Citadel - Marko Kloos

Marko Kloos has been turning out military sci-fi for years at this point, I've been reviewing them for about as long, and I have to admit, his stuff is always a pleasure to read. It's reliable in that it always gives me characters I can empathise with, interesting worlds to delve into, and some adrenaline-shot action, usually when I'm least expecting it. His Palladium Wars series continues this trend, and has been a lovely comfort read until now. I saw the third book on sale recently, and snapped it up. So, does Citadel deliver? Basically, yes.

The book largely takes place on Gretia, a world under occupation by the remaining planetary powers in its system. Unusually, it's under occupation because it started a war, and then had the poor grace to lose it. The occupiers are struggling to contain a civilian population that doesn't want them there, and to rebuild a shattered economy without enabling the every people they fought a war against, and the Gretians want to get out from under the occupiers, and ideally never talk about that war business ever again. They're definitely not happy to have their administrative centres under military occupation, or to see armoured troops marching around like they own the place. Even if they, you know, do. And into that volatile mix have come a group of rebels, of schemers, who refuse to let the last war die, who refuse to accept that Gretia has changed its place in the universe, who are so embedded in the past that they refuse to look past it. And those people are out on Gretia, blowing up buildings and orchestrating massacres - to destabilise both the surviving power structures, and try to drive occupying forces off their world. They are very much not good people, with a penchant for civilian casualties, but they're probably familiar. This is Gretia, ruled by corporate cliques and aristocracies, trying very hard not to live with guilt, or think about it too much. Well, some of them. And this is the other powers, so sure in their virtue that they live in arrogance and pride, not reaching out to help those they can to build a better world, because of their own trauma and memory. 

If that sounds complicated and like it's going to get bloody, well...yes. The last book ended with the antagonists deploying an orbital nuke on one of the other planets, with predictable crackdown results. And so, here we are. This is a world, a system in turmoil But it makes sense. It has the seething layers of politics and personal advancement that make it real, and it has the shining stars of duty and integrity that make it true. We're spread across familiar viewpoints, including one of the occupying troops, the heir to one of the corporate Gretian dynasties, a navy captain for one of the other powers, taking a new ship on a shakedown cruise. And then there's the lost boy, a man who spent too long in the uniform of Gretian intelligence, did some things he regrets, and is now living as quietly as he can on a space freighter, trying not to let his past (and his corporate family) overwhelm his future

They're a fantastically diverse range of people, and it's to Kloos' credit that they don't all sound the same. That the corporate knives in the dark in the Gretian glass towers are as different and as sharp as the high powered recoilless rounds pouring down on our trooper and her squad. They're all people, trying to make the best of things and do the right thing. While Kloos manages to avoid the traps I find a lot of the genre falls into (the government, it turns out, are not entirely incompetent buffoons, and we aren't all better off having some aristocrats running things, and so on), he does tend to reify duty, honour and service. That's fine actually, in context, and I appreciate it here, letting us know who our heroes are. They're unapologetically decent people, which is nice. 

And they're decent people having a rough time. The action isn't unrelenting, but when it happens, it's always a shock. And that shock is often dark and bloody and kinetically charged. You can feel the tension build and seep into things, a moment of quiet turned into a bloody streetfight in a word or two. It's snappy, its gritty, and the moments between the action serve to give it room to breathe and make the meaning that keeps it embedded in the real. 

In other words, this is good stuff, and if you're looking for a quick, compelling read, this is one for you.

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying - Django Wexler

Alright, this was a fun one, the fabulously named How to become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. It's a progression fantasy, of sorts. The protagonist, Davi, is stuck in a time loop. Every time she dies, she finds herself right back at the start of an epic quest to save the Kingdom (capital K) from the invading armies of the Dark Lord (also capitalised). A lot of you are nodding along at this point - the protagonist grows stronger with every loop, works out their situation, and saves the world, yes? That's what we're used to, what we expect.

