It's a 'Julian the Apostate' Reference. You Learned Something Already!

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is the kind of book Samuel Clemens would be writing, if he were alive today. Which is not to say that Robert Charles Wilson is the next Mark Twain; he's quite good, but Twain had such an innate facility with language, such an entirely relaxed way of picking out just the right word, that it's difficult for any writer to equal his mastery of the craft. But if Clemens were still with us, I think he'd consider Julian Comstock to be a damn fine adventure.

That's a Falling Solar Mirror, For the Record.

One of the nice things about getting into a series late is that the wait between the last book you read and the next book to come out is pretty short. Which is why, not long after thoroughly enjoying Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, I found myself picking up its sequel, Caliban's War.

Like the first book, this one is just a monster of a tome. It's over six hundred pages long, which would be impressive enough on its own, but those pages are 6"x9", and there's not a lot of wasted margin, header or footer space. For the sheer amount of story they contain, each of these books could have been split in half as a standard mass-market paperback, and you would not have felt cheated.

Caliban's War picks up eighteen months after the conclusion of Leviathan Wakes. The protomolecule is still on Venus, and despite being watched by basically everyone and every institution with an even tangential interest in science, it's utterly inscrutable. In more mundane developments, the UN and Mars are both trying to hold on to Ganymede, breadbasket of the Outer Planets, and are about one sudden twitch away from an open shooting war. The Outer Planets Alliance, given at least some status at the end of the last book, has spent the intervening time establishing itself in its sphere of influence, minting money, directing relief supplies and keeping the peace. And with the only available warship in the area, the OPA has been turning to James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante to do just that. The fragile peace is shattered, however, when what looks like a protomolecule-based monster slaughters first a UN and then a Martian military outpost on Ganymede; with each side thinking the either has finally stepped over the line, the space forces start shooting, blasting each other to pieces and doing major damage to the infrastructure of Ganymede in the process.

This is about where Caliban's War introduces its new characters. Praxidike Meng, a botanical geneticist on Ganymede. Roberta 'Bobbie' Draper, a Martian Marine and sole survivor of the monster attack on Ganymede. And Chrisjen Avasarala, a high-ranking UN bureaucrat and something of a power behind the throne of the Secretary-General. When Meng's daughter is kidnapped, along with all the other children on Ganymede with a particularly rare genetic immune deficiency, just ahead of the monster attack that Bobbie barely survives, the story really gets started. Like Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War is about the way enough little things can trip up the biggest plans; one more missing child on collapsing, war-ravaged Ganymede might seem like nothing, but it's the loose thread that sends Holden and his people right back into the thick of things.

Caliban's War is a good read, but for all its heft it feels in some way insubstantial, particularly compared to its predecessor. Partly, it's a function of the placement of characters. With Holden and Miller in the first book, the viewpoint characters were always on the front lines of the story. It was a conspiracy story, so of course they didn't know everything, but it always felt like whatever was happening that was important, one of those two men were involved. Unrealistic for a story concerning the fate of the entire solar system? Oh, certainly. But narratively compelling. In this book, however, while Holden and Meng are pretty good at being front and centre, there are also major political and military actions taking place that they really play no part in. And Avasarala and Bobbie are even worse, frankly. Each spends about half the book spinning their wheels while the other is in their element, which makes their sections drag when they're out of place. Bobbie's adventures on Earth are interesting enough in their own right, but rarely relate to anything besides character building, while Corey makes the frankly insane choice to remove Avasarala from her spheres of political influence towards the last third of the book. It makes perfect sense on the part of the characters, but it kills most of her narrative momentum.  She's basically reduced to sending cryptic video letters to her allies and offering the odd bit of sage advice to the others, and it's a serious waste of an interesting and powerful character. On the other hand, without removing her from Earth, it would have been tough for Corey to link her into the main plot with Holden and Meng. In that case, though, perhaps Avasarala should have been redesigned earlier; replacing her with, say, the already space-based Admiral Souther might have gone a long way towards bringing home the immediacy of certain sections that otherwise fall a bit flat.

It might sound like I didn't enjoy this book; that could not be further from the truth. Caliban's War might not be as strong as Leviathan's Wake, but as I reached the end I understood why; Corey is writing a trilogy. The back of this book contains a small excerpt from Abaddon's Gate, and even from what little we see it's hard to imagine how this story could continue past that volume without radically, perhaps even fundamentally, changing its tone and focus. So, a trilogy. And what is always the weakest point of those? Yes, the middle book. Limited set-up, limited pay-off, because the former's all been done in book one and the latter's all being done in book three. Knowing that, being able to judge the book in context, I actually revised my opinion up a notch or two. All things being equal, Corey has pulled off this midway book quite nicely. If you enjoyed Leviathan Wakes, you should definitely enjoy Caliban's War.

Helmetless Sergeants and Captains - Take Note!

Ever since their last codex over-hyped them to the point of insanity, the Ultramarines have taken a bit of a kicking from the fanbase. They're no Grey Knights, thankfully, but talk of how non-Ultramarines-descended chapters are sad because they 'can never be Ultarmarines' despite their best efforts and of how the Blood Angels 'strive to be worthy of Guilliman's legacy' doesn't exactly endear them to folks. Nobody likes a Mary Sue, which is what the last Codex: Space Marines turned the Ultramarines into. Which is shame, because in my opinion that rather goes against the most interesting aspect of that legion.

Know No Fear, by Dan Abnett, thankfully reverses course about as swiftly as possible. Yes, the Ultarmarines have a certain standing amongst the Astartes; they're the biggest legion, with the greatest number of triumphs, spread over the widest area. They conquer as swiftly as World Eaters or Space Wolves, with all the skill of the Imperial Fists and the Luna Wolves, and create compliant worlds as stable and productive as Word Bearers and Thousand Sons, but without the brutality of the former or the lengthy deployments of the latter. So, yes, the Ultarmarines are probably one of the top legions at the time, and they know it just as much as everyone else. But that certainly doesn't endear them to those legions who are considered to be inferior in some way. And it doesn't mean they can't get hurt, badly.

The Ultramarines famously played no real role in the Horus Heresy. Dispatched by the Warmaster to the Eastern Fringes, far from the fighting, and ambushed by the Word Bearers, they were basically written out of the main action. But you can't just sideline a legion the size of the pre-Heresy Ultramarines without a pretty serious fight, and Know No Fear shows us the start of that fight. The Ultramarines, assembled in all their vast strength, are set to assault a powerful ork stronghold alongside the Word Bearers. It turns out to be a trick, however, a way to assemble the majority of the Ultramarines' force in one place so the Word Bearers can cause maximum damage with their alpha strike. And it works. Good heavens, does it work!

The best thing about the Ultramarines, and the thing Ward's fawning Mary Sue-isms foolishly undermines, is that they were the everymen of the Space Marines. They weren't crazy berzerkers, or blood-drinking mutations, or flesh-hating cyborgs, or crusading knights errant. Their role in the fiction was to be the baseline for Space Marines, not as strong, not as wild, not as calculating, not as impregnably armoured or fantastically armed. They fought Behemoth and won, but lost their entire First Company. It was a monumental achievement, at a staggering cost. It's what made the Ultramarines likeable; they took their licks, fair and square, and then powered through and triumphed despite the odds. And that is what Know No Fear seems intent on reinforcing. Attacked without warning, by a force meant to be friendly, at a time when violence between Space Marines was simply unthinkable, the Ultramarines take absolutely catastrophic losses. Starships, space docks, Ultramarines, Imperial Army, Mechanicus, civilians, the Word Bearers visit indiscriminate slaughter on any and every target they can find. Abnett really sells the sheer scale of the horror, taking a bit of time here and there to rattle off the names of helpless ships being killed, one by one, in orbit, or showing small groups of disoriented Imperial Army and Ultramarines being run down and murdered. And while the Ultramarines react with the sort of stoic determination that so makes a Space Marine, even Guilliman can't just shake off the profound emotional impact of such a monumental betrayal. He and Lorgar might not have seen eye to eye on a great many things, but they're brothers, sons of the Emperor, gods amongst men creating a golden future for all humanity; for one to try and kill the other is, rightly, shocking. And it comes off that way.

