What do you think?
Rate this book
Chronicles of an Age of Darkness #9
The Worshippers And The Way
In the city of Dalar ken Halvar, two warrior, Asodo Hatch and Lupus Lon Oliver, battle for supremacy in virtual reality arenas. The outcome of their struggle will be the key to the outcome of a struggle taking place in the city in the world of the fact and the flesh. This is military SF, much of the action set in the Combat College.
379 pages, Paperback
First published April 23, 1992
2 people are currently reading
135 people want to read
About the author
Hugh Cook
44 books67 followersHugh Cook was a cult author whose works blend fantasy and science fiction. He is best known for his epic series The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 24, 2012
When the instructor at the Combat College is found dead, it is determined that Asodo Hatch and Lupus Lon Oliver, the two best Startroopers, will battle for the instructor position in three years time. But will they survive that long with revolution brewing and the religion of Nu-chula-nuth gaining a foothold?
Hugh Cook doing science fiction? In the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness? What gives? Well, this book reveals the truth about things long-hinted at in earlier volumes. The world Cook fashioned has lots of remnants of super science lying around and this book reveals where it all came from.
The Worshippers and the Way takes place in the far flung past of the Chronicles. It turns out the planet was once part of a transcosmic empire called The Nexus, but the Chasm Gate connected it to the rest of the Nexus was 20,000 years dead at the point this story begins. The story is only tangently related to the rest of the Chronicles, though Ebrell Island and The Hermit Crab are mentioned, as are the Golden Gulag. I'd say it's most tied to books 6 & 7.
Enough of the background, this is essentially the story of Asodo Hatch and Lupus Lon Oliver, two soldiers doing their duty and butting heads. Hatch is far more like the standard fantasy or sf hero than most of Hugh Cook's leads. He's the best of the best but Cook makes up for it by having his personal life be a damn mess. Lupus doesn't fare much better. By the end of the tale, it's very apparent how this story is related to the others.
Cook's humor is very apparent in this volume, as is how much effort he put into conceiving the world of Age of Darkness. I'd say there's more world building in this volume than any two other Chronicles put together. It's still good but it feels a bit bogged down at times. Also, I found the sf kind of jarring compared to the other chronicles, though it had to be done eventually.
Still, it had it's moments. How many stories have you read where someone is killed and a plastic bag of dog semen is found lodged in their throat? 3 stars, leaning slightly toward 4. It's by far at the tail end of my list of favorite Hugh Cook books.
Hugh Cook doing science fiction? In the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness? What gives? Well, this book reveals the truth about things long-hinted at in earlier volumes. The world Cook fashioned has lots of remnants of super science lying around and this book reveals where it all came from.
The Worshippers and the Way takes place in the far flung past of the Chronicles. It turns out the planet was once part of a transcosmic empire called The Nexus, but the Chasm Gate connected it to the rest of the Nexus was 20,000 years dead at the point this story begins. The story is only tangently related to the rest of the Chronicles, though Ebrell Island and The Hermit Crab are mentioned, as are the Golden Gulag. I'd say it's most tied to books 6 & 7.
Enough of the background, this is essentially the story of Asodo Hatch and Lupus Lon Oliver, two soldiers doing their duty and butting heads. Hatch is far more like the standard fantasy or sf hero than most of Hugh Cook's leads. He's the best of the best but Cook makes up for it by having his personal life be a damn mess. Lupus doesn't fare much better. By the end of the tale, it's very apparent how this story is related to the others.
Cook's humor is very apparent in this volume, as is how much effort he put into conceiving the world of Age of Darkness. I'd say there's more world building in this volume than any two other Chronicles put together. It's still good but it feels a bit bogged down at times. Also, I found the sf kind of jarring compared to the other chronicles, though it had to be done eventually.
Still, it had it's moments. How many stories have you read where someone is killed and a plastic bag of dog semen is found lodged in their throat? 3 stars, leaning slightly toward 4. It's by far at the tail end of my list of favorite Hugh Cook books.
