Review: Leo Frankowski
Sorry about the longer than usual delay. I blame appendicitis, and don't recommend it to anyone else,no matter how good an excuse it might provide. I'll be writing a few more reviews than usual, in order to catch up - I think I'm pretty close to 100 authors by now, frighteningly enough. This author does science ficiton, and a reasonable job of it.
Leo Frankowski has written one series of note, the Adventures of Conrad Stargard (starting with The Cross Time Engineer), which is six books long so far, and covers the adventures of a Polish engineer from the late eighties who gets thrown back to 1330 or so. Just a decade before the Mongol invasion, and destruction of the land.
Overall, the series is an entertaining read, with a range of interesting characters besides the main protagonist. It's largely an uplift type novel, with a modern character introducing advanced technology to the past, and following the changes created that way. In this case, the changes do get to be rather impressive - though it takes a number of books to get there.
The series does have a few weak points, the main one being that Conrad, the main character, is very much what I'd call a Heinlein type hero: he knows more than an encyclopedia, is a better fighter than half a dozen knights, and has women throwing themselves at him pretty much non stop. So maybe it's more wish fulfillment than Heinlein style, but suspension of disbelief is hard to keep up over six books. Another quibble is that at times the author attempts to introduce his opinions as fiat, and does so poorly - fortunately, these things are rare, but they are jarring.
So if you enjoy the genre, or simply a fairly well written book where the forces of modern knowledge get to beat up medieval ignorance, the books are worth picking up.
Leo Frankowski has written one series of note, the Adventures of Conrad Stargard (starting with The Cross Time Engineer), which is six books long so far, and covers the adventures of a Polish engineer from the late eighties who gets thrown back to 1330 or so. Just a decade before the Mongol invasion, and destruction of the land.
Overall, the series is an entertaining read, with a range of interesting characters besides the main protagonist. It's largely an uplift type novel, with a modern character introducing advanced technology to the past, and following the changes created that way. In this case, the changes do get to be rather impressive - though it takes a number of books to get there.
The series does have a few weak points, the main one being that Conrad, the main character, is very much what I'd call a Heinlein type hero: he knows more than an encyclopedia, is a better fighter than half a dozen knights, and has women throwing themselves at him pretty much non stop. So maybe it's more wish fulfillment than Heinlein style, but suspension of disbelief is hard to keep up over six books. Another quibble is that at times the author attempts to introduce his opinions as fiat, and does so poorly - fortunately, these things are rare, but they are jarring.
So if you enjoy the genre, or simply a fairly well written book where the forces of modern knowledge get to beat up medieval ignorance, the books are worth picking up.