A warrior with the secret powers of knowledge and training. It's sad that this series gets such low ratings. I've read the books several times over the past 20 years and found the plot intriguing: a man trained in the psychology and application of war and conflict is sent to a world(s) where some of the original colonists have learned to manipulate time/space to basically function as minor gods. The hero is sent there to find out what's going on and inserts himself into the fighting milieu using his inherent talent for conflict (he's a natural born warrior...only with real training) and moves to the top of the hierarchy. It was a thrill for me to read how he analyzes the culture, the battle techniques, the weapons and the basic psychology of the combatants to ingratiate himself with the various warlords with the aim of reducing the level of brutal one-on-one conflict throughout the various planets of the star-system(?).

The gimmick of the stories is that the native culture is pure medieval with swords and bludgeons, etc. using super-advanced electronic cyber-enhanced battle suits of which the natives have only the most rudimentary knowledge. Hansen, the hero, quickly analyzes the complexity of the suits and experiments with the powers that one might expect such suits to have and uses this knowledge to dominate the landscape to make himself the kings’ most trusted war martial.

The only reason I hold back from rating all the books 5-stars is that, even though Hansen has been sent there to find out what has happened to all the fleets that have been sent to investigate this star system, and have never returned, David Drake never tells us how the originals ever became ‘gods’. Nor how they made Hansen a god—without his knowledge.

Maybe it just didn’t matter to Drake. After all, he’s only retelling the legends of Norse/Scandinavian mythology in a more modern guise—where the how or why really wasn’t important. ( )

See my note on it in my blog:

http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/02/booknote-northworld.html ( )

very nice. I read the second volume first and had to fake it until I got to read this one and understand a lot more.
The curious thing is the romance line, is very week but in the second volume is referred to it as big love affair... Which confused me a little because a lot of the plot is based on vengeance for this big love affair that actually never existed. But is still a very good sci-fi.

I was hoping to like this book more. Unfortunately that was impossible. Drake is generally much better than this, and I have been a fan of his since the early seventies and finding Alois Hammer as one of my friends. Northworld is just one giant miss.

The reasons are three fold. The story is all over the place, and that was intentional. The plot does not hold my interest, mostly because of the issue we have with the first problem. And last we have no one I care about.

Now a good story gets you right away. And this one did, but by the end of the first chapter our hero is being taken out of the story track he was on and placed on an entirely different track. Then while on that new track, he jumps around to other tracks, for in the place he journeys to, there are eight different parts of the matrix that he can be sent back and forth too. You get comfortable with and then momentarily you are thrown elsewhere.

So that plot is loosely based according to Drake in the author notes on legend. But I have no care for it. Since we have eight worlds, and the addition of the overworld, and the world from where our 'hero' came from, 10 different flavors that all have their own plots, their own reasons to exist, I am not invested in one or another.

Then the hero, you want to start liking him, but he is arrogant and an idiot, though he'll keep telling everyone he is gods gift to solving the problem. Another real winner, or whiner.

This sat on my shelf for ten years waiting for me to read it. Now that it is done, I think it is a never again, and no reason to investigate the other books of the series. The downside here is that if Drake had just focused on the one world that he spent most of his time at, he could have had a Cross Time Engineer, or Lest Darkness Fall type of tale and been much more successful. ( )