November 3, 2024
*How I Became Mau'dib by Mistake*
Record scratch; "Yep, thats me.. You're probably wondering how I became the messiah..."
Another one I really liked! Why?
[EXTENSIVE SPOILERS BELOW]
Our protagonist is Asodo Hatch, a giant purple bodybuilder with deeply social worries. Essentially he just wants to defend his wife and child, (and lover) (or does he?).
Hatch is an ostensibly powerful man - a leader in his community, war-leader, has the ear of the Emperor, is in contention for the instructorship of the war college, but his father just committed suicide, causing massive shame to the family, his brother has disavowed the family, his sister is in massive debt, sufficient to get her enslaved, and is involved with a crazy cult and his wife has terminal cancer which is killing her slowly - the only treatment is expensive and illegal opium. Everything is mortgaged to the hilt and his family position is a crazy house of cards which could come down at any moment
The interrelationship of debt, wealth, economics, politics and a simultaneous synthesis of deeply human emotion reminds me a lot of Sylvia Townsend Warners multi-generational convent story 'The Corner that Held Them'. Its relatively rare that a writer can deal simultaneously in personal psychology, family dynamics, debt, money, low and high level politics and often sincere yet conflicting religious and ethical impulses at the same time.
Asodo Hatch is not an anti-hero but, in fantasy terms, a null-hero. To most of the people in the story he seems like a 'main character', a driver of events and embodier of the historic moment - and in this book he is in fact the main character, but within his own mind he feels utterly helpless, driven relentlessly by tangled webs of outside forces, all of which mutually conflict with each other and none of which he has any time to adapt to, having to improvise relentlessly in the moment, moment-by-moment. Even until the final pages of the book his core beliefs and true position, remain negotiable to circumstance.
As in 'Werewolf and Wormlord', this is another protagonist caught between cultures - a man who, in a sense, believes in nothing, or comes to almost believe in nothing. Like I imagine Cook to be; he knows too much of the flaws and failures and invisible compromises of too many different cultures and too many different ways of life to be a thoughtless intuitive believer in any of them. This makes him a man alone before the world.
The scene of action and the axis of drama in 'Worshipper and Way' is, so far as I can tell, utterly original - I haven't seen anything like it before, and it produces and strange, dreamlike feel unique to this book.
20,000 years ago the world of 'Age of Darkness' was part of a Star-Trek/Culture star and reality spanning megaculture called 'The Nexus'. Then the gate connecting this world to the Nexus collapsed and it fell into savagery- through endless cycles of brief renaissance followed by post-future warfare and hyperdoom.
The only part of this world where the technology and the ideology of the Nexus still works even a little like before is the Combat College buried in the mountains of the city of Dara Ken Halvar.
Within this complex, and only here, we have replicators, post-future medicine, virtual reality training machines, somewhat chilly comfort, sliding doors, clean electrical lights and an A.I. overmind which, for the last 20,000 years of slowly degrading functions - has persisted under one prime directive; 'Train Star-Troopers for the Star Force'
This is a Star Force that effectively no longer exists.. but *might* one day exist again, if the Chasm Gates are ever re-opened.
Outside the matter-energy doors of the Combat College, the sprawling desert city of Dara Ken Halvar is a multiethnic, deeply stratified powderkeg under the rule of the often-absent Silver Emperor - the acknowledged master of the massive, and massively poor and desertfied continent of Parengarenga. Dara Ken Halvar is filled with beggars, debts, cults and ethnic resentment, and with no water, all of which has to be carried up, by hand, from the river below to the rocky escarpments which make up the cities quarters. They have eyeless beggars and a ceremonial dog-killing festival. It is a savage nation, of the kind the crew of Star Trek might beam down to in disguise so as not to break the Prime Directive, though depicted with more complexity, subtlety, sympathy and horror than Star Trek usually leant to its adventure zone cultures.