Know No Fear has some really excellent action scenes. It helps that 40K's best scenes are usually of the 'desperately outnumbered', 'heroic last stand' or 'doomed but glorious' variety, which this book has no shortage of. The Ultramarines die by the truckload, but they die well, which is just what you want out of them. They should be noble, so their deaths mean something, but they should also be vulnerable so their deaths can be relatively realistic. It's a fine line, and Abnett handles it nicely.

That's not to say this book is perfect, though. Much as I like a bit of worldbuilding, it does rather take its own sweet time getting started. And while Abnett's practice of introducing a wide variety of figures in small roles, and giving them a look-in every now and then, can make for a wider world for the reader, he does go overboard in this one. There are several characters, notably a dreadnought and a high-ranking Ultramarine lord, who get several rather lengthy establishing scenes that never really result in anything. There's no real payoff for it, which is frustrating when those interludes kept interrupting the meaningful action.

Still, despite a few rough patches, Know No Fear is an excellent entry into the Horus Heresy series, and a solid return to form for the Ultramarines. Let's hope Matt Ward was watching...

Fallin' Down On the Job

Star Trek: Titan: Fallen Gods (Star Trek books do love their colons), by Micheal A. Martin, is full of interesting ideas and setup. Unfortunately, for the most part, these elements aren't fully realized and resolved. This book picks some serious topics and elides around them as hard as possible.

The story picks up not long after the previous Titan adventure, as chronicled in Star Trek: The Typhon Pact Book 2: Seize the Fire (see what I mean about colons?), and carries through several threads from the larger TNG/DS9 era expanded universe. The Federation is still trying to deal with the massive devastation and dislocation caused by the Last Borg Invasion. At the same time, it is trying to come to terms with the secession of Andor. The Andorians are desperate, in the face of a reproductive crisis that could well reach extinction levels. And the Typhon Pact, particularly the Tholians, are involved deeply with Andor. It's a solid bit of fractured setting to build a compelling narrative of conflicting aims and ends, and in that Martin does a decent job.

Captain Riker and the USS Titan have discovered a planet orbiting an immensely deadly pulsar. Shockingly, the planet appears to be inhabited, a fact made possible only by a hugely enhanced geomagnetic field to absorb and deflect the pulsar's considerable broad-band radiation output. When it appears the artificial field may have some connection to the terraforming device found, and destroyed, in Seize the Fire, Riker decides it might be worth investigating. That investigation becomes even more imperative when a maintenance AI on the planet forcibly mind-melds with Tuvok and an AI Titan picked up in Synthesis, Sentry SecondGen White-Blue; the two Titan crewmembers had attempted a similar link with the terraforming device, and the maintenance AI recognised elements of its makers' code in their minds. But with the mind-meld risky, and potentially irreversible if left to continue too long, the pulsar getting steadily more violent and the geomagnetic field on the edge of collapse, such an investigation could be dangerous. Add to that a civil war being fought by the descendants of the Ais builders on the planet, between Preservationists/Keepers and Deconstructonists/Trashers, Starfleet Command's orders that all Andorian officers be reassigned to 'less sensitive' positions, and Andor's demands that all reproductive-age Andorians be sent back to Andor and the newly-reconstituted Imperial Guard's willingness to enforce that order, and you have a pretty wild set of circumstances that would allow for an exploration of any number of issues.

Unfortunately, as I said, Fallen Gods does not fully embrace its difficult subject matter. Much time is given to establishing the alien civil war, including several chapters from the viewpoint of the Preservationist leader, but ultimately it's never really an issue for the Starfleet characters in the book. It's a thing that's happening when they reach the planet, something that inconveniences them slightly, but no more than bad weather or predatory wildlife would've. The same is true of the efforts to get the maintenance AI back to the planet and the magnetic field generators repaired. The book spends ages having characters discuss the pros and cons of going, of how to go, of when to go, and then covers them actually going. But then they just drop the maintenance AI off in a convenient console and leave, playing no role in actually resolving any of the issues. The worst-handled storyline, however, certainly belongs to the Andorian Imperial Guard's efforts to 'liberate' reproductive-age Andorians from Titan.

The book skirts around the AIG commander's plan for an unnecessarily long time, since anyone familiar with The Next Generation should quickly figure out what it consists of. Unfortunately, with all that evasion and forced mystery, there's no time left to delve into the ramifications of it, which are absolutely massive. The moral stain on the Andorians who are participating in it, the mental anguish and existential collapse of the Starfleet Andorians subjected to it, neither are given any particular weight. Indeed, the actual issue isn't directly addressed by any characters until literally the last page of the story. One can only hope, rather desperately, that the next book will actually put some work into exploring this issue on a personal and societal level, rather than faffing about with artificial mysteries that dedicated Star Trek fans (and who else would be reading a Star Trek: Titan book?) will see through in a few pages.

Fallen Gods has all the pieces necessary to be a really compelling novel. Frankly, it has all the pieces necessary to be several really compelling novels. But its refusal to actually engage with any of its topics in detail, to build up meaningful drama and suspense, to present serious threats and stakes, hampers it. The book is enjoyable enough while you're reading it, but upon putting it down don't be surprised if your first thought is a rather plaintive, 'Is that it?'

Quoth the Raven? Thankfully, not in this book.

Like the White Scars and the Iron Hands, the Raven Guard are one of those Space Marine legions that just never seemed to get much in the way of publicity. Sure, each of them have a single special character in Codex: Space Marines, and there's the odd book devoted to them or their successor chapters, but it's pretty small potatoes for a First Founding legion. The Raven Guard are third tier, falling behind not just the big names, the Ultramarines and Blood Angels and Space Wolves, but the lesser-known but codex-toting Marines, the Black Templars and the Dark Angels. Which is all a really long-winded way of saying that unlike The First Heretic and A Thousand Sons, I went into Deliverance lost with no real preconceived notions one way or the other.

Deliverance Lost picks up from the infamous Dropsite Massacre, which at this point is probably running just behind D-Day for 'most fictionally covered battle', where the Raven Guard have been practically destroyed. Corax and a handful of his men make it off the planet, thanks to a slightly psychic noble and a rather daring Raven Guard strike cruiser commander, and the primarch of the Raven Guard is faced with the fact that there's no real way for the shattered remnants of his legion to participate in the accelerating civil war. The Raven Guard would make a particularly strong chapter, but this is the time of the legions, and there just aren't enough of them left for that sort of designation. Which is why Corax decides to take drastic measures to rebuild his legion, setting the plot of the novel into motion.

It's a bit of a slow burn, really, but Gav Thorpe puts the downtime in the middle of the novel to good use. Corax, of course, needs to be built up; unlike Magnus the Red or Leman Russ or Roboute Guilliman, this is not a primarch the reader can be expected to know from the start. Humorously, the only think Corax is really famous for are his reputed last words, which are not going to be of great use in any story but his very last. Thorpe unspools Corax' past through a series of flashbacks, explaining how he came to be on Deliverance, his campaign to establish himself as ruler and his meeting with the Emperor, the seminal events in every primarch's pre-Great Crusade life. But he also spends time on a couple of Raven Guard characters, who give the reader a good sense of what it means to be a member of this particular legion, demonstrating both their common cause with the other legions and the particulars that make them unique. And even with all that, there's still a little time left over for an Alpha Legion character or two.

I've said it before, and my opinion hasn't changed; I fundamentally do not like the way the Alpha Legion decided to align with Horus. The Emperor's goal with the Great Crusade was always and explicitly to elevate humanity to the rulers of the galaxy, so to have Alpharius and Omegon swayed by a group of aliens explaining how the extinction of humanity would destroy the powers of Chaos just rings false. Not only does it not really make sense, since Chaos pre-dates humanity and Slaanesh was explicitly born from alien actions, with no human involvement whatsoever, but it requires the twin primarchs to somehow intuit that while what the Emperor has always said he wanted was the primacy of humanity, secretly what he wants even more is the destruction of Chaos. Also, they have to trust aliens, which is sort of a non-starter in the grim darkness of the far future. I just don't buy it.

That being said, though, Thorpe does a good job with the Alpha Legion characters. The soldiers are believably conflicted about their actions, infiltrating and sabotaging a loyal legion, killing their battle-brothers while pretending to fight alongside them, and Alpharius and Omegon both get some good scenes. The former's meetings with Horus, which book-end the novel, are particularly solid, presenting Alpharius as a consummate schemer faced with an ego-maniacal madman in Horus, both of them entirely aware of the others fundamentally untrustworthy nature. Given that the traitor primarchs as basically a collection of unbridled egos just waiting to stab each other in the back and festering grudges that have completely ruined the ability to think rationally, this is about what I would assume every gathering of more than one of them would boil down to. Also, there's a nice little Fabius Bile cameo in the end, which ties smoothly into his codex abilities. It's really quite delightful, and clear evidence of the author really thinking out how to connect fluff and tabletop.

