Scorpio - Marko Kloos

Scorpio is a new novel by Marko Kloos, who has found fame for his Frontlines series of military sci-fi, which I've reviewed favourably in the past. It's set in the same universe as those stories, but in an entirely different place, and from an entirely different perspective. 

And you know what, not to give the game away, but it's a good time. There's some gnarly, thoroughly visceral action, that Kloos writes with an immediacy and intimate tension that will leave you sweating. The story cracks along pretty swiftly, and I found myself unwilling to put the book down while I was finding out what happened next - which then led to the next thing happening, and so on. And the main character (more on her momentarily) is believably young and  often out of her depth, whilst also being competent, brave, and driven to succeed at doing what she loves.

Speaking of Alex. Alex Archer is a colonist on Scorpio, reaching for the dizzy old-age of twenty-one, in a future where humanity has embraced the stars. Unfortunately for Alex, the stars fought back. Her home was obliterated eight years previously by hostile entities known as "Lankies". As the story opens, the few hundred survivors have been buttoned up in a hardened installation known as The Vault for over eight years. Children have been born not knowing any other way of life, while outside their deep dark hole in the ground, those who devastated their world have turned it into a toxic hellscape unfit for human life. Much of the initial setup is Alex familiarising us with this world she lives in, one where the only thing keeping the lights on at home are dangerous "salvage runs" from the safety of their hidden vault, diving into the broken remnants of the thriving colony that existed eight years before. There's a claustrophobia inherent to the text in those pages, as well as a more literal one - she spends quite a lot of time inside an armoured vehicle on the way to a salvage site, or outside in horrible weather surrounded by unbreathable air, with the unseen possibility of alien-monster-related-disaster lurking ominously just out of shot. We can see in her a woman trying hard to build as much of a life as she can, to take joy in small things - like having a particular flavoured ration bar - that we might skip over ourselves. But while those things are beautiful, they're also small, and you can feel Alex, and her team, fighting the ragged edge of a losing war against time. And that edge is crumbling away beneath them, taking a toll that's physical as well as mental.  Still, Alex is a smart, personable protagonist, one we can easily sympathise with, who is doing her best to hold things together while the world crumbles around her - with her team, and her dog.

The dog, incidentally, is lovely. He gets to go outside in an APC because he's bene trained ot sniff out the aliens that snuffed out Alex's world. So now a woman and her dog ride out with salvage teams, keepinmg watch for extra-terrestrial terrors alongside the more mundsane ones of simple survival. Her buddy is a very good boy indeed, and Kloos manages to write them a bond that will be familiar to anyone with a beloved pet of their own. He's a working dog though, and takes it seriously - but Alex and her boy are in the mix together, always. There's opportunity there to give little dashes of kinbdness, of humanity, to the cast at large in their canine interactions - and the dog is also a proper character (indeed, a Proper Character!) in his own right. As a re the supporting cast, mostly surviving military grunts, who banter with Ash and each other, and try to figure out what they'll do next as and when something goes wrong on their latest dive into hell itself. I would've liked more time with the crew, this being a fairly short book, but I will say that I felt like I knew them as much as Alex did, by the time it ended.

The story? Ah, well, no spoilers. Being a new series in a new place, it takes awhile to spin up, but I think that the high-wire tension, the rising dread, and the aforementioned claustrophobic feel probably help with that. And when things do kick off, Kloos' writing absolutely shines. He can write combat that feels like you can hear the com-chatter in your ear, like the blood running out of a wound is your own, makes you feel the lives and eaths and last-moment defeats and searing comeback victories in those moment-by-moment firefights. High-stakes, deeply personal, and absolutely riveting.

In any event, this is likely to be popular with anyone coming off Frontlines and looking for another work with a similar vibe. And for everyone else, I'll say that this is a story with a well-crafted protagonist, an accessible prose that snaps you through pages, moment-to-moment stakes that always keep things feeling like they matter. Also there's massive aliens, auto-cannons, armoured vehicles, and, of course, a Very Good Dog. It's a fun read, and as ever, I look forward ot seeing where Kloos goes next.

