Yay, I’m caught up on what counts as the main series of James Hunter’s Viridian Gate Online. Why? Didn’t I do that a few days ago? Yes and no, you see they count the anthology even though it kind of isn’t a part of any of the series and has a couple short stories that more belong to the side ones.
Not a lot I can say that isn’t spoilers, because the whole book is just short compressed stories with pithy endings, so I’ll just say this. I have a love-hate relationship with anthologies. Conceptually, I really like the idea of a bunch of authors writing stories in the same universe. And even when it’s one author I like the change in prospective they can bring. But I have to admit that they often don’t feel like enough, like their just teasing me with concepts that will probably never return.
I’ll admit there was a bit of that here, but I still really liked it enough so I’d still recomend it… just only if you have a credit to kill. It’s not essencial in any way to the story of the main series and I doubt it will be essencial to the side series. It’s just a bit of content that nicely expands what’s already there and introduces a few new and extremely interesting concepts that are probably going to have limited use going forward.
