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!

Disquiet Gods - Christopher Ruocchio

I've been talking about Ruocchio's series for years. He does good work, building out a complicated universe filled with a diverse range of factions, weird and wonderful tech, and people that live inside that space. Of course, the centrepiece of the story is Hadrian Marlowe, once an arse-kicking knight of the Solar Imperium, and before that all kinds of things, including a runaway son, a gladiator, and a general troubleshooter for his somewhat decrepit polity. Of course that kind of troubleshooting invovles warfare with aliens, blowing up clandestine research facilities, and tracking down technological abominations, so there's a breadth of coverage there. And now, he's back in this latest volume, Disquiet Gods.

Anyway. Marlowe. He's been through the wringer the last few books, and that doesn't really change here. He's still rocking that penchant for sticking his neck out, for taking risks, for saying not-quite the right thing to not-quite the right person. There's a sense to him of someone determined to walk away, to not be seen as a hero any longer, to fade into the west, as it were, and live outside the shadow of his own legend. This is, however, quite a long book, so I think you can all expect ithis plan not to work out exactly as he hopes. That said, this is Marlowe with a stake in events. He's trying to build something personal now, trying to look at his relationships, his family and friends, those that have survived, and keep them safe, keep them alive. Whether that's the best thing for them or not is rather open to question, but still. This version of Hadrian has matured enough to recognise his own weaknesses, and recovered sufficiently from the trauma laid out behind him in order to at least function. He's someone whose life has derailed maginificently from its expectations, and Hadrian is, if not resigned to that, at least comfortable in it; perhaps, as the story begins, too much so. Still, after the lavishly wrought inner worlds of earlier stories, its enjoyable to see him on something of an upswing.

In this he's helped by his relationships, with those surviving acquaintainces he has. As time passes for Hadrian Marlowe, we the reader risk growing a little disconnected from events, as the Patrician Marlowe, rendered long-lived by science and caste, outlives those other characters we loved so well - even when they don't get disembowelled, assassinated or otherwise fall to misadventure. Still, there's a few familiar faces in here to enliven the spirit, in terms of friends and enemies both and a swathe of new people whom we're learning about alongside our protagonist, and whom, as ever, the author draws with a rich and vivid passion to his prose that makes it both believable and great fun. Because while this is a story about galactic empries, about war between the stars, about atrocities and super-science and the inner heart of humanity and their story, it's also a apean to the person, to people, to the value that one clear vision can have if it finds itself lifted up by those around, about how no-one is an island. ABout human need and folly and loss and fear, yes, but about our strengths, our compassion and friendhsip and love for one another and how tht can make and break both people and empires. 

And if you're not into that, hmm. Well. Okay. The story lives on. The universe lives on, filled with horrendously alien aliens, who would like nothing better thn to eat you for their own aracane reasons (or, you know, for fun). Filled with people who've handed over more or less of themselves to machinery. To those who claim to live forever, flitting from one re-animated body to the next. Filled with horrors to blight the soul, absolutely, or even to slowly wrap it in turgid chains of protocol and a fog of formality. Of Empire, not without ambition, but with an impending mortality, Byzantium on the wane. But also a universe with laughter, with vital, fierce people who can and will change the world. And that's what makes the stoy, I think, because the world feels complicated, liek we see a small piece of a wider mosaic, and even what we see is filled with life and colour and movement and other stories just out of frame. It's a world that has textruee and heft, in a story which demands your attention. 

Speaking of....well. I won't delve into the tale here because it gives too much away really. But this is the beginning fo the end, I think, you can feel different voices building to a crescendo, you can feel institutions tottering, can feel choices being laid down which will drive a path to ruin, or something more. It's a story of fast-paced escapes, duels, unlikely alliances, extremely likely betrayals, and more than a little love. And for that, with that, it builds a story worth reading. It's not all fast-paced space battles; and though some of the more introspective pieces feel a little laboured, or occasionally  felt suspect or made me uncomfortable
, there's still a thoughtful, compelling story here, which will keep you turning pages until it's done. 

Return of the Jedi: From a Certain Point of View - Saladin Ahmed et al.

This is another in the sequence started way back in 2017, bringing you perspectives on the classic film trilogy from the perspective of various bit players. Those include a variety of Imperials stationed on the moon of Endor and beyond, bounty hunters, monsters, unfortunate civilians, and beyond. The idea is to provide some context and flavour to the world, to look at the adventures of Leia, Luke, Han et al through another lens. To emphasise that those other perspectives are just as important, in a wider universe.

