This sums up how I feel about Gary Russell's Legacy. I was so happy after Decalog, so sure I was going to be able to dive right back in and get the project going again!
Then I hit the first few pages of Legacy and the steam just left the engine. Wow. I began to refer to it in my imagination as "Lag-acy," because of the lag in posts. I finally forced myself to get through it, but I am now craving a really good one to be the next book.
It's not that there are no likeable characters at all. I actually enjoyed the Ice Warriors, and I could see so much wasted potential in so many others in the book. But I couldn't bring myself to really care about any of them, and that's a deep problem when you have the vast cast and numbers of races Russell brings to the table.
Maybe I would have liked it more if I'd been more familiar with Peladon, but I've never seen the TV episodes and by the time I was through the first chapter I didn't care. Pointless blood, beings pointlessly growling at one another, pointless. It did nothing, really, to illuminate the plot. Swords flash and people fall dead right after introduction, when the same points they are supposed to express are re-explained in later chapters.
At no point did I really feel like any of the Main Three characters were in danger. At no point did I feel like I had a handle on what made any of the other races different from humans.
It's not a horrible book. It's not like some of the others we've read that made me despair, and I can't honestly say I would have done better. But, as Opus says, "Lord, it wasn't good."