Deliverance Lost is another of those 'basically inconsequential' Horus Heresy novels, which is to say that by the time the story is resolved the situation is basically back to where it started. Like Nemesis and Battle for the Abyss, however, Deliverance Lost manages to be an excellent read despite not really advancing the larger story of the Horus Heresy, and like those others it also manages to plant a few little seeds that will, a few books down the line, no doubt pay off nicely.

The Geriatric Brigades!

John Scalzi's Old Man's War is a modern scifi classic, which is probably why I've only just got around to reading it; for all that I keep meaning to crack Don Quixote and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the like, I am just not one for the classics. I think I just resist the idea that I might read anything because I 'should', rather than because I want to. A hallmark of having been in school, in one form or another, for all but about four years of my entire life, I suspect. I'm just a little tired of being told what to read.

Also, those fighters?  Complete lies.  It's infantry all the way.

The story concerns the titular old man, and his titular war. John Perry of Idaho is a widower and a senior, making him perfect for the needs of the Colonial Defence Force. The CDF, which seems to be a body completely independent of any particular government's control, offers the chance to join up only to those who have passed the age of seventy-five, for two very good reasons. One, anyone who has reached that age, and is still in decent enough physical and mental shape to even consider joining a military organization, is likely to have a lifetime of useful skills, abilities and thought processes already deeply ingrained, along with a sense of connection to the broader human community. A young person might join up for adventure; an old person would be joining up for a purpose. And two, what the CDF has to offer as a reward for service is distinctly valuable to those sorts of people; it's not until you can see death on the horizon, after all, that the promise of more life is really going to hit home.

The book is less a discrete narrative than a series of occurrences, following Perry from his wife's grave on Idaho, to Colonial Station in geo-synchronus orbit over Earth, onto the CDFS Henry Hudson, a transport full of other recruits, into basic training on Beta Pyxis and finally, out into the broader conflicts that seem to constantly assail the human Colonies (and yes, it's capitalized like that; 'the Colonies'). Along the way he meets various people, mostly good, and mostly dead by the end, since the universe in which Perry and his fellows find themselves is stranger and more dangerous than anyone can possibly imagine, and an unimaginable threat is one almost impossible to defend against. His training sergeant, Ruiz, is a particularly delightful character, an Angry Drill Instructor right out of Hollywood's central casting but self-aware enough to warn his recruits that he doesn't act like this because it's 'what's expected', but because being loud and angry and borderline abusive is just about the only way to really get through to people just how completely out of their depth they suddenly are. He's also got a good friend in Alan, and eventually a rather strange connection to Jane Sagan, a member of the mysterious 'ghost brigades', the CDF Special Forces. There are other characters sprinkled around, of course, and generally speaking they're all pretty decent, more than capable of carrying their part of the plot with enough style to make them more than just Stock Character #21-A. Which is good, because as I said, there's not actually much plot, so the character work had better be strong.

If there's not much plot, though, there are some very nicely constructed set pieces. The biggest two are basic training and the Battle for Coral, but in between Perry sees action in a variety of rather strange places. From fighting insectoid aliens who're centuries ahead of humanity's technology but restrained by a desire to sanctify the lesser races through the ritual shedding of blood, rather than simply annihilating them, to one-inch tall humanoids with a dangerous space fleet but cities that invite any normal human to play Godzilla, to pterodactyls and giant spiders and a few other odds and ends in between, Perry's adventures give the reader a glimpse of just how fundamentally weird the galaxy really is. It's not as hostile as, say, the galaxy in Warhammer 40K, but it's certainly nowhere you'd find the United Federation of Planets, or even the remains of the Systems Commonwealth. There are a few species who're willing to live and let live, but for most, the cutthroat competition for land and resources is every bit as fierce among the stars as it ever was for colonial Europe.

The cover of my copy had a blurb that compared the author to Heinlein, and I'd agree, but with a caveat. See, I don't actually like Heinlein very much. Starship Troopers is a demi-fascist mess, a war book with no decent action scenes and a ludicrous premise (an all-volunteer army big enough to defend humanity across the stars based on the reward of voting?), Stranger in a Strange Land has trite, self-congratulatory new-age ideas about love and sex and life and death, and the less said about Lazarus Long and his omnisexual exploits, the better. What I will say about Old Man's War, then, is that it's like Heinlein the way he 'should' have written. In that regard, it made me think of a novel I read a while back, Armor by John Steakley; the idea of Armor was to take the general idea of Heinlein's Mobile Infantry, file the edges off, and actually give the readers some decent military action. Old Man's War is Heinlein-esque in the same way. It takes a dubious idea, military service conferring a particular social benefit, but cleans it up; rather than a franchise that most people in stable democracies can't seem to be bothered to exercise when it costs them nothing at all, Old Man's War offers the elderly a chance to start over again physically, promising youth and vitality, but this time with the wisdom to use those gifts better. Old Man's War also incorporates technology into the soldiers in a way Starship Troopers and Armour never did, building better personal platforms for war-fighting rather than wrapping frail humans in powerful suits of armour.

Old Man's War is not a heavy book. Clocking in at just three hundred and thirteen pages, with a fair-sized font and spacing, I breezed through this thing in a couple of days, and that's with work, chores, relationships and the finishing touches for an Allied contingent for my Tau cadre squeezing it from all sides. But part of the reason I went through it so quickly was because it's a very good book; I could easily have spent twice as long on it, if not longer, if it was just okay. The writing style is very loose and natural, though I found myself mentally skipping over 'I said', 'he said' and 'she said' as the book wore on, since the author almost never ends a piece of dialogue without the relevant suffix, and if it never gets particularly deeply involved in certain moral dilemmas or ethical arguments, I got the feeling it was more because the author wanted the reader to think about the pros and cons themselves, rather than because he was lazy. This scifi classic is fun and funny, with some decent action, decent technological imaginings, and a final set-piece that gives a nice sense of closure to a story that hasn't really been building to anything in particular, and very specifically doesn't end when the book runs out of pages. It's a look into a year or so in the life of John Perry, not the story of a military campaign or an enlisted man's climb up the ranks, and while that might leave it feeling a little insubstantial in places, it's also got a certain relaxed charm that works very well. Old Man's War is one classic, at least, that's worth reading for its own sake.

Through a Mirror, Politically

I'm going to bend my rules a little, to talk about Cory Doctorow's 'For the Win'. Partly because it's a really good book, and partly because it's a fairly important subject, and partly because, well, they're my rules; if I don't bend them, who will?

The thing about For The Win is, it's not really science-fiction by any conventional definition, and it's only debateably futuristic. It does contain a few elements that don't quite map onto the present day, but for the most part it's a wholly contemporary tale. And even those few elements aren't especially fantastic; if they were enough to define For The Win as science-fiction, every Tom Clancy novel ever would fall into the same definition. And I can't think of many who'd consider Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan or Rainbox Six series to fall into that literary camp.

So, why do I want to talk about this book on a blog entitled 'Forward the Future'? Well, because it's not about the setting or the technology, this time; instead, it's about the ideas. Although it contains no fantastical futuristic technology or hallmark science-fiction tropes for the exploration of the humanity (aliens, alternate realities, clones and robots; the Big Four), For The Win does have something to say about a likely near-future reality. Namely, what happens when Third/Developing World workers take a lesson from Western workers? What happens when trans-national 'independent contractors' decide not to compete as national citizens, but to unite as labourers? To be specific, what happens when gold farmers decide to start a union?

There are those who would dismiss the idea as impossible on its face. No shortage of them would claim that there's something unique about the working cultures of India or China or south-east Asia, that a union would never be accepted by such people. To that, I say nonsense; almost nobody, no matter their colour, creed or sex, likes to work very hard. I don't mean people don't want the old cliche, 'an honest day's pay for an honest day's work', I mean all things being equal, people don't want to work twelve-hour days for pennies an hour, minus expenses. Industrial workers in the West got tired of it, which is why we have a five-day work week and vacation pay and sick days, and there's no reason to assume that fundamental aspect of human nature, the desire to not work any harder than you absolutely have to, won't carry over to workers in the rest of the world. There's very little chance of a trans-national union, for reasons both obvious and subtle, both explored in For The Win, but there's every reason to assume that eventually, Chinese sweatshop workers are going to find they've had enough, and demand something a little more humane from their employers.