And I'll say this, this is a collection with a diversity of perspectives, gods and monsters and heroes and unrepentant villains. There's something for everyone to enjoy, whether you like your hard-edged heroines, your scoundrels and killers, or the more familiar cast of the working stiff just trying to make it by while people keep waving laser swords and doomsday lasers in your face. I admit I have something of a penchant for the latter, but they all have their charms. And its a credit to the authors that they can show us different sides of characters we only saw in person, or ask us to interpret their actions a little differently, now we're inside their head. And enjoyably for Star Wars, this layer of personality, this extra flavour, makes for a more complex universe. Sure, the baddies are still bad. And the goodies are still good. But there's circumstance and story and history and all the rich tapestry of choice that brings not just the main characters, but all the people we see to the point of Return of the Jedi. And we get to see it here. 

Now, there's a fair point to be made that, well, do we really need to see another performer from the Max Rebo band? Does anyone care what blob-head-alien-in-the-crowd is doing there? And you know what...some of the time you're going to read one of these stories, and it'll be a miss for you. But there's enough here that maybe the next one will be exactly the flavour you need to pass the time, or the one in the collection that will light up your soul. 

And having said that, I think there's some good stuff here. Family stories. Redemption stories. Flat out adventure romps. More starfighter combat, fast and visceral and deadly, than you can shake a stick at. The ominous shadow of a super-moon that is something else. And of course, the knowledge that we know what's coming, but we don't know how we're going to get there this time, or why it may matter, differently, to others than our movie heroes. This is a paean to the idea that other people matter. That the greats are who they are because they're surrounded by other people living and working and supporting them, lifting them up with every choice, and being, in their own way, heroes in their own lives.  

This isn't a quiet book. It's full of blood and thunder and rousing speeches. But it's also an introspective one, which throws out some fun ideas to explore in the Star Wars expanded universe. Are we any worse off in the films for not hearing about Mon Mothma's corps of historians of the rebellion? Patently not. But they have an interesting story, and a protagonist who is ready to ask questions about whether what her leaders consider important actually...is. And if some of these stories are cracking yarns, others are looking around and using the Star Wars lens to ask some searching questions about us, and what we're willing to do, willing to accept. 

It's a solid collection, this. If you're a Star Wars fan, and want to get a little something more for your next viewing of Return of the Jedi, or you just want to delve deeper into the rich, diverse universe that Star Wars has on tap - then this is the one for you.

Wicked Problems - Max Gladstone

Wicked Problems is the second in Max Gladstone's Craft Wars sequence, which builds off another series of his, the Craft Sequence. I'll offer full disclosure by saying that there's never been a Craft book of his that I didn't like. Something about the blending of magic, gods and warfare with the more prosaic linguistics of consulting and attorneys, the mix of the high fantasy with the low familiar, really hits the spot. Gladstone also isn't shy about pointing out social issues, framed inside his fantasy; you're as like to see a necromantic lich lord called out for his unsound environmental provisions, as groundwater drains from a nearby lake broken by spellfire, as to find a high finance firm using precognitive worship to try and spot trends in the market. It's a smart conceit, and one I've always found deeply enjoyable. 

That has not, honestly, changed here. This is a second book in a second series, so I would say that if you're coming into the story fresh, there are probably better starting points. The original sequence pretty much works as standalones, but Wicked Problems needs you to have read its predecessor, at a minimum, to get to grips with it. And the additional context from the other series isn't a bad idea either. But if you're coming in as a fan, as someone who already knows the characters and the world, then let me tell you, this is a story which will reward close reading. It isn't afraid to ask hard questions of its characters - morally, ethically, and occasionally through all too literal sacrifice. It wants to know whether or not you're willing to take action in the face of mounting catastrophe, and it's also willing to entertain the idea that the specific action you might take may also be, you know, wrong. Wonderfully, this is a story which looks at two groups of people trying to save the world from onrushing cataclysm - they're just finding that their means of doing so, and their own sense of what is allowed in order to make that happen, are at odds. No cackling villains here (well, maybe one or two), mostly people doing the best that they can with the information available, and fucking up from time to time. Now granted, those times may or may not involve extradimensional entities and the occasional fireball, but hey.

And the characters themselves...well, if you're here you already know most of them. What they've already lived through, the decisions and consequences they've had to deal with Everyone on the page is smart, thoughtful, and willing to do a lot of things. Some of them are cynics, some are idealists, but they're there, looking back out at us, filled with raw pain and utter joy. There's families trying to live together on opposite sides, and students and teachers at the edge of a knife. There's golems and pirates and the occasional god, and say it however many times you like, they all feel like people to me, Like they could step off the page, grab a beer and start arguing about arcane theory and how it, say, allows you to use lava monsters to run geothermal plants. They're people, even the ones who aren't. Maybe especially the ones who aren't. They're dangerous and clever and hurt, and they're always willing to surprise both their antagonists and the reader at the last second. 

