A Fortress In Shadow

… which is what my father says when he is too polite to tell people he doesn’t like something, but will grant them it was worth making the experience.

I was pointed to this by an /r/AskHistorians thread extolling Glen Cook’s virtues in portraying pre-modern warfare. Like my father, I will grant that reading the novels is not an experience I regret as such. Unlike him, I will come out and say I didn’t particularly relish the experience either.

Yes, this is well written enough; yes, it probably felt very fresh and unconventional in the early eighties; and yes, Cook does have a good understanding of pre-modern warfare both at the battle and at the campaign level. If that is your thing, go for it. Me, I wish Cook also had an idea of the logistics and societal / economic conditions dictating the operations of pre-modern armies, which he obviously has not (the most egregious example being his Mercenary Guild, basically legionnaires operating out of Crusader Knights-like setting, which raises a plethora of questions even before you get to the US Marine Corps-like boot camps and esprit de corps, the nonsensical notion of such a formation fighting on for years without pay or supplies, or the absurdity of a long march overland without foraging). For something that is, by its own admission, “military fantasy”, that is not a good look.

I also take objection to Cook’s portrayal of his “Arabesque” world, with a newly minted religion on a missionary rampage. Yes, fantastic literature is free to do as it will, but this thinly veiled version of Islam is a counterfactual (the rapid spread of Islam in the medieval world was mainly due to it total lack of missionary fervour – for complex reasons mostly related to taxation, but still; the crusaders sat on the other side of the Western / Eastern divide) obviously meant to serve Western audiences’ perceptions of the Islamic world, and that is problematic.