Which is not to say it will be easy, and this is where For The Win really shines. It would've been simplicity itself to have the heroic workers triumph over their greedy and corrupt masters, both economic and political. But it wouldn't have been believable. The politicians and the businessmen are just as tightly intertwined in modern-day China as they ever were in the America of the Robber Barons or Industrial Revolution-era Britain, and they will use all the considerable powers of the state to block anything that looks to threaten their friends and themselves. Heck, we still see it in the West, with the current war on unions (understandable, since after all they did crash the economy in 2008, oh wait...) and Canada's own government's apparent refusal to allow any workers to go on strike, ever. For The Win makes the work of unionization as hard as is believable, which probably means it's easier than would be true, with gangsters and cops alike trying to crush the nascent organization on behalf of, essentially, the exact same people. Indian badmashes with machetes, Korean gangsters throwing firebombs, and the riotgear-clad police of the People's Republic of China all use similar tactics, to similar ends, to the point where it's largely impossible to understand where the criminals end and the state begins.

So, For The Win is about that moment, not too far from now, when a new group of oppressed workers stands up and says, enough. But that's not actually a narrative; what's the novel actually about, as a work of fiction? And aside from all this consciousness-raising, is it actually any good? Is it, in short, worth reading?

Happily, the answer is yes. The novel follows several characters, spread over multiple countries and continents, in order to provide a variety of viewpoints on the story. There's Matthew and his buddies, a group of Chinese gold farmers trying to get out from under the thumb of Boss Wing; there's Mala, also known as General Robotwallah, and her 'army', a group of Indian slum-children hired to fight the gold farmers on behalf of the game runners; there's Wei-Dong, a 17-year-old Jewish kid from the OC with serious Sinophilia and a desire to make his own mark on the world; there's Connor Prikkel, a statistician who figures out the formula for fun and uses it to get in good with Coca-Cola Games; and there's Big Sister Nor, the mysterious visionary at large in south-east Asia who sets in motion the plot that connects all these characters to each other. And of course, each of those major characters has a handful of minor characters in their orbits, some of whom become just as important as the story goes on. There are also brief looks in on single-shot characters for a page or two, to illustrate some particular point or provide a bit of necessary backstory, and despite the brevity of their appearances they're all quite well fleshed-out, all things considered. There are also occasional breaks for the narrator to explain, by way of metaphor and example, key economic ideas like futures trading and bond markets and derivatives, which is delivered with all the scorn that, frankly, such dangerous and economy-wrecking junk-work deserves. There's no secret as to what side Cory Doctorow is on; this is not a book for the 1%.

Which is why I wanted to bend my rules a little, to talk about it here. For The Win is that rarest of things, a modern scifi book (it's what it'd be shelved as, if not necessarily what it is) with a social conscience. It's worth reading on its own, as a work of fiction, but it's even more worthy of time and attention given it's willingness to talk about the way the global economic system is, frankly, rigged. And the fact that it does so realistically, without resorting to a Shadowrun- or Tales from the Afternow-style dystopian world of monolithic megacorps, just makes it all the more compelling.

More a Drizzle Than a Thunderstorm

I finished A Rising Thunder, by David Weber, recently. Well, I say finished; really, I devoured it, covering its four hundred and sixty-four pages in about three days. Even for an inveterate book-lover like myself, such progress is unusual, a testament to the hook Weber's 'Honorverse' series has on me. But when I sat down to write this review, I was struck by the fact that, really, this is a very difficult book to review. Because while it is a book, it's not really a story.

It's actually been a fairly long time since Weber wrote a straight, stand-alone story about his heroine. The first few books could be taken as fully-realized tales set within a expanding world, but by the fifth book, In Enemy Hands, Weber had clearly been sucked into the ever-growing scope of his own universe. Not that that's a bad thing; Weber has created a sprawling fictional galaxy of hostile multi-planetary star nations, most of them trying to play empire at the others' expense, populated by politicians, spies, and naval officers who run the gamut from incompetent to genius and from vile to heroic, regardless of what side of any border they happen to be. The story has grown from a single star system desperately trying to escape conquest by a massive, hopelessly corrupt empire to an alliance of new friends and old enemies all trying to, well, escape conquest by a massive, hopelessly corrupt empire. But, you know, a different one from the first time around. And with that growth have come new planets, new fleets, new commanders, new politicians, new enemies and new allies, all of whom have to be checked in on every now and then to advance the larger, galactic-level plot.

Which is to say, the individual books that attempt to get across the movements of dozens of characters across a handful of states have largely fractured, turning from self-contained narratives to somewhat arbitrarily-selected dispatches. Waiting for the latest Honorverse book, I can't help wondering if this is how people felt waiting for the latest chapter of Dickens' works to be published in the newspapers.

By embracing that sense of serialization, Weber has been able to keep the story moving pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, he's done that at the expense of the actual divisions of the books themselves. The latest one, A Rising Thunder, is the worsts offender; it essentially starts and ends at completely arbitrary points. It's not the only one, though. Ever since the issue with the Solarian League arose, with the exception of the Shadow of Saganami/Storm from the Shadows spinoff series, the books have transitioned away from 'building a story around, and to, a singular confrontation' and towards 'telling the latest serial instalment'. Which is what makes reviewing modern Honorverse stories difficult, because it's become the equivalent of reviewing the chapters of a book.

Still, there are a few things you can say about it. The Honorverse books, after all, are marked by a few recurring themes, and within the series you can judge the worth of a book by how well it hits those themes. And within that metric, A Rising Thunder does pretty well. It carries on the evolution of the Manticorn Alliance, the trials and tribulations of which have been a constant issue, and builds on the growth of the Republic of Haven, particularly the alliance between the two of them that kicked off at the end of Mission of Honor. It builds up the threat of the Mesan Alignment, particularly their nanotech mind-control abilities. And it gives hints that, like the corrupt Peoples Republic before it, the Solarian League does actually have some competent, honorable individuals working within its borders. None of them seem in the kind of key positions that Theisman, Giscard and Tourville enjoyed, yet, but if the League is serious about fighting the Manticoran Alliance there should be plenty of dead men's shoes to step into quite quickly.

Unfortunately, A Rising Thunder is rather bigger on political manoeuvring than it is on space combat. There is one major space battle in the book, about two-thirds of the way through, and it breaks very sharply from the Honorverse's tradition of 'outmanned, outgunned, but not out-thought'. Rather than being a matter of tactical genius overcoming crushing odds, the Manticorans enjoy total intelligence on the enemy force, the defensive position, superior technology and superior numbers. It's a well-executed plan, and it has Honor's trademark cunning, but it lacks the thrill of Terekhov's battle at Monica or Rozsak at Torch. Worse, despite being billed as 'an Honor Harrington Adventure' and falling in the main line of the series, that is, the books that are supposed to be about Honor herself, the woman doesn't appear until over a hundred pages into the story, and her role is extremely minor given the scope of the story now being told. It may be that, with the series having grown so expansive, and Honor having attained such advanced rank, she can no longer be sent on the kind of desperate missions that made the earlier books such pleasures, but if that's the case then perhaps she should be retired from the novel series in favour of the Crown of Slaves/Torch of Freedom and Shadow of Saganami/Storm from the Shadows storylines.

A Rising Thunder isn't a bad instalment in the series. It moves the story along nicely, it introduces some characters who are likely to play important roles down the line, and while it never comes to an open fight, there are some well-written, tense moments of Manticoran naval ships trying to get out of, and get the Manticoran Merchant Marine out of, Solarian space. But the actual space battle is a one-sided and rather dull affair, the Alignment is still a giant cipher of moustache-twirling villains, and the character who's billed on the cover has relatively little page time. For those already invested in the series it's a nice addition, but I could never in good conscience recommend a first-time Honorverse reader pick up this book.

There Need Not Be Gods; The First Heretic

It's not easy to make a three-metre tall demigod with gold skin and psychic powers pitiful. Too little, and it would just come off as self-pitying; too much, and it's less pitiful and more stupid and pathetic. In The First Heretic Aaron Dembski-Bowden was given this daunting challenge with Lorgar of the Word Bearers, a very different kind of primarch from those we've seen to date, on either side of the Heresy. It would have been all too easy for him to fall short of the mark, by skewing too far to either extreme. Pleasantly, however, Mr. Dembski-Bowden appears to have been up to the task.