Well, Wexler is here to subvert your expectations - at least some of them. Davi is sick and tired of being the saviour of the Kingdom. She's spent more than a while trying to make it work, dying over and over and over. She's jaded, tired, and absolutely done with the entire exercise. So now, Davi is going off-script. If she's stuck in a loop, she may as well have some fun. And, well, so begins the adventure of Dark Lord Davi, who decides that she'll take over the world rather than save it, because at least it's a chance to do something new. It's a fun conceit, and it helps that Davi as a narrator is quite personable. A little prone to banter, but always an entertaining read. She's not a skull-clutching cackler of evil schemes, and if she was, she'd at least provide us with a few amusing footnotes as to why. 

Instead, Davi is...well, smart, experienced, and very much trying her best to remain a decent human being in a world that just won't cut her a break. Starting each loop with, in her own words, noodle arms, makes getting into fights rather tricky. Instead, she's determined to build a coalition, an army, that will let her seizer the power of the Dark Lord for herself. But she's presented as charming, exhausted, and with a habit of snarky asides which generally landed and made me at least chuckle. I will say, as a snarky aside of my own, that while I enjoyed that partiocular lightweight tone, it might not be For You, if you wanted something with a bit more of a serious face. Which isn't to say the story itself isn't serious enough. There's betrayal and battle and heartbreak aplenty, and some sensitively drawn  male and female romance. There's some magic and monsters too. And perhaps the smartest thing about the book is the way it whallops Davi with a need to see things through, see what happens next, even as it draws in the reader. She's been a good guy a thousand times before, but this time, she's doing something new. And if she feels at the start like she can just reset her mistakes over, and over, and over...as things progress, she doesn't want to, doesn't want to go back to the start. Wants to keep everyone going the way they are. And so everything gains flavour and texture for her, becomes more real, and she and wee learn to care about the characters together.

The world is some fun stuff, carefully avoiding just being boilerplate fantasy with the serial numbers filed off (though maybe that's The Kingdom, heh). There's different cultures and traditions and a history at work here, and part of the story is in the way those are uncovered, as Davi steps into each new place feeling more than a little overwhelmed. We learn the history of this side of things one piece at a time, in asides and chance remarks, and occasionally on a battlefield. In any case, the world has a richness, a flavour that suggests there's a lot more going on behind the scenes, and gives us enough to let it feel real, let the stakes feel real, without overwhelming in appendices and elven dictionaries.

In the end, this is a smart, accessible and entertaining read, with some snappy fight scenes, some even snappier dialogue, some poignant character moments, and a story which promises a lot, but manages to deliver. I'm looking forward to the second book in the series, and I think you will, too.

Warlords of Wyrdwood - R.J. Barker

R.J. Barker has a reputation for writing complex, well-characterised fantasy that does the rarest thing: something new. His previous series have been great favourites of mine, as long-time readers will know, and the latest, the Forsaken series, is no different. The first book had the same depth and the same unsettling, richly detailed world as its predecessors, and so I was excited to see if Warlords of Wyrdwood would follow suit.

And you know what, it really does.

The world of Crua remains a careful blend of scintillating wonder and outright horror in equal measure. The world continues to tilt, one end of the axis becoming increasingly untenable. The rai, the magical upper classes, continue to oppress everyone around them, both systemically, and rather more immediately with the occasional fireball or on-land-drowning. Using their magic seems to drive them increasingly into sadistic cruelty, and picking at that power balance is one of the many interesting parts of the story. Are the rai cruel because their magic slowly makes them that way? Or do they have a choice, a means to become something else? Given the horror that goes into their creation (which was explored in the first book in visceral terms), the reader can even see how they were once victims, now acting out their trauma on a wider stage, seizing the sense of power and control, and slowly losing themselves. On the other hand, they incinerate people for looking at them funny, and laugh about it, so maybe I'm overthinking it. But this is a wonderful bit of exploration of class warfare. The rai are on top, and while they're more than happy to murder each other in pursuit of power, without much interest in how many "little people" are caught in the crossfire, they're also willing to turn as one on any threat to their power. And that's before we get into the Forest that sprawls across much of the story, looming larger than its trees, full of wonders to delight the soul, and horrors which will more than happily eat it - not to be malevolent, but because they do not care. The world is filled with detail and asides and little revelations that give it a flavour and texture that are different to anything else out there, and yet also very believable.

