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.

Beyond the Fringe - Miles Cameron

Beyond the Fringe is a collection of short stories by Miles Cameron, set in the Arcana Imperii universe. The mainline entry in the series, Artifact Space was a rollicking space adventure, with some deep world-building and strong characterisation, married to a plot that ramped up in a hurry and ended with me reading later at night than I should've been.  These stories take place in the same universe, butt with different characters, and in different places.  That said, most of them centre around the world of "New Texas", which seems to be getting rather expansionist, and also seems to feel like it can challenge the existing socio-political and interstellar commercial order. Why it thinks that is another matter entirely, one slowly revealed over the course of these vignettes.

I will say, up front, that I had a great time with each of these stories. There are five in the collection, and if I remember correctly, two were published already. Each has a different focus. From bloody massacre in the face of a New Texas revolution, through espionage, tradecraft and violence in dealing with a defector, and out the other side into the gracefully deadly ballet of space warfare. I won't say there's something for everyone - it's a little less cozy than you might expect - but if there's a military tinge to the SF here, that's fine if you like that sort of thing. And the stories themselves are lean, incisive work, without much in the way of narrative flab.

I think my favourite may be Tradecraft, which follows an agent of the human polity as she potters about her day, gathering information and selling luxury goods to the locals. Until someone puts down a red flag, and she has to drop everything to find and protect a (potential) defector with some very high stakes indeed. It's a story that emphasises the slow adrenaline of espionage - there's a soupcon of Le Carre in here somewhere - but backs up the long shots of preparation and discussion with some explosive moments of action which are kinetic and bloody in equal measure.

That said, there's another which explores the claustrophobic world of another human polity through its navy. Three ships diving through the darkness, on a mission of great importance. Probably. Unless what they're doing isn't what it seems. This one looks more at the enemies of the DHC, the central human power of the mainline story. If the DHC are a futuristic Venice, their opponent feels like something different - possibly there's a flavour of China there. In any case, this is a claustrophobic tale of betrayal, conspiracy and what happens when you let off a handgun in a confined space. 

I don't want to spoil any of the stories here; I think they're great at adding flavour and context to a universe that we're used to only seeing from one angle. That they're all also snappy sci-fi adventures is a bonus. That they sneak in some big ideas when nobody's looking, that's something else again. If you're a fan, this is a collection you'll want to pick up sooner rather than later.

The Daughters' War - Christopher Buehlman

Alright, up front, this is one of my favourite books of the year. Its a thoughtful paean on the horrors of war. It's a story of what family is and what it means. It's a means of exploring and understanding grief, and conflict, and trust, and faith. It's a story about kicking goblin arse, and a story of war with an unapologetic, harrowing darkness to it, a razor edge that makes sure you know you're bleeding. It's a tough read, no doubt, but also one that made me think and feel, and explore a little more what it means to be, well, human. It's a book that can be brilliantly funny, understatedly smart, and emotionally devastating in a handful of pages.

Anyway. That's probably telling you that I quite liked it. And I did! It's worth noting that it's a prequel to Buehlman's The Blacktongue Thief, but I'd say it could happily be read as a standalone. And it's very tonally distinct from that story, with an interlocutor whose perspective is very different to that of the previous novel, and in a different time and place entirely. Decades before, during the last Goblin war, which ripped apart a continent.

Our protagonist is Galva, a young woman who has defied her family to go to war. It helps that her family are one of the pre-eminent noble families of her kingdom, and it helps that two previous wars with Goblins have savagely lowered the number of men available to, well, fight wars - so now the military is heavily populated by women. Incidentally, the story does delve into the socio-political issues this causes, with a minority of rich men struggling to come to grips with the idea that their command structure is now populated mostly by women, many of whom both aren't taking any of their crap, and also are looking to step up and replace the existing hierarchy pretty soon now.

But anyway, Galva. Those of you who read The Blacktongue Thief may recognise her from there, but here she's twenty years younger, and it shows. This Galva is blunt, but thoughtful. She struggles to reach out and make human connections, but also seems very incentivised to make them - trying to be a little less self contained, looking for, if not romance, at least peace and comfort during a conflict that means life is likely to be cut short at any moment. Galva is also well trained and dangerous, though not yet a hardened killer - she has an innocent side to her, slowly calloused by the sheer brutality of what she's exposed to. But she's also sweet, compassionate, and probably not going to put a sword in you unless you deserve it. Her struggle to really understand people is something that gives her startling vulnerability, even when she's slogging through mud, falling headlong into the horrors of war, and marching with magical war-ravens (read and, well, find out). I mean...I don't want to go on about this exactly, but as a protagonist, she's pitch-perfect, drawing us in, letting us empathise and sympathise, and showing us not only the best and worst of her world but what it means and how it feels. She does also kick serious butt, but her emotions are there, her humanity is there to make us feel the raw nature of the events she's embroiled in. In summary, Galva is wonderfully realised here, and if you've seen her before, then this adds a rich texture to her previous appearance - and if not, well, she's still great.

This is a war story, and I will say that the Goblins, as primary antagonists, are brutal. This is not a happy-go-lucky book. It's laced with blood and tragedy, and you know what by the end I absolutely loathed these creatures as much as Galva does. Buehlman manages to make them repulsive while also giving the, a life and culture of their own, it's just one that sits at a solid ninety-degrees to our own (actually, since they can't abide straight lines, probably at eighty-five degrees). They're viciously intelligent, brutal, and horrifying in equal measure. And every battle (and there are a few) is viscerally felt, bloody, uncompromising in the grit and sweat and horror. But this is also a world that plays with triumph and with subtler emotions - the grief, for example, that an equestrian nation feels when its horses are cut down by an engineered plague, laced with a need for vengeance, and sorrow. 

Anyway. Maybe I haven't sold you with all that. So I'll say this. The Daughter's War is a war story, a story of family, born and made, a story of horrors and a story of love that could light the stars. It's a story that you'll want to tear through, a story that you won't want to end, an story that will make you feel. Go and get a copy as soon as you can, you won't regret it.

Back next week!

 Everyone here is ill right now so we'll try againnnext week!

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.