Like Prospero Burns, I went into The First Heretic with a certain hesitation, and for the same reason in both cases; I just didn't like the legions in question. And like Prospero Burns, I ultimately came away from The First Heretic with, if not affection, at least an appreciation for the legion in question.

The First Heretic is the story of two men, though I use the term loosely in applying it to such beings, Lorgar and a Word Bearers captain named Argel Tal. As the primarch of the chapter that seemed from the hints provided in other books to have set the whole Heresy in motion, it's no surprise that Lorgar is central to this story. The book is ultimately about him, about building a believable situation in which the Emperor's most fervent acolyte could turn into his most implacable detractor. To that end, Dembski-Bowden introduces what may well be the perfect flaw in the character of Lorgar, given what little was known about him. It isn't that Lorgar believes the Emperor is a god specifically, but rather he believes that there are, that there must be, gods in existence, and as the wisest, strongest, most powerful being in the physical plane, the Emperor must be a god by default. It's a very subtle distinction operating in a vacuum, but in practice, and the two hundred or so years of the Great Crusade leaves a lot of time for practice, it can make itself very well known, indeed.

This is the crux of Lorgar's pitiable nature. One could respect him if he were the 31^st millennium equivalent of a Christian crusader, filled with holy fire, or a Muslim willing to bring the certainty of the law of Allah by the sword; there's an internal consistency to such people that, even if you despise everything they stand for, you can respect them for standing for it so completely. Conviction is admirable in fiction, even the wrong convictions, so long as it's held honestly. But there's nothing so admirable about poor Lorgar. The Word Bearers' primarch doesn't worship the Emperor because he is moved by the rightness of his cause, the perfection of his ideals or the wisdom of his laws, but simply because he is a god; in Lorgar's mind, anything that is divine is a priori worthy of worship, no matter the content of its character. There appears to be no real difference in his eyes between the Emperor and the Ruinous Powers; they may be utterly antithetical and anathema to each other in every respect, but their both gods, so one's as good as another, and the one that will pay attention is better. Rather than burning with a righteous fire, Lorgar's willingness to worship a god, any god, just so long as it reassures him it is a god makes him look desperate, and more than a little sad. It's a blatant cry for attention and acclamation, but despite the power and wisdom of Lorgar, gifted orator, keen philosopher, 'father' of a hundred-thousand of the greatest warriors the galaxy has ever seen, it rings true. The primarchs are absolutely riddled with daddy issues, after all, and the Emperor is quite frankly the worst father in history. The fact that none of the other primarchs seem to have the slightest respect for Lorgar, save perhaps Magnus who seems to view him as a well-meaning but slow-witted tagalong little brother, probably doesn't help, either.

But the daddy issues between the Emperor and Lorgar aren't the only ones at play; there's also Argel Tal, and his issues with his own 'father', his primarch. Argel Tal is the latest in the long line of 'Space Marine everyman' we've seen in the Horus Heresy, a solid character who we can respect and admire thrust into difficult situations, and ultimately forced to choose between loyalty to his legion and loyalty to the Imperium. But the Word Bearers' geneseed seems to carry a stronger element of respect for, even obedience to, authority than the other legions', leaving Argel Tal to wonder if he is truly making his decisions, or if they're the inevitable result of his compromised genetics. It adds an interesting undercurrent to the relationship between captain and primarch, one we haven't really seen replicated in any of the other Heresy-eras legions. Argel Tal has to struggle with the idea that he may well be following Lorgar, not because Lorgar is right, but because Argel Tal is incapable of thinking Lorgar could be wrong.

Which doesn't mean Argel Tal doesn't realize what's happening to him. Even if the Emperor is unworthy and the Ruinous Powers deserve the worship of the Word Bearers, Argel Tal is one of the few characters in the Heresy series to really think about the cost of their actions. And not just in the tally of dead brothers, either. As one of the first to witness the corrupting power of Chaos worship up close, he gets to see just how much the Ruinous Powers will inflict upon their worshippers. Even if the price is ultimately one worth paying in his eyes, Argel Tal isn't blind to the fact that it's there, and that in the short term, at least, it seems terrible indeed.

Thanks to all this, Argel Tal is actually one of the better Space Marine characters we've seen in the Horus Heresy novels. It's easy to be an Ultramarine or a Raven Guard, bravely standing up to aliens, traitors and daemons, and not that much harder to be a loyalist in the Traitor Legions, standing by sworn oaths of loyalty even in the face of fraternal treachery. But in Argel Tal, Aaron Dembski-Bowden gives us a traitorous patriot, a man who honestly believes he's doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons. It gives him a certain classically tragic weight to his character, though that's probably not a description the Word Bearers' captain would be all that happy with.

Once More, Unto the Breach

A good science fiction writer can make a space battle exciting. A great science fiction writer can make conversation just as exciting. Jack Campbell is a great science fiction writer.

Jack Campbell, in fact the pen name of John G. Hemry, arrived on the scene some time ago, with his now-completed six book Lost Fleet series. The series chronicled the efforts of a massive Alliance space fleet to escape from deep inside the territory of the Syndicate Worlds, an enemy state with whom the Alliance has been at war for a century and who has managed to lure the Alliance fleet into a potentially catastrophic ambush. The fleet's only hope is Captain John 'Black Jack' Geary, a fabled Alliance hero found drifting in a survival pod, a man a hundred years out of his time and a captain several ranks out of his depth. But the war has been a slaughter on both sides, with the institutional wisdom of both state's star fleets completely wiped out, and Geary, a well-educated product of a less rushed era, may well be the greatest fleet commander of this time.

In the follow-up series, Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier, Geary is tasked by the Alliance leadership to once more lead the Alliance fleet into danger. This time, however, his orders are to go beyond Syndicate Worlds space, to explore what seems to be the realm of the first non-human sentient species humanity has ever encountered, and one that seems as paranoid as it is hostile.

Oh, did you assume the Alliance was humanity, and the Syndicate Worlds were the aliens?

That's one of the more notable aspects of Campbell's work; the man is absolutely miserly with description. I originally picked up the Lost Fleet somewhere around the middle, and there seemed no reason not to assume the Syndics, as those in the Syndicate Worlds were referred to as, were non-human. More than that, even, Campbell at no point provides any real description of Geary himself, or the other key characters in the series, leaving it pretty much entirely to the reader's imagination to visualise who these people are and what they look like. In the hands of a lesser writer this would seriously hamper the reader's ability to immerse themselves in the story, but to Campbell's credit he writes with a spare but powerful style, emphasizing dialogue and conflict, both military and interpersonal, over adjectives. The result is a pulp-style novel in the best sense of the word, a fast-pace story that whisks the reader along so fast they don't stop to wonder about little things like what people look like.

With the first book in the Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier series, Campbell really pushes his talents to the limit. For a book about a powerful military fleet venturing out to confront hostile aliens, most of the book revolves around Geary struggling to balance the demands of the much-maligned government, the orders of a frankly moronic headquarters, and factions within the fleet who would be more than happy for Geary to overthrow the lot of them and crown himself king, or at least president-for-life. But rather than be dragged down by what could otherwise have been a dull series of the brilliant Geary running rings around these future-rubes, Campbell gives us a man who still believes in the ideals of the century-old, peace-time Alliance, not the admittedly squallid realities of an Alliance that's been feeding men and women into a meat grinder for a hundred years, with all the social damage such actions would bring. So while he could easily disregard the politicians and the bureaucrats, trading on his status as a living legend and folk hero, Geary finds himself constrained by his sense of honour to abide by the laws of the Alliance, no matter how unworthy those who make and implement the law may seem. Campbell never tires of giving Geary a problem and then forcing him to think his way through to a solution, one that balances four different factions' demands, the best interests of the fleet and of the Alliance, and his own personal honour all at the same time, and as a result even Geary's more mundane struggles make for compelling drama.

You don't have to have read the original Lost Fleet series to pick up Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier, but I would definitely recommend it. While Campbell does a serviceable job of catching new readers up on the broad strokes, there are a whole host of events, characters and details he glosses over, and while none of them are vital, knowing about them would greatly increase the appreciation of the story Campbell is telling with this latest installment in the life of 'Black Jack' Geary.