A threat like Cahan. A threat like foresters. A threat like regular people carrying bows and arrows, and willing to use them to solve problems like "Maybe if we put an arrow into that fire guy from a hundred yards away, we don't have to listen to him any more. Cahan is the catalyst for a war that's bubbling under the surface of a broader conflict, but he's not the only one. He is, to be fair, a lynchpin. A person who feels like he needs to hold everyone together, without much of an idea of how to do it. Dragged unwillingly to the head of a march for freedom, he's a man who just wanted to be left alone, who now gets to make choices about how (and if) people get to live at all. He is, to put it mildly, not excited about that. And Barker charts his character...I want to say growth, but perhaps expansion is better, as Cahan makes some rather poor choices while thinking he doesn't have any other option. On the other hand, we get to spend a lot of time with some totally new characters (no spoilers there), and watch some old friends and/or enemies figuring themselves out. It's something Barker does well, letting each viewpoint unfold enough to give us empathy, if not sympathy, and see these people thinking through their emotions and their actions, trying to understand themselves and , if not be better, at least sometimes try to be different. There's an element of sympathy for self reflection, and then there's moments where you can be wading hip deep in the icy needle consciousness of an unrepentant killer. And you know what, it all feels like it makes sense, and I spent a lot of time being surprised, and watching characters I thought I understood take opportunities to be...different. Not always better, but different! And this sort of character stretch is done with a human rawness that makes it plausible, that makes it real. 

In a world filled with trees so huge they almost dwarf the sky, where uncaring entitites of unknowable puissance lurk in the dark glades out of view, where the alien and the horribly twisted familiar are the edge of a forest away, the humanity and the cruelty and the courage and the hope pour off the page in a deeply human experience which was both incredibly tense and deeply cathartic to read. 

Overall, this is Barker at his best; thoughtful, challenging fantasy that rewards a close reading, providing characters and a world that grips the heart and characters and a story which makes it sing. Go on out and pick this one up./

On Vacation!

 Hey everyone!

We'll be back in a couple of weeks, we're going on vacation and  off the internet for a short while.

Normal service should resume shortly.

The Mercy of Gods - James S.A. Corey

The Mercy of Gods is the start of a new sci-fi series from James S.A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo responsible for The Expanse. As a big fan of their previous work, I was very excited to pick up this new work and see what they were up to. There was a danger that they wouldn't live up to the hype, and I can say that fear was unfounded. This is thoughtful, compelling, high-concept science-fiction, with characters that make us feel and understand a bit more about what it means to be human - and non-human characters whose perspectives will challenge, appall and excite the reader in equal measure. 

The protagonist is Dafyd Alkhor, whom we first meet at a faculty party. He's a research assistant for a group of scholars that's busy making history. Dafyd is a smart, thoughtful viewpoint, with an instinct for people and interpersonal politics. He's not powerful, but incisive and a little manipulative. Those he's surrounded by are all brilliant in their own ways, and flawed in others - from Tonner, the research lead with a towering intellect and an equally towering sense of self-importance, to Else, who gave up her own position as a research lead to be inside Tonner's group, and is also incidentally his girlfriend, to Jessyn, who matches a searing intelligence with struggles to keep an even keel. While the story takes a while to get going, it uses its time wisely, building out these people, their lives, their hopes and dreams and darker desires, their pride, their flaws, their hubris, their leaps of intellect and occasional misadventures. We come to them with nothing, and Corey uses the start of the story to turn them into living, breathing people. Recognisably from a different cultural context, but still people we could recognise if we saw them in the street - from the venal to the brilliant and back again in the space of a breath. 

And the world they inhabit is there as well, one where humanity has entered an interstellar age - and then forgotten. Where people live on another world with a dual biosphere - and don't know why. With politics and institutions that are rich and filled with veins of lore and the crackle of hidden history told in a newsreel. A world that has texture, and a past. Dafyd and his friends live somewhere we can recognise, even if its about forty-five degrees off what we'd normally see looking out the window.

And then, right about the time you're trying to work out what the point is, it's all washed away. An outside-context-even shatters Dafyd's personal universe, and his world. An alien fleet descends and seizes  everything and everyone it deems useful, and whisks them away to, well, elsewhere. And that's where the groundwork becomes essential, as the book becomes less a space opera, and more of a survival story. A story of trauma and how we respond to it. A story of what it takes to make it through another day, and the compromises and decisions someone will make to ensure not just their own survival but the survival of their friends, or their species. And it doesn't shy away from exploring these questions either, of calling out when those compromises might be self-delusional grasps for a shred of comfort, or when the necessary thing is also a terrible thing. Where horrors force someone to behave like a captor they despise to survive, and what that does to someone, or to a group. It's by tunrs brutal and transcendent. I described it to a friend as "deeply harrowing". It's a story that drinks deeply from the well of human misery, from abrupt, seemingly arbitrary executions, to uncaring captors leaving their prisoners to become useful - or die. From people cowering in their nightgowns, to exploring the moral compromises and definitions of resistance. It's a book that delves into what it means to be human, what it means to survive, what it means to live.

It's a complicated story, which survives, first on the in-depth characterisation, as we see people we've come to know slowly change in the crucible of being alien POW's, and second on a world which is only revealed to us one strand at a time, but promises to be a flavourful gumbo of deeply weird alien cultures, all with their own histories, their own perspectives, their own agenda. Our protagonist and his friends and colleagues are blindsided, confused, and desperate to learn what's going on to ensure their own survival - and so are we, right along with them. And Corey does something wonderful here, giving us the Carryx, an antagonist so strange we're not even entirely sure what it is they want, why they're doing what they're doing, what their goals are and how their society functions. Some of this comes out over the course of the text, and uncovering it alongside Dafyd's group (and occasionally, shortly before) makes for a powerful and at times revelatory narrative experience.

In any case. Before I go on too much. Not to overstate it, this isn't The Expanse. This is something new. But it has a lot of the same hallmarks. Complex moral questions. A humanity on the brink of paradigm-shattering change. Characters whom you can live with love with, cry with, hate and love and empathise with, often over the course of a few pages. Sprawling, detailed societies filled with those little details that make them real. A commitment to asking big, hard questions and letting the reader push themselves toward answers, where there are any. And a fierce, for want of another word, faith in humanity, or at least in people. This isn't The Expanse. It's something new. But it's also really bloody good, if you want to explore trauma, survival, deeply alien environments, prison complexes that are also alien civilisations, and, again, those big questions around who wand what we are, what it means to be people, what it means to be a person. It's slow start is more than paid off by the catharsis of its conclusion, and if it took me a while to really let it get going, once it did, I couldn't take my eyes off the page. Top notch stuff, that lives up to the hype.

Back next week!

 We're on vacation this week!

We'll be back next week.

Deep Black - Miles Cameron

I've been waiting on Deep Black for a while. Ever since I finished Artifact Space, honestly, at which point I shook my fist and demanded a sequel, ideally immediately. Well, immediately it wasn't, but the sequel is here, wrapping up the story that the first book began: Marca Nbaro is having her first eventful cruise aboard the Greatship Athens, trading with mysterious aliens for technology and materials we barely pretend to understand. Nbaro grew by leaps and bounds in the first story, rising from her beginnings in an orphanage to something like a talisman, getting to live to her full potential in service to the Service. Of course to do that she had to deal with an espionage ring and the aforesaid mysterious aliens.

This second book opens where the first left off. With the Athens meeting some weird and wonderful starfish-aliens, and trading them all sorts of knickknacks for their own goods. And I'll say this for Deep Black. It's not afraid to start looking at the aliens that underpin the economy of interstellar human civilisation. We've heard a little bit about the Starfish, but this is seeing them up close, as Nbaro and the rest of the crew try to work out how to extract as much alien tech as possible for as little outlay as possible. This is, after all, a merchant voyage. But it's also a voyage that shows us a crew trying to understand the alien. Trying to see where they come from, and what it is that they want all our stuff for, and find a way to communicate. Those efforts are slow, and stumbling, but you can feel the small victories, and the potential for shattering consequences that they evoke. And the Starfish remain impressively opaque, with drives and responses that seem to sit at an odd angle to our own. They're fun to read. This is a universe populated by the strange. Speaking of which, there are rumblings of other aliens making an appearance as well (as seen in the interstitial short story collection Beyond the Fringe), and their agenda and world view is likely to change everything again. 

The book manages to make all of this work by taking the high concept stuff - the galaxy-spanning humanity, the distinctly odd alien cultures, and grounding it in what feels suspiciously like 16th century Venice, but with faster-than-light travel. The Athens is a massive, brutally elegant tool, staffed by tens of thousands of people, all of whom are, after months or years in the middle of nowhere, busy politicking or screwing or feuding just trying to find a decent cup of coffee. They're our grounding influence, in their messy humanity, in their enmities and in their friendships and in their love perhaps most of all. They're good people. And, you know, also, they learn to fight hand-to hand, they fly space-fighters, and they do, sometimes, blow shit up real good. Because this is a world that fights slow, real wars in space, where getting everyone in the same place at the same time is hard, but throwing a bunch of kilometers-long railgun slugs at them once you do is reasonably easy. Deep Black has more of a focus on the xeno-culture than its predecessor, but worry not. It's still full of tense space-navy warfare, and harsh, kinetic and bloodily immediate combat, on the "ground" and in the air - all described with compulsive prose that leaves a taste of iron and gunpowder in your mouth.

Nbaro is as much of a joy to read as ever, incidentally. If you're here for competence-as-a-service, she can hook you up. There's a sense that she's grown more as a person than at the start of the first book. Here she's thrown into the deep end of trying to be a grown-up officer in what's definitely not a space navy (it absolutely is).Buried beneath watch reports and Science! and trying to fly a space-fighter and maybe also learn to be an engineer and and and. But underneath that is a vulnerability and a humanity that show us she's not just a hyper-competent plot-magnet. She's someone trying to understand what's going on, what she wants, and where her friends and her career fit in a world slowly tilting out of the known, and into something different, whether or not it's better. I've always liked her for being intelligent and brave, but seeing her run into the edges of her own personality, and need to think things through, was a delight - working on her own need to be at the front, to be seen and a hero, and yet also somehow not end up dead. And she's surrounded by some delightful supporting characters. Including the mostly-not-that-bad shipmind AI, and also her long term crush who may reciprocate her feelings, and her roommate, who has her own problems. The book wants to spend more time with some than others, but I liked the way it dealt with the issues it did have time to explore - love, loss, and dealing with the sometimes permanent consequences of a life spent at hazard. I would've liked to give them all a little more room to breathe - sometimes there's a cavalcade of names and faces and they don't get as much flavour as I'd prefer, in between the world-building and the world-exploding. But that said, the book's already big enough, and honestly I was always going to want more anyway.

The story? Well. If I can paraphrase Blackadder, it twists and turns like a...twisty turny thing. I will say that you naval warfare fans and you ground-pounders, there's plenty for you. But there's romance in here too, little sparks of joy in the dark. There's tense negotiation and catharsis and blood on the decks. There's epic space battles, and sometimes there's just training and coffee and trying to make it to the next thing before you fall over. There's being the one who shows up, the one who cares. This is high concept space opera, with a gritty feel to it, a feel of flight decks stained with oil and blood, but with some smart ideas hiding behind the explosions. This is, in short, a fine sequel, and a fine conclusion to the series.

P.S. I will say that there was some nice extra context made available in Beyond the Fringe reviewed last time, which I encourage everyone to give a read. It's not necessary but it certainnly adds some interesting facets to an already complex tale.