The Warrior's Stone Matthew O Duncan

The Warrior's Stone

Matthew O Duncan

Another book I bought at ComicFest 2018, The Warrior's Stone was self published in 2014 by Matthew O Duncan and reprinted in 2018 using Lulu. Lulu is a self publishing company that was founded in 2002 by Bob Young, who’s mostly known for founding the open source software company Red Hat. He founded Lulu after trying to get a book (titled Under the Radar) about his experiences founding Red Hat published and being frustrated with the experience. Lulu.com also takes steps to ensure that books published with them can be sold on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles.com and the Apple store if the writer applies for an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) which is free. Mr. Duncan also lives in the Phoenix area with his wife (Reviewed authors shall be part of the Fremen army that invades the state capitol during a giant Haboob. Long live the fighters of Mua’Dib!)

The Warrior's Stone takes place in the year 2319; humanity has expanded to the stars and met many other alien races. It even joined an interstellar alliance of races for peace and trade. For a long time humanity wasn't seen as an important member of the alliance and Earth was a backwater world which served as the capital for a minor race. Then, as you might have guessed, war happened. The Serken, a reptilian race of slaving war happy carnivores who think eating other species is fun and profitable attacked the alliance. The Alliance promptly... Kinda feel apart and it was up to humanity and a number of other races to pull together and fight off the monsters. It's taken decades and hundreds of millions if not billions of deaths and billions if not trillions of tons of materials reduced to burning wreckage in the void, but the war is turning in the favor of the alliance. As the Serken struggle to build new ships and weapon platforms to offset the Alliance's logistical and industrial advantages, the Alliance plans an attack into the home system of the Serken to cripple their war-making ability and force a final peace. Roy O'Hara, widower, fighter pilot, and squadron leader operating from the Alliance Carrier T.S.S Phoenix leads his squadron in an ambush to destroy one of those new ships; a Super Destroyer with a main cannon capable of wrecking anything it hits in a single shot (We need to sit down with scifi writers and have a chat about ship classifications). There doesn't seem to be a lot of those around however so if his fighters can take it out before the invasion, that's a major piece off the board. The problem being that the Serken know that too and while they're savage and fairly monstrous, they ain't stupid.

Meanwhile, on the pleasant planet of New Terra, the Princess Katreena is in mourning. Her husband George and her father were killed in a freak accident and while she misses her husband George, it's her father she really mourns. Her marriage was an arranged one and while George was respectful, kind, and friendly, he was also away regularly visiting another girl from a relationship prior to their marriage. Katreena's father the King on the other hand was someone close to Katreena, especially since her mother passed away working as a healer during a plague. Princess Katreena herself is a healer, due to being able to use the magical healing stones. There are a number of different stones with different powers, healing stones, which can be used mostly by the women of the the eleven royal families, can heal physical injury, pain, and illness. There is a cost in that the healer ends up taking on some of that pain, which means repeated use can weaken or even kill the user. Warrior Stones are mostly used by the men of the royal families to generate energy blasts that can be used as weapons. There are also prophecy stones which means... We're looking at a prophecy story... Again. Anyway, while Princess Katreena still has remaining family in her Uncle and her Aunt, who have become King and Queen, she is left without anyone she can confide in as her position isolates her in a lot of ways. Although I am left wondering why she doesn't have a favorite servant or a fellow noble woman she can talk to. There don't seem to be a lot of nobles around honestly but there are some that show up in the book. Frankly it seems odd to me that Katreena doesn't have a single friend her own age but that's not impossible. As a result of the stress Katreena decides to sneak off to an out of the way cottage that her father maintained, where he and his family could go and pretend to not to be royals (historically a number of folks have done this) and no one else knows where it is. I have a harder problem believing that part honestly. If the King is the only one who can make certain decisions, people kinda have to know where he is. I mean if the kingdom starts burning down while he's pretending to be peasant and no one knows where he is... What then?

These two very different settings are about to collide as Roy O'Hara is forced to crash land on New Terra after chasing a Serken fighter bomber (FTL doesn't seem to take much space or energy in this setting as you can fit it into a single-man craft) into the system during battle. His ship is pretty banged up but repairable due to him having repair drones that basically make replacement parts as long as they have metal (the implications of his repair drones being basically Von Neumann probes is never really gotten into. [Hi! For those of you who don’t know what a Von Neumann Probe is, they are self-replicating machines that are capable of exponential growth {That means the more of them there are, the faster they can make more}. Basically, a drone capable of producing advanced technology for a spacecraft can in principle make more of themselves unless their programming is somehow constrained. This capability, if turned on accidentally or on purpose, could lead to the exponential growth of those probes and the eventual conversion of all matter within travel distance into more probes.]) but more importantly is the fact that Roy is grievously injured in the crash and metaphorically left at death's door (you ever notice that death doesn't open his door all that often? [Not in fiction, anyway.]). In a more literal sense he's left at Katreena's door and in an effort to preserve his life she is forced to break out the big stones, the Boto Stone, which is a special type of healer's stone with a lot more mojo than your standard magic rock. It does have a side effect however of “soul bonding” the healer and the healee to the point that they can share dreams and sometimes even memories. I'm sure that my readers know where we're going with this. Roy and Katreena start sharing dreams, memories and more... Intimate moments. Katreena, realizing what's going on, decides that the responsible thing to do is to break contact. She takes Roy to a nearby settlement once he's stable and runs home. It's a bit too late for that, as she finds out when she gets home and using the magical rock pregnancy test finds out that she's expecting, which results in her promptly panicking.

It's here that we get the major world building, we find out that New Terra is ruled by eleven royal families, all descended from eleven people who were able to use the magic rocks to throw off their alien enslavers. You see, the people of New Terra are all descended from a Scottish village that was kidnapped about 1500 years ago to use as slave labor to mine the magic rocks (Oh god, the background inbreeding. There’s a reason Icelanders have an app!). After kicking out the aliens and shooting up their spaceships with really big magic rocks called land stones (these things also grant extra sensory information so you can see targets in interstellar space and shoot them down, if you know where to look). Afterwards these eleven people set themselves as kings and queens, created their kingdoms, and begin setting up rules. Now, the rules start to make sense when you consider what’s going on. The power of the royal families is completely dependent on being able to use the magic rocks, no one else is supposed to be able to. The ability seems to have a genetic component, as it is passed