Only Thing? Her Hair's Never Purple.

It's a common literary device to frame a story around a person searching for their purpose in the wake of some profound change. A soldier, in peace time. A police officer, thrown off the force. A big shot corporate type, blacklisted. A sex robot, in a post-human extinction solar system.

Well, some executions are a little more out there than others, I suppose.

Charles Stross, the author of Saturn's Children, has denied any responsibility for the North American cover art, but it's hard to imagine why. Quite frankly, it's pretty much perfect, as far as judging a book by its cover goes; this is a book about a female sex robot who gets caught up in a high-stakes covert affair, so a busty woman with purple hair in a catsuit holding a mysterious orb pretty much tells you from the start if this book is for you or not. If you don't like the cover, you probably won't like the book.

Yeah, the cover is actually slanted that way.  I have no idea why.

More seriously, Saturn's Children is a first-person narrative about Freya, a female sexbot only activated after humanity went extinct, and her search for any kind of purpose in her life. Programmed and conditioned exhaustively to consider the sexual satiation of the human male as the only thing that matters, Freya is understandably at loose ends with no human males on order. Morose and aimless, Freya begins the book by contemplating suicide, a not-uncommon fate for her model, only to find her will to live rekindled by a run-in with a particularly bloody-minded aristocrat and her tame-killer bodyguards. In desperate need of escape from Saturn's moons, Freya takes up a courier job from some 'legitimate businessmen' that promises a ticket to Mars, and sets her on a collision course with powerful interests, vengeful assassins, mad scientists and a plot to up-end the entire robot society of the solar system.

While Saturn's Children is no great book by any stretch of the imagination, it does do some things differently enough to be worth a mention. The most particular is the way robot society is organized post-humanity. The robots were, of course, programmed to abide by humanity's laws, but since humanity never extended legal personhood to them before passing on, the robots are left in a legal limbo; all the institutions of the various states still exist, carried out by diligent robots, but there are no governments, no means for updating the law, and no protections for the rights of robots. One of the more clever bits of Stross' future, particularly timely given the recent Citizens United decision in the US, was the way the robots deal with that last issue. While robots aren't people, and can't claim human rights, they are legally qualified to establish corporate entities, which they can use to protect themselves by declaring themselves the legal assets of said corporation. It's something of a legal fiction, but it's enough to protect the middle-class robots from the predations of those who 'inherited' substantial sums from humans that granted them power of attorney, and have used their own, considerable corporate power to institute a vicious slave-state throughout the inner planets of the solar system.

My love of AI is certainly no secret around here, and it's that same love that actually left me feeling the most let-down by Saturn's Children. Yes, it makes perfect sense for the sentient robots of the inner system to be human-like. They were designed to function in human society, to interact regularly with human beings and to serve as stand-ins for humans as needed, after all. And some, like Freya and her sexbot sisters and the masterless butler-brothers of JeevesCo, had every reason to be as human-like as possible, given their very personal connection with humans. But honestly, it's a bit of a lacklustre portrayal of a society of robots in a post-human existence. The creators of these things may well have exceeded Tyrell Corporation's famous boast in Blade Runner, 'More Human Than Human'. Stross rarely does much with the fact that every 'person' in the book should be as customizable as a desktop PC, and the non-human robots are mostly consigned to the far reaches of the solar system, the Forbidden Cities of the Kuiper Belt and the like, meaning they play almost no role in the story. If you replaced the robots with cyborgs and the human extinction with a melding of humans and robots until there were no legally distinct human beings, you could pretty much tell the exact same story. It's not that it's bad, exactly, it's just that it's not as footloose and fancy-free as 'a tale of robots living in a post-human solar system' could have been.

But no, it's not a bad book. Like I said, it's not great, but it's still a very solid scifi chase story, with a bit of espionage and action thrown in for good measure. The plot is complicated enough that it feels overwhelming while you're reading, but Stross neatly ties everything together in the end, making sense of even some of the stranger quirks of behaviour the reader should have noted a few chapters previous. And if there isn't enough inventiveness in the robots, or the space travel for that matter (Stross has gone with the absolute most pessimistic predictions about its ultimate feasibility), Freya is a compelling enough character to keep you reading while she's alternately running, fighting, and screwing for her life.

What? I told you she was a sexbot; did you really think it wouldn't come up?

A Slog, from Start to Finish

The strange thing about Henry Zou's 'Emperor's Mercy' is that it is an absolutely awful book, but might have been two or three fairly decent ones.

Let's just get this out of the way; Black Library books are hardly high art. Some of them are better than others, but the best are usually just really well-written tales of martial prowess and total war, with the odd bit of philosophizing or thriller-mystery action thrown in for good measure. When done well, they're fun, pulpy reads. When done poorly, they're a slog of badly connected fight scenes and utterly flat characters. And unfortunately, despite what Dan Abnett's quote would have you believe, 'Emperor's Mercy' does it very badly, indeed.

Emperor's Mercy is the story of Inquisitor Obadiah Roth, sent on a mission by a senior inquisitor to discover the identity of the fabled 'Old Kings of Medina'. Sent into the Medina Cluster, a multi-planet system, in the midst of a major Chaos invasion, Roth's mission is understandably complicated. Travelling to three worlds in the system, picking up and losing companions, and of course getting into all manner of scrapes along the way, Roth ultimately learns the truth about the 'Old Kings', the purpose of the Chaos invasion, and the ultimate cost of protecting the wider Imperium from both.

It all sounds solid, but unfortunately it's executed absolutely execrably. The problem is, Roth's adventures feel less like a constant narrative and more like a series of barely-connected incidents. There's no real sense of scale; the planets he visits feel like they're no bigger than those the Enterprise or SG-1 might go to, consisting of one city and perhaps a dozen characters who actually matter, if they're lucky. And there's no particular sense of either time, either, with whole weeks of running and fighting on Cantica glossed over in a sentence or two, while three days on Aridun take up chapter after chapter. The story could take month, or a year. And so much of it is just wasted, or has no real pay-off. What little actually matters from Cantica could've been folded into either of the other two planet's sections with no loss, and considerable improvement, to the overall narrative structure, and frankly Kholpesh and Aridun could've been collapsed into one planet, too. The book is terribly scattershot, which makes it hard to really get a sense of how things are going, and why. This isn't helped by the fact that major military forces and characters, like Inquisitor Gurion, the 9^th Route Fleet, allied Space Marines, and at least one, and possibly two, companies of Blood Gorgons just disappear from the narrative for no adequately explained reason. While the individual action scenes, taken on their own, can often be rather well written, overall the story of the war between the Imperial Guard and the forces of Chaos in the Medina Corridor is just a complete mess.

The worst of this book's failings, though, are in its characters. Where an older, more experienced, more established Black Library writer might spend book after book on a single Inquisitor and their retinue, Zou introduces no less than five, none of whom really emerge as fully realized characters. Delahunt, Barq and are Celeminé are ultimately ciphers, to varying degrees, and Gurion, as mentioned earlier, just disappears from the narrative after a relatively bad-ass moment two-thirds of the way through. That just leaves Roth himself, and he isn't much better. He is sometimes stoic, sometimes suicidal, sometimes courtly, sometimes abrasive, sometimes cold, sometimes emotional, sometimes suspicious, sometimes naive, sometimes young and inexperienced, sometimes well-read and intellectual (apparently)... And while such contradictions can be used to construct a whole greater than the sum of its parts, here they're just kind of a mutually contradictory mess. And the supporting characters are pure stock; Lord Marshal Khmer is 'the needlessly obstructive rival', Silverstein is 'the faithful friend/the sniper', Captain Pradal is 'the young but determined military officer' and Madeleine de Medici is 'the lady intellectual/the archeologist'. None of them manage to grow beyond those easy labels, and you know about as much about them at the end of the book as you did at the beginning. Compared to things like The Fall of Prospero, Firewarrior, the Eisenhorn trilogy or the Ciaphas Cain series, this is pure amateur hour. Heck, as much as I absolutely loathed the way Alpharius/Omegon came to their decision at the end, even Legion did a better job of building characters than this.