I don't have a lot to say about the story, except that it'll grab you at the back of the neck and not let go. It's going to keep you there, turning pages until far too late at night, as you try and figure out who is going to survive, what they plan to do, and whether or not they're right. It's a story that asks questions and throws out answers for you to look over yourself, to decide where you sit, where your sympathies are. It's a story that compels and fascinates, blood and metal and love and thunder. It's another marvellous book from Gladstone, another excellent Craft story, and if you're a fan, you should go pick it up, very soon.

 Back (again) next week!

We're all sick this week sadly, review to follow next week!

The Book That Broke The World - Mark Lawrence

As long time readers know, I've always been a fan of Mark Lawrence. He's got a knack for writing a richly imagined, immersive universe. For making the stage feel like a real, lived in place. And for putting characters on it who you can feel. Who are working on their own wants and needs, not just marching through the narrative motions. A knack for stories that ask big questions, and challenge the reader to go on the journey to, if not find the answer, at least find an answer. Which brings us to The Book That Broke The World. 

In part, this is a book about The Library. Not a library, but the library. It squats on its world, pulling in knowledge and focus like a gravity well. It's a monstrous thing, a collection of more knowledge than anyone can bear. Constructed over aeons, pulling in different peoples, different species, from all across its geography. The library squats within a mountain, and plumbs its depths. And while its physically imposing, its cultural weight is larger. Wars are fought for the knowledge of the library. People broken and forced out of the city. Which changes hands again, and again, and again. On a long enough timeline, the library draws everything to it, and then sets it aflame. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is open to debate. But the library itself has a warm, cosy, only slightly horrifying feel to it. As people step between different rooms, which can be feet or miles across. As they uncover secret knowledge, and terrifying defence mechanisms, those people step deeper into the space which is at once confined and limitless, chambers going ever deeper into the bedrock, each turn and each open door promising more understanding, greater knowledge. Greater power. And that's a promise which in this world carries costs.  The story isn't afraid to explore those, looking at the systemic oppression enacted by those in control, at one time or another. At the efforts to make changes, gradual or otherwise, violent or otherwise. It's a text that gives us a world about which it often seems fiercely angry, a world where knowledge is available if you're willing to kill for it, where keeping people down is a survival strategy and also inevitably ends in blood and fire. From the dark tunnels of mines worked by slaves, pulling out layers of shattered civilisations, to iron shelves in the library, torn apart by murderous automatons, there's layer after layer of history, of politics of compromise of blood. This is a world in thrall to its past, unwilling or unable to walk away from it. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is one of the questions this book is asking, as it shows you the consequences of both knowledge and ignorance (and perhaps, quietly, understanding).

We get to see some of our friends from the previous book once again. Livira and Evar are back, each one looking for the other, in their own way. Something Lawrence does well is show us characters changing, not just telling us about it. So we can see Livira, marked by her actions in the previous story, trying to find a way home, find a way back to Evar, to hold tight to a connection that might slip away forever. Whether she's willing to bear the costs of doing that is uncertain. But like Evar, she finds her family in those around her, and you can feel her becoming something more by osmosis. Evar, of course, has his own family, from hardened killers to schemers and back around again, victims of ancient trauma that they struggle with every day. He's a person willing to guide and be guided, growing from a lost boy into a leader, but still holding to curiosity, to vulnerability, to a quiet hurt that draws sympathy. They're both delightful in their empathy for others and fierce love for each other, and sympathetic in their struggle against their environment, their circumstances, and their struggle against antagonists that include malevolent ghosts, automatons, and, of course, other people. But this book also gives us a breath of fresh air in Celcha, someone brought up as a slave, mining knowledge, crushed into despair that hides a lively intelligence, and a strength of feeling likely to shatter worlds. Her journey, along with her brother, is a searingly painful one with flashes of joy, of understanding and belonging - and it's also a story of suffering, of the conflict between becoming what you hate and fighting back against it. Celcha is fiery, unyielding, thoughtful, and every page she's on is better for it.

The story. Well. No spoilers. But this is Lawrence at his best. Weaving strands of narrative across different moments of time and space, across multiple books, setting up convergences, letting people make choices that move them toward fraught, occasionally bloody conclusions. There's more action here than you can shake a stick at, and a slyly leering horror, and on the other side, there's the best of people, coming together to try to make something better. And, of course, the big questions - like how much knowledge is enough, how much is too much, is there such a thing, and should we let other people decide that for us, even if they look like they know what they're doing? It's a story that wants to give the reader room to think, while pacing the story so that you have to run to keep up at the same time. This is smart, wonderfully written fantasy that asks big questions about the kind of world we want, and about ourselves. It's also bloody good fun. So as ever, I thoroughly recommend it - though you could stand to read the first book in the series beforehand. Anyway, absolutely brilliant book, go, read.