In remarkably similar circumstances each time. They have to find a bunch of magical items. It is unfortunately that obvious and weak. We can forgive the ‘I overheard this is the tavern, the item we seek is in the ruins of …’ when it appears once or twice, but every time the Orcs complete one aspect of the quest they luckily overhear or are directly told of where the next item is. Most fantasy authors are allowed a pass on the occasional use of Deus ex Machina plot interventions,Nicholls uses up not only his allocation but that of David Gemmell, Tad Williams and Robert Jordan. That out of the way, what of the rest of the books? Well,problematically this is a run of the mill, fantasy by the numbers, plot coupon collecting quest travelogue.

So rather than this being a book that redresses the balance and gives you the Orcish perspective, it is just one more quest trilogy about misunderstood noble/honourable barbarians. There are occasional flashes of humour, especially when the Orcs joke about living up to their stereotypes (most notably early on in the opening sequence when they joke about eating a human baby… doesn’t sound funny when it is put like that but it is worth a short chuckle when you read it in context.) but ultimately there is little about them that distinguished Orcs from any other race. Unfortunately if you took out the visuals they would resemble half a dozen other barbarian races that inhabit fantasyland. Ok, Ok so no Orcs are actually real, but Nicholl’s Orcs are effectively ‘noble savages’, that is pretty typical fantasy barbarians who happen to have lightly green and clammy skin, brutish looking faces, and a propensity for physical violence. The Orcs of this book don’t read like ‘real’ Orcs.

Unfortunately this is where I ran into the first let down of this series.

They are after all the much maligned evil cannon fodder of many a genre fantasy and it would be interesting to read a story from their point of view. I was initially intrigued by the idea of a book written about and from the Orcish perspective. The Orcs Omnibus is the complete collection of the Orcs: First Blood trilogy by Stan Nicholls.

Orcs by Stan Nicholls