There's one last thing I want to say about Emperor's Mercy, and it's a bit spoilerish, so be warned. There's a sub-plot running through it about a traitor within Roth's group, which presumably is how certain groups are able to find and attack them. This is dumb enough, since of the two attacks one would have killed the traitor, as well as the target. But when it's finally revealed who the traitor is, it goes from being just kind of dumb to outright idiotic. There's no real justification for it, either in the narrative or on the part of the character themselves, with the traitor actually going so far as to just cut off Roth's demand for an explanation and start a fight. To me, that's a bald admission that Zou didn't really have any idea about why this plot-line was there, other than possibly because someone told him it should be. And what little justification that's there actually makes things make even less sense; the traitor claims that working for Khmer against Gurion's mission will lead to them being elevated in rank, but really? The favour of a Lord Marshall means more than the disfavour, and probable extreme suspicion, of a high-ranking and highly-respected inquisitor? That was, by far, the dumbest part of this book, and this was a book that did not particularly lack for bad plotting and nonsensical motivation.

Also, at one point Zou refers to a gathering of some Imperial Navy, Guard, Astartes and Assasinorum leaders as having enough combined firepower to kill whole galaxies. Really, man? Whole galaxies? Would that be why they're having so much trouble defending a single solar system against some raiders and a company of Chaos Marines, Zou?

Not So Much a Cliffhanger as a Sinkhole

There are two schools of thought when it comes to storytelling, and they break down on a very basic idea; is it better to have a great beginning, or a great ending? Obviously having a great beginning, middle and end would be preferred, but in an imperfect world sometimes priorities must be set. I know a lot of publishing houses feel the beginning is the more important aspect, that readers will decide whether to read a book within the first chapter or three, and you have to hook them early to get them to stick around for the ending. For myself, I think the ending is more important, since I usually decide whether to read a book based on the cover and the inside blurb. I can think of only one book I've ever stopped reading in protest of a terrible beginning, but I can remember rather a lot whose endings left me feeling profoundly dissatisfied.

Reality 36, by Guy Haley, is another on that list.

It's unfortunate, because I really want to like this book. Set in the 22^nd century, Reality 36 is a 'Richards and Klein Investigation', a tagline that leads to the most delightful of hypothetical pitches: "Richards is an unbodied AI; Otto Klein is an ex-German military combat cyborg; They solve mysteries." What's not to love there, even for those who aren't as hopelessly besotted with stories of non-cartoonishly evil AI as myself? And in truth, there is a lot to love in this book. Both characters are strong and distinct, with Richards aping a '50s noir detective's aesthetics every chance he gets but not being averse to occasionally piloting a humanoid war machine through a factory-fortress, and Klein being as close to a Luddite as a cyborg can be, with lingering issues from his service days and a dry, slightly sarcastic sense of humour. Their world is likewise well realized, a post-climate change wreck filled equally with glittering arcologies and decaying urban wastelands, opera singing superintelligent AI and annoyingly chipper smartphones, all meshed together in a believably muddled state. The AI are mostly running the place, with a 5, the highest classification of AI, in charge of the EU police forces and the 'Three Uncle Sams' ruling the United States of North America. The only exception is China, where it's hinted an AI, the 'Ghost Emperor', caused sufficiently catastrophic damage that China has outlawed AI within their sovereign digital territory, and is entirely willing to kill any AI that tries to penetrate the Great Firewall of China. But the nice thing about Reality 36 is that the AI aren't in humanity's face with their leadership; mostly they take a long view, and adjust things in small ways to achieve the optimum result, rather than having some kind of garish mechanical oracle squatting in the middle of the UN building, barking orders at the world. It's a control you can believe in, in no small part because you don't actually see much of it.

As for the plot, it's a pretty standard sci-fi mystery story; a professor working on a highly classified project disappears, his student goes on the lam, and people connected with the professor start turning up dead. That several of those people appear to be the professor himself adds a nice little wrinkle to the issue, and by the time the reveal comes, the action has chugged along strongly enough that, after a fortress-factory invasion, a sniper attack on a diner, and a nuclear weapon detonated in an arcology, the reader is as invested in finding out what's going on as the characters are. And, in a sense, the reveal doesn't disappoint.

I said the ending of this book was a big problem, and it was. In order to talk about it, though, I'm going to have to go into a bit of spoiler territory. If you're interested, and despite its flaws I'd still highly recommend Reality 36, you should read the book before continuing on with this review. Don't worry, it's not going anywhere.

So. The problem with the ending of this book is that, frankly, there isn't one. The subplot involving the titular Reality 36, one of a series of computer generated universes so realistic that the UN has declared their inhabitants sentient and deserving of protection from human interference, suddenly becomes integral to the main plot. Unfortunately, it's never really clear what the villain is using Reality 36 for. Oh, the protagonists talk about it, and seem to know what's going on, but there's no real detail to it; you know this is bad, but you're not totally clear on why. Worse, it turns out the mission to stop the issue in Reality 36 was a trap, into which both Richards and the EuPol 5 have stepped, a trap that somehow also attacks various cyborg, smart-vehicle and weak-AI-guided weapons platforms in the area, starting what two characters refer to as a war against, well, presumably everyone else. And then it stops. Richards is trapped, cyborgs are hijacked, hacked tanks shoot at the good guys' allies, two of the protagonists make a desperate escape, and then it's like the writer hit an arbitrary word count and had to stop typing. I checked the publication list in the front, a mini-publisher's catalogue in the back, no sign of an additional book anywhere there. The only hint, in fact, is that the timeline, printed as an appendix after the story, lists the 'present' as being when the events of Reality 36 and something called The Omega Point took place. Presumably the next book, it would have been nice to know this was going to end on a big fat 'To Be Continued...' going into this. As it is, frankly, the ending is so frustrating as to sour much of what went before it. Worse, so much of the story isn't actually resolved because of this ending that it hampers the overall flow of the book.

It was, in other words, a really terrible ending.

And yet... And yet, I'd still recommend this book to any scifi mystery fan. Like I said, the characters are good, the action set-pieces are solid, those parts of the mystery that get resolved do so quite well indeed. And if you went in knowing that 'To Be Continued...' is waiting there for you, I suspect it wouldn't be nearly so annoying when it happened.

Still. Openings and endings; the thing about them is, you can forget a bad one of the former by the time you reach the latter, but a bad ending will be the last thing you experience. It's why I think they're so important.

And No, I Still Can't Understand the Cover Image

Alright, let's just get this out of the way at the start. Yes, the book is called Leviathan Wakes. Yes, it's the first in a planned series called The Expanse. Yes, it's a huge book, clocking in at 561 trade paperback-sized pages. Yes, that's right, it's a giant book that kicks off a series. And yes, the jokes just write themselves.

Which is good, because I sure don't want to!

So, Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey. The novel is set in the middle-distant future, at a non-specific point; the most we know is that it's a hundred and fifty years after Earth and Mars nearly went to war, which means there was a Mars strong enough to even go to war, which means decades at least in the future just to get there. Whenever it's set, humanity has advanced enough to colonize the asteroid belt and start the long process of terraforming Mars, but hasn't yet made it out to the stars. Their earlier antagonism mostly set aside, Earth and Mars are uneasy partners, alternately co-operating to oppress the Belt colonies and maintain the hegemony of the 'Inner Worlds', and jockeying to dominate each other and emerge as the solar system's sole superpower. Earth and Mars are largely remote from those living in the Belt, however, which are the people the novel is really concerned with. Particularly, Leviathan Wakes follows two viewpoint characters; Joe Miller, a functional alcoholic working as a detective on Ceres, and Jim Holden, XO on the ice hauler Canterbury making the run between the gas giants' rings and the Belt. Both men are relatively happy with their lives, but this being fiction of course that doesn't last, and soon enough both of them, and a growing web of their friends and allies, find themselves drawn into a situation that rapidly escalates from rich girls falling in with 'freedom fighters' and mass-murder to Earth firing off its entire store of interplanetary nuclear weapons and the very real possibility of Solar System War I. And since the author is a moderately knowledgeable figure, he understands that yes, ship-to-ship fighting is a serious issue, but the real war doesn't start until someone starts dropping rocks down gravity wells. Increasingly desperate to stop that from coming to pass, Miller and Holden struggle both together and separately to do what they can to expose the murky beginnings of the conflict and stop those most dedicated to seeing it come to fruition.

Leviathan Wakes is many things; Miller's sections are noir and police drama, with some body horror thrown in there, while Holden's are more old-school space opera, with gunfights and space battles and a plucky crew on a tough little ship. That might make the book sound like a bit of a hodge-podge, but Corey does a very solid job of keeping the overall tone of the book consistent, and of blending the various elements into each other. You can see it when you look back on it, say when you're writing a review of the book for your blog, but while you're actually reading the book it really doesn't seem as though there's any reason you shouldn't go from body horror to wild-flying space battles to transhuman philosophizing to political manoeuvrings. It's all very organic, really.

There is one thing missing, however, and I do think the novel suffers from it, if only a bit. Really, I think the author could have done with a slightly larger scope. I know, I know, the book is already a monster, but in terms of what the reader directly gets to see it's very limited. The only two viewpoint characters, after all, are both living in, loyal to and culturally steeped in the Belt colonies. Through them, you get a sense of what the Belters think of what's happening, of how they react to the moves Earth and Mars and even the Belt 'freedom fighters' make over the course of the novel. But you never really get a look at what people on Earth or Mars actually think, just supposition on the part of the characters and a few odd talking heads on the public affairs programs of the day. It would have been tricky to include them, given that the action all takes place out in space, but it really would have been nice to get a look at how the people of the Inner Planets react, particularly once it looks like their two worlds are going to end up in a serious shooting war, one that may well end with rocks falling down the gravity well onto either the heads of Earth-bound humans or the dome-cities of the Martians. It sort of feels like watching Ugandan secret agents working to stop a war between the US and China, without ever getting a look at what's going on within either of the two superpowers themselves.

That said, though, the absence of Terran or Martian viewpoints only moves the book down from 'completely flawless' to 'really excellent'. Despite its size, I never really felt overwhelmed by the book, nor did I find myself worrying about the kind of 'ending fatigue' that huge novels, with multiple plotlines to wrap up and multiple climaxes to work through, can all too easily fall prey to. And while the author downplays the hard-science elements in a little interview after the end of the novel, it's a relatively solid, 'realistic' depiction of space travel. There's no artificial gravity, and thus no safe way to travel at really high speeds because of inertial pressures on the crew, the ships are armed (those that are, at least) with railguns and nuclear missiles rather than the more exotic options available in science fiction, and the Belt colonies are equal parts fantastic and brutally functional, just what you'd expect from industrial areas that have grown into residential colonial spaces. There are also corporations everywhere, with the author doing a relatively good job of balancing between the corporate-less utopian Star Trek-style future and the corporatocratic future of the cyberpunk-derived dystopians. There is an 'evil' corporation, because of course there is, but for the most part the corporate entities you see are just trying to sell a half-decent product or service for a reasonable mark-up to make a decent buck; they are, in other words, pretty much like the real, non-mustache-twirling corporations of today, just scaled up or out or sideways, as appropriate. It's not a completely perfect world; Earth and Mars are a little too monolithic (especially given Earth's population of 33 billion), and the technology is basically just a generation ahead of ours (there are no apparent cyborgs or AIs or neural interfaces or...). But it's a solid, believable place full of solid, believable characters, and if Corey chose not to take full advantage of the freedoms literature affords the science-fiction author, well, he wouldn't be the first or, likely, the last.

And, without giving too much away I hope, it seems like Corey is using Leviathan Wakes not as a techno-social end-point, but as a familiar jumping-on point for the reader. By the end of the story things in the solar system look set to change in a very big way, and it remains to be seen just how well Corey can harness those changes narratively. Hopefully he won't be overwhelmed by the host of new possibilities and potentials available to him by the end of the book, but even if he is, well, at least Leviathan Wakes can still stand as a solid, enjoyable, sprawling space opera full of horror, mystery, political manoeuvrings and space battles.

A Lot More of One Than the Other

I'm a terrible sucker for stories of robots, stories that go beyond the cliches of 'robot who wants to become human' or 'robot who wants to destroy humanity'. As a form of life, as things that live in a way unlike us but that we can understand, they just have so much potential for uniquely fascinating stories. Of course, being non-humans ninety-nine times out of a hundred they're forced into one or the other of those cliches, their actions revolving arbitrarily around humanity, seemingly incapable of defining an existence for themselves that isn't about either emulating or exterminating us. But there is still that one time, and so every once in a blue moon you can find a story like Tony Ballantyne's Blood and Iron.

On the world of Penrose, robots are the highest form of life. These robots are strange creatures indeed, compared to what we're familiar with from other stories. They have sexes, and children, and those children are created through a form of duo-sexual reproduction, they treat bodies like clothing, they have states and empires, they go to war with rifles and swords and awls to punch through skulls, they politick, they have love and cruelty and a strange lack of curiosity about their surroundings... Ballantyne creates very particular robots, robots that could not have existed in any other story setting, marking the world of Penrose out from any other on which robots rule right from the beginning. And boy, does he create a lot of these particular robots. The novel is divided up amongst viewpoint characters, of which there are five principles and one who gets just a single section for herself, and each of those viewpoint characters routinely interact with anywhere from one or two to five or six other characters, along with the inevitable gaggle of background characters. At 553 pages Blood and Iron is a fair-sized book, and Ballantyne packs each page so full of dialogue and action and detail that at some points it was, frankly, a little overwhelming.

But ultimately, this book succeeds at nearly everything it does. It begins and concludes a civil war and a rebellion against an emperor, gives an answer to the question of how a robot mind should be woven (a key recurring theme), concludes a search for lost love and traces the events of two separate contacts between the robots of Penrose and humanity. Yes, there are humans here, but Blood and Iron does its robots the honour of treating them as independent life-forms of their own. Interestingly, although the key robot states in Blood and Iron are loosely modelled after feudal Japan and a sort of exaggerated, almost cartoon-ified militaristic Spartan city-state, their interactions with humanity put me more in mind of the unfolding of contact between the indigenous tribes of North America and the explorers, traders and colonists of England and France. It makes perfect sense; to borrow a term from Iain M. Banks, both North Americans and robots found themselves confronting an Out Of Context problem, an issue completely beyond the scope of their society pre-occurence to prepare them for. How, after all, could you plan for something you don't even know exists? Like the North Americans, the robots try a variety of responses to the presence of humanity, a strange new breed of person with technology unlike anything previously encountered and internal divisions and motivations the robots can't easily grasp. And like the North Americans, the robots' cultures are profoundly, perhaps irrevocably changed by this interaction. I don't know if Ballantyne had the North American indigenous people in mind when he was writing this, or perhaps some other group like the Australian aborigines or the Indians under the British Raj or Africa during the period of European colonial conquest, but the parallels are most certainly there, and make the book more interesting for their presence.

One thing I should note, and it's unusual for me to say so, but I didn't always enjoy this book. Usually I find books make it fairly evident early on if they're for me or not, so if I'm not enjoying a book at some point it won't become a book I ultimately enjoy, because it will keep doing the thing I'm not enjoying. But Blood and Iron is different, in that respect. Without giving too much away, there are two nationally-bounded narratives running through this book, that of Sangrel in the empire of Yukawa and that of Artemis City and the continent of Shull, and although they're both interesting it seemed, as the book went on, that there was nothing to connect them. And really, if you're going to read over five hundred pages worth of story, you want it to all be worth something as a unified whole in the end. Otherwise, why not just release two separate novels? But the writing was still solid enough that, even as my concern about the end result mounted, I continued to push onwards. And I was pleasantly surprised when Ballantyne finally made the connection, doing it in such a way that I would never have suspected. The connection actually runs through much of the book, but isn't made clear to the reader until near the very end of one of those two seemingly disparate narratives. For that deft bit of forethought, I tip my hat indeed to Tony Ballantyne.

Blood and Iron is apparently part of the 'Penrose Series', following the first book Twisted Metal. Thankfully Blood and Iron stands quite well on its own, using a prologue that presumably explains the events of the first book to bring readers up to speed, a prologue done in a delightfully in-universe mytho-historical style that keeps it from being dry and dull. There are some aspects in the story suggest a larger narrative at work, of course (particularly the fate of Calor the Scout, the meaning of the metal moon over Penrose, the purposes of Morphobia Alligator and Banjo Macrodoceous, and the stories of Nicolas the Coward and the Four Blind Horses), but even if Ballantyne decided to give up writing tomorrow and never penned another word, Blood and Iron would still stand as a satisfying singular narrative. Although the book is certainly good enough that I'd be more than happy to read more about the robots of Penrose, so I hope Ballantyne isn't planning on retiring just yet!

The particular tales Blood and Iron was telling might have reached a satisfying end, but the wider tale of the robots of Penrose is still far from finished.