The Combat College is ruled by an omnipresent A.I., with the image and personality of a long-gone individual. Making it, in effect, a character. In a way, a strange Prince of the City. But the only thing the Combat College wants to do, it’s only directive, is to train Star Troopers for the Star Force.
So, every year, a bunch of (relative) savages from the desert city of Dara Ken Halvar, come into the Combat College as year one cadets, and over subsequent years of education they are whittled down and trained up as hyper-competent Federation-Style Star Troopers, ready for anything from surviving on a jungle moon to taking command of a super space battleship, none of which they will ever see. They are also trained and educated in the ideology and history of the Nexus, the long-absent Star-Empire.
Once the graduating class has achieved its highest level, they are sent back out into the desert, dog-eating, blind-beggar city of Dara Ken Halvar, and forgotten.
The action of the book takes place across this boundary between a dreamlike lost post-future and the savage, but very real and consequential, ethno-politics of a shrivelled primitive desert empire run by an actual Wizard.
What things mean changes as you go through the matter-energy doors of the Combat College. All of the politics, starvation and ethnic conflict of the Real World infiltrates the clean Star Trek halls and the strange, now twenty-millennia-old philosophies and conflicts of the Nexus, themselves seep out into Dara Ken Halvar, mutating and mestatising into strange new forms.
This would make a really good stage play.
'Worpshippers and Way' plays a game of long, slow reveals. Dropping fragments, hints and details about both the life of Dara Ken Halvar, (and Asdo Hatch within it), and its history and nature, and the “true” details of the Nexus, what that Grand Polity thought it was, what the nameless third-person narrator of this story thinks it was, and what Asdo Hatch thinks it was.
Hatch is driven by his fathers suicide, probably more than any other single thing, a suicide we only towards the end happened after his father faced his uncle in the combat pits, during Dara Ken Halvars annual ‘Season’ of bloodletting, over a religious matter. Asodo’s father successfully killed his own brother, then took his own life in the ring. He was destroyed by the same competing tidal forces of love, honour, faith, policy, ethics and truth that are slowly destroying Hatch, both inside and out. We slowly realise that its an open question as to whether Hatch himself will suicide under the massive pressure.
“any man who kills himself hands a sharp sword to his son.”
In fact he does get close, but not quite.
At the same time we discover that the Nexus was not quite as wonderful as it thought it was. Its core probability-altering technology was something it could not replicate itself, having to buy the central ‘processors’ from semi-material aliens – meaning it was utterly dependant on them for its continued existence. It was also an Empire fully invested in supressing the semi-regular outbursts of religious mania and revolution which threatened its peripheries. Not exactly a very evil empire, but an Empire, and not an honest one. Hatch suspects that 20,000 after the Gates fell, the Nexus probably no longer exists.
We could almost re-name the Age of Darkness series ‘The Necessary Tragedy of State Formation’. Many of our protagonists are putative mega-Emperors or other State leaders and their condensation of power may herald the end of the Age of Darkness. Hatch is one of these as, at the climax of the book he adopts the ongoing religious-levelling revolution as his own and becomes its master, though he does not believe in it.
A lot of Cook-Books make unconscious or deliberate pairs with others in the series, both either repeating each others feel or subject, or deliberately looking at the same situation from opposite sides
'Worshippers and Way' forms something of a pair with 'Werewolf and Wormlord' - both have competent relatively high-status male protagonists with very adult worries about property, family and taxes, both protagonists occupy an ostensibly heroic role while strongly doubting much of what they are doing, both have the protagonists enmeshed in the deep structures of politics and state formation or revolution. In both cases the Protagonists often feel as if they are racing to keep up with events and are frantically adapting and improvising and arguing whilst maintaining an appearance of surface level calm
The protagonist of Werewolf and Wormlord is ultimately outmanoeuvred and doesn't in fact become king, but does manage to keep his soul. Asodo Hatch in 'Worshippers and Way' does eventually 'win the game' but it certainly feels as if, by the end, though he has preserved the lives of his loved ones, he has lost his soul. He is the apparent Master of the hour but feels utterly hollow. One of the final acts of the book is Hatch signing the psychic death-warrant of every woman in Paragengea with the full knowledge that his new theocracy will reduce them to, (even more), second class subjects. It’s a political necessity of his revolution. As he says; ‘The men must have something’. It strikes the reader hard. Cook never lets us escape either misogyny or the horrors of actual warfare. Even from the offscreen rape and murder of the water people by the heroes party in the very first book, he keeps throwing up these little shards of horror as if to remind us; ‘yes, these things are also happening’.