The Blacktongue Thief - Christopher Buehlman

Well, this was a fun one. I'd heard good things before I started The Blacktongue Thief, which may have set my expectations a little high. But I will say that the story delivered. It also managed to do so by being character driven, with a plot that ticked along between suspense, exploration of the world and the motives of the characters, and cathartically explosive action scenes, and did so with metronomic precision. I had a lot of feelings reading this story, but at absolutely no stage was I bored, which I have to say is high praise.

Anyway. Kinch. Kinch is a thief. Very explicitly a thief. Employed by a Guild, who amongst other things, illicitly train people to become better thieves. And also, conveniently, charge them a large sum of money in order to do so. A debt which can be brutally, magically enforced. Kinch is charming, thoughtful, romantic, and also opportunistic and ruthless. The Guild, on the other hand are, if I can be permitted the odd expletive, a grey-faced band of total arseholes, whose weapons-grade corporate malevolence only becomes slightly more obvious in the person of their magical assassin enforcers. Kinch, something of an independent spirit, is not one of the Guild's favourite people - and they aren't any friend of his. But as long as he keeps paying off his debt, he's got the chance for that one big score that will leave him free and clear.

Which, for Kinch, would be a novelty. He's part of an expansionist power that still sees his recently conquered people as an underclass. That power is in a state of near-perpetual war with, well, goblins. Not the squishy, chaffy goblins you see loitering around other books either; these goblins are monstrous. So on the one hand there's a state which has conquered you in order to use your manpower and resources to propagate its war. And on the other hand, that war is one of survival in the face of an enemy which regards people as something roughly akin to cattle, and has already launched several invasions in living memory in order to fill its larders. So, you know, Kinch isn't having a great time. 

But for all his lows, Kinch is fun. He's self aware, and incisively witty. He can also be surprisingly vulnerable, even while he's figuring out whether he's sincere in his own right. And  if he's not exactly a hero, he is innately sympathetic, someone struggling to get out from under the varied thumbs of The Man. Between that and his penchant for the odd knife-fight and desire to just, well, keep out of things, the protagonist is in a similar boat to the reader, the winds of fate blowing him just where he doesn't want to go. 

Which is a disservice really. Because I can't quite capture what it is that comes off the page when you read it in his voice. Possibly its that he has one, or that its shifts from cynical detachment to a kind of deep truth via bursts of existential horror in a way that feels very real. Kinch isn't the mighty-thewed barbarian hero, in fact he'd probably not know a thew at fifty yards, but then again, neither are we. And like us, he comes across as complicated, as a bubbling stew of past mistakes and remembered triumphs, a gumbo of regrets and passion. Buehlman has a real eye for character work, and his protagonist here just...comes off the page, and starts shaking you down for a beer somewhere around the third page, eerily reminiscent of that uncle who still owes you a twenty from ten Christmases ago, but he made you laugh so you're happy never to see it again as long as you see him again.

Suffice to say, this is Kinch's story, and it has some...moments. He's about to meet someone who will change his world. Expand it, destroy it, that's a little more unclear. But, to take a moment, what a world it is. There's the high level stuff, of course, a clash of empires that's also a clash of species who regard each other as food animals or inhuman monsters, respectively. But there's also a raw energy and worn texture to the whole thing, from the part-reconstructed buildings in cities recovering from war, to sublte (and less subtle) magic and its wielders running around and doing, well, horrible things to each other (and sometimes people around them). There's people just trying to live their lives, and there's monsters, human and otherwise, in the woods and in the mountains. There's a history to this world, told in the lost fingers, in the empty places at the hearth, told in the way that women significantly outnumber men, and in the number of those women who carry injuries - and what that looks like for societies which you can feel struggling to adapt away from a male-centric model of power. There are old tragedies writ small if we look around , because they've been placed artfully there for us to see. And it's done in a space that feels like it exists, just one ocean over, and a little in a dream - or a nightmare.

What I'm saying is, the worldbuilding is bloody good.

The story...well, I can't comment on it without spoilers, honestly! But I will say that it spends a while laying deep groundwork, which it rewards with some beautifully set up emotional results, with resolutions that left me feeling raw, and bloody, like someone coming away from an attempted murder. But also a little lighter, like someone hearing horses in the early morning light. That's the story. It's high stakes, it's tightly plotted and kinetically paced, and honestly I powered through it over a couple of nights and was desperate to reach the end but also very sad to have finished it. 

So yeah, this is a good one - go pick up a copy!