. And that whole thing had nothing whatsoever to do with the story except to tittilate some reader's fantasy I guess. I was just ick.

3 - The characters were boring, Hansen was a warrior, he was good at it, and that's about it. All the characters were one dimensional, no real personalities, no growth. He wasn't a bad guy but he honestly didn't care if he mowed down a bunch of innocents either. Yeah, sometimes he felt bad about the people who died by his side, I guess because he got to know them, but other times he outright said the death of those he killed didn't bother him.

4 - What's with the dinosaurs and the mammoths? I would understand if they were limited to one realm, but they seemed to pop up everywhere.

And then the Norse mythology part, I both enjoyed and disliked it. There was so much potential there, but he managed to pick some tales that I hadn't come across before. Like Frothi's Peace (which I struggled to find any info on even using the god-like power of Google), or Weyland the Smith (although this one seems to be a gap on my side), and finally one where Heimdall had a fling with some minor goddess, Google found me a whole sentence about that one. I couldn't figure out who half the gods were supposed to represent. I would make guesses, but they were never quite right, like Saburo had to be Frey since he had a sister...but there were other things that didn't match. And most of them don't show up for more than a couple pages (Thor, his wife, Freya, Frigg...if there was a Frigg, North didn't seem to have a wife). In fact you could take out Saburo's part entirely, and it weren't for the fact it lined up exactly with one Norse myth, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the overall story arc. Fortin, being Loki, was of course at least interesting, but the sex-addict goddess was the one wearing Freya's necklace but wasn't Frey's brother, and turned out to be that one that had the Heimdall fling. But even Fortin left me wondering what was going on, he managed to get one world based on War cancel out one world based on Peace using some kind of quantum physics thing where the two worlds would occupy the same space, and then the War world got cancelled out as punishment...no idea what that had to do with anything either, nor what that had to do with Norse mythology, Loki never wiped out any of the 9 realms, not till Ragnarok anyway.

There were a couple stories I recognized and that was kind of fun, to put a technological twist on the tales, where giants are androids and...well I couldn't figure all the realms out...oh, just realized the "heavy squat people" were probably the dwarves and yes the engineer from that world was the best at crafting things. But the lizardmen left me scratching my head...elves?

Anyway, because I didn't enjoy it much, I read it kind of sporadically, so I probably missed some meaningful stuff along the way. And the big question at the start of the story, how did North pull the fleets into this alternate world, if it got answered, got answered by, "Hansen probably guessed"...nice for him, but I didn't guess so what was the answer? After all it was the whole point of the book. Seems even the people writing the blurbs for the covers didn't know what to say about each book.

But don't take just my word for it, I saw some people giving it really good reviews, including Patrick Rotfuss, though so far, though I've not read many, I've found the Baen Free Library to be mostly books that don't appeal to me. I don't know if they were put up for free since they were the worst sellers, or if Baen just publishes the kinds of books I don't much care for, but except for a couple exceptions, I've always been happy I didn't pay for what I just read.