The strong, stark cut of Cooks empathy and his particular highlighting of necessary or actual social horror might lead us to ask some questions about him. As the unnamed narrator says in ‘Worshippers and Way’;
“It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moral universe, Asoso Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the lady Iro Murasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not a gaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candyflossed to life by the Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of error and retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies. It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of moralists
But if some mission be demanded, if it be said that the mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself – why then, let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity of life. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of this history be a message in itself. And if something more still be demanded - a moral, perforce! – why then let the moral be that life is a dice game played in the shadows with a dog and a ghost.”
There is more to this, but I will leave that to my final summation.
Record scratch; "Yep, thats me.. You're probably wondering how I became the messiah..."
Another one I really liked! Why?
[EXTENSIVE SPOILERS BELOW]
Our protagonist is Asodo Hatch, a giant purple bodybuilder with deeply social worries. Essentially he just wants to defend his wife and child, (and lover) (or does he?).
Hatch is an ostensibly powerful man - a leader in his community, war-leader, has the ear of the Emperor, is in contention for the instructorship of the war college, but his father just committed suicide, causing massive shame to the family, his brother has disavowed the family, his sister is in massive debt, sufficient to get her enslaved, and is involved with a crazy cult and his wife has terminal cancer which is killing her slowly - the only treatment is expensive and illegal opium. Everything is mortgaged to the hilt and his family position is a crazy house of cards which could come down at any moment
The interrelationship of debt, wealth, economics, politics and a simultaneous synthesis of deeply human emotion reminds me a lot of Sylvia Townsend Warners multi-generational convent story 'The Corner that Held Them'. Its relatively rare that a writer can deal simultaneously in personal psychology, family dynamics, debt, money, low and high level politics and often sincere yet conflicting religious and ethical impulses at the same time.
Asodo Hatch is not an anti-hero but, in fantasy terms, a null-hero. To most of the people in the story he seems like a 'main character', a driver of events and embodier of the historic moment - and in this book he is in fact the main character, but within his own mind he feels utterly helpless, driven relentlessly by tangled webs of outside forces, all of which mutually conflict with each other and none of which he has any time to adapt to, having to improvise relentlessly in the moment, moment-by-moment. Even until the final pages of the book his core beliefs and true position, remain negotiable to circumstance.
As in 'Werewolf and Wormlord', this is another protagonist caught between cultures - a man who, in a sense, believes in nothing, or comes to almost believe in nothing. Like I imagine Cook to be; he knows too much of the flaws and failures and invisible compromises of too many different cultures and too many different ways of life to be a thoughtless intuitive believer in any of them. This makes him a man alone before the world.
The scene of action and the axis of drama in 'Worshipper and Way' is, so far as I can tell, utterly original - I haven't seen anything like it before, and it produces and strange, dreamlike feel unique to this book.
20,000 years ago the world of 'Age of Darkness' was part of a Star-Trek/Culture star and reality spanning megaculture called 'The Nexus'. Then the gate connecting this world to the Nexus collapsed and it fell into savagery- through endless cycles of brief renaissance followed by post-future warfare and hyperdoom.
The only part of this world where the technology and the ideology of the Nexus still works even a little like before is the Combat College buried in the mountains of the city of Dara Ken Halvar.
Within this complex, and only here, we have replicators, post-future medicine, virtual reality training machines, somewhat chilly comfort, sliding doors, clean electrical lights and an A.I. overmind which, for the last 20,000 years of slowly degrading functions - has persisted under one prime directive; 'Train Star-Troopers for the Star Force'
This is a Star Force that effectively no longer exists.. but *might* one day exist again, if the Chasm Gates are ever re-opened.
Outside the matter-energy doors of the Combat College, the sprawling desert city of Dara Ken Halvar is a multiethnic, deeply stratified powderkeg under the rule of the often-absent Silver Emperor - the acknowledged master of the massive, and massively poor and desertfied continent of Parengarenga. Dara Ken Halvar is filled with beggars, debts, cults and ethnic resentment, and with no water, all of which has to be carried up, by hand, from the river below to the rocky escarpments which make up the cities quarters. They have eyeless beggars and a ceremonial dog-killing festival. It is a savage nation, of the kind the crew of Star Trek might beam down to in disguise so as not to break the Prime Directive, though depicted with more complexity, subtlety, sympathy and horror than Star Trek usually leant to its adventure zone cultures.
The Combat College is ruled by an omnipresent A.I., with the image and personality of a long-gone individual. Making it, in effect, a character. In a way, a strange Prince of the City. But the only thing the Combat College wants to do, it’s only directive, is to train Star Troopers for the Star Force.
So, every year, a bunch of (relative) savages from the desert city of Dara Ken Halvar, come into the Combat College as year one cadets, and over subsequent years of education they are whittled down and trained up as hyper-competent Federation-Style Star Troopers, ready for anything from surviving on a jungle moon to taking command of a super space battleship, none of which they will ever see. They are also trained and educated in the ideology and history of the Nexus, the long-absent Star-Empire.
Once the graduating class has achieved its highest level, they are sent back out into the desert, dog-eating, blind-beggar city of Dara Ken Halvar, and forgotten.
The action of the book takes place across this boundary between a dreamlike lost post-future and the savage, but very real and consequential, ethno-politics of a shrivelled primitive desert empire run by an actual Wizard.
What things mean changes as you go through the matter-energy doors of the Combat College. All of the politics, starvation and ethnic conflict of the Real World infiltrates the clean Star Trek halls and the strange, now twenty-millennia-old philosophies and conflicts of the Nexus, themselves seep out into Dara Ken Halvar, mutating and mestatising into strange new forms.
This would make a really good stage play.
'Worpshippers and Way' plays a game of long, slow reveals. Dropping fragments, hints and details about both the life of Dara Ken Halvar, (and Asdo Hatch within it), and its history and nature, and the “true” details of the Nexus, what that Grand Polity thought it was, what the nameless third-person narrator of this story thinks it was, and what Asdo Hatch thinks it was.
Hatch is driven by his fathers suicide, probably more than any other single thing, a suicide we only towards the end happened after his father faced his uncle in the combat pits, during Dara Ken Halvars annual ‘Season’ of bloodletting, over a religious matter. Asodo’s father successfully killed his own brother, then took his own life in the ring. He was destroyed by the same competing tidal forces of love, honour, faith, policy, ethics and truth that are slowly destroying Hatch, both inside and out. We slowly realise that its an open question as to whether Hatch himself will suicide under the massive pressure.
“any man who kills himself hands a sharp sword to his son.”
In fact he does get close, but not quite.
At the same time we discover that the Nexus was not quite as wonderful as it thought it was. Its core probability-altering technology was something it could not replicate itself, having to buy the central ‘processors’ from semi-material aliens – meaning it was utterly dependant on them for its continued existence. It was also an Empire fully invested in supressing the semi-regular outbursts of religious mania and revolution which threatened its peripheries. Not exactly a very evil empire, but an Empire, and not an honest one. Hatch suspects that 20,000 after the Gates fell, the Nexus probably no longer exists.
We could almost re-name the Age of Darkness series ‘The Necessary Tragedy of State Formation’. Many of our protagonists are putative mega-Emperors or other State leaders and their condensation of power may herald the end of the Age of Darkness. Hatch is one of these as, at the climax of the book he adopts the ongoing religious-levelling revolution as his own and becomes its master, though he does not believe in it.
A lot of Cook-Books make unconscious or deliberate pairs with others in the series, both either repeating each others feel or subject, or deliberately looking at the same situation from opposite sides
'Worshippers and Way' forms something of a pair with 'Werewolf and Wormlord' - both have competent relatively high-status male protagonists with very adult worries about property, family and taxes, both protagonists occupy an ostensibly heroic role while strongly doubting much of what they are doing, both have the protagonists enmeshed in the deep structures of politics and state formation or revolution. In both cases the Protagonists often feel as if they are racing to keep up with events and are frantically adapting and improvising and arguing whilst maintaining an appearance of surface level calm
The protagonist of Werewolf and Wormlord is ultimately outmanoeuvred and doesn't in fact become king, but does manage to keep his soul. Asodo Hatch in 'Worshippers and Way' does eventually 'win the game' but it certainly feels as if, by the end, though he has preserved the lives of his loved ones, he has lost his soul. He is the apparent Master of the hour but feels utterly hollow. One of the final acts of the book is Hatch signing the psychic death-warrant of every woman in Paragengea with the full knowledge that his new theocracy will reduce them to, (even more), second class subjects. It’s a political necessity of his revolution. As he says; ‘The men must have something’. It strikes the reader hard. Cook never lets us escape either misogyny or the horrors of actual warfare. Even from the offscreen rape and murder of the water people by the heroes party in the very first book, he keeps throwing up these little shards of horror as if to remind us; ‘yes, these things are also happening’.
The strong, stark cut of Cooks empathy and his particular highlighting of necessary or actual social horror might lead us to ask some questions about him. As the unnamed narrator says in ‘Worshippers and Way’;
“It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moral universe, Asoso Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the lady Iro Murasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not a gaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candyflossed to life by the Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of error and retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies. It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of moralists
But if some mission be demanded, if it be said that the mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself – why then, let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity of life. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of this history be a message in itself. And if something more still be demanded - a moral, perforce! – why then let the moral be that life is a dice game played in the shadows with a dog and a ghost.”
There is more to this, but I will leave that to my final summation.
September 29, 2016
I'm cheating and using this reveiw for all Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.
Take almost every fantasy cliche and trope you can think of and give it to Eddings or Jordan and you get 'The Belgariad' or 'The Wheel of Time'- entertaining enough but otherwise souless pap. Give them however to Hugh Cook and you get your tiny mind blown. He turns everything on its head like no other author before or after him. Wizards, magic bottles, monsters and heroes are used in such a fresh imaginative way that you are glued to the story page by page. Humour pervades every book to a varying degree and one of the great disappointments in life is that he never finished the whole set as he saw them- though luckily each book can be read as a stand alone novel, rewarding fans with nods, winks and links akimbo, otherwise complete reads in themselves.
I cannot recommend these books enough- even if you are not a fantasy fan; believe me these books will nothing like you expect and I think represent a truly unique literary experience
Take almost every fantasy cliche and trope you can think of and give it to Eddings or Jordan and you get 'The Belgariad' or 'The Wheel of Time'- entertaining enough but otherwise souless pap. Give them however to Hugh Cook and you get your tiny mind blown. He turns everything on its head like no other author before or after him. Wizards, magic bottles, monsters and heroes are used in such a fresh imaginative way that you are glued to the story page by page. Humour pervades every book to a varying degree and one of the great disappointments in life is that he never finished the whole set as he saw them- though luckily each book can be read as a stand alone novel, rewarding fans with nods, winks and links akimbo, otherwise complete reads in themselves.
I cannot recommend these books enough- even if you are not a fantasy fan; believe me these books will nothing like you expect and I think represent a truly unique literary experience
October 25, 2022
Chronicles of an Age of Darkness Vol. 9 is set in a mileu which doesn't insect with any of the previous yarns. In this case, the gates that link the inter-cosmic Nexus have failed for 20,000 years, leaving a Startrooper training facility run by intelligent software trapped inside a mountain. It continues to train warriors for the Nexus, but when they interact with hte city outside, chaos and mayhem ensues. Some of the book details fantastic battles in imaginary worlds, as part of the training and competition run by the facility. The plot has the normal twists and turns, and the usual not entirely satisfactory resolution. But, as ever, it's a rattling good read.
October 1, 2025
In The Worshipers and the Way, Hugh Cook creates a strange and compelling world set in the city of Dalar ken Halvar, where power, devotion, and survival collide in unexpected ways. The novel plunges the reader into a fierce contest between two warriors, Asodo Hatch and Lupus Lon Oliver, who fight for dominance in virtual reality arenas that reflect the deeper spiritual and social conflicts of their society.
Cook’s prose is imaginative and morally layered. The city feels alive: its walls and alleyways whisper of worship and betrayal, while its courts echo with ambition and fear. Beneath the clash of blades lies a tapestry of devotion, heresy, and the painful cost of belief. The characters are never simple. Even those who claim to be true worshipers carry scars, doubts, and hidden motives.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its refusal to offer easy answers. Cook allows his characters to betray, to question, to falter, and at times to show unexpected compassion. The tension between faith and power resonates throughout the story, asking what it really means to dedicate oneself to “the Way” in a world where gods and rulers alike may falter.
For readers who enjoy speculative fiction that balances philosophy with action, The Worshipers and the Way offers a unique experience. It lingers long after the final page, urging reflection on the nature of devotion and human resilience.
Cook’s prose is imaginative and morally layered. The city feels alive: its walls and alleyways whisper of worship and betrayal, while its courts echo with ambition and fear. Beneath the clash of blades lies a tapestry of devotion, heresy, and the painful cost of belief. The characters are never simple. Even those who claim to be true worshipers carry scars, doubts, and hidden motives.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its refusal to offer easy answers. Cook allows his characters to betray, to question, to falter, and at times to show unexpected compassion. The tension between faith and power resonates throughout the story, asking what it really means to dedicate oneself to “the Way” in a world where gods and rulers alike may falter.
For readers who enjoy speculative fiction that balances philosophy with action, The Worshipers and the Way offers a unique experience. It lingers long after the final page, urging reflection on the nature of devotion and human resilience.
November 21, 2018
A worthy entry but must say a little disappointed. Thought there was a lot more Cook could do with the sci-fi theme, especially going into much more history and detail of the Nexus. It's a constant theme but would've really like more on the Golden Gulag and the Chasm gates. Hopefully the next volume may cover this. Enjoyable.
December 15, 2016
Wah! To quote Asodo Hatch. Wasn't as keen on this volume as much of the others, and I took a while to get into the groove. It picked up pace towards the end, and in retrospect, it pulled together a lot of back story concerning the origins of the world.
It doesn't have significant links to the stories set in Argan or Tameran. It alludes vaguely to the Hermit Crab but doesn't really extend the stories set in Untunchilamon or Yestron. It is solely set in Parengarenga and can be considered more science fiction than the other books. Probably more stand alone than thr others too.
I still liked it though. The humour's still there, and side characters add depth. Where else will you find three crazy blind beggars who share a single artificial eye?
It doesn't have significant links to the stories set in Argan or Tameran. It alludes vaguely to the Hermit Crab but doesn't really extend the stories set in Untunchilamon or Yestron. It is solely set in Parengarenga and can be considered more science fiction than the other books. Probably more stand alone than thr others too.
I still liked it though. The humour's still there, and side characters add depth. Where else will you find three crazy blind beggars who share a single artificial eye?
August 17, 2007
The first one was the best, but I love the loopy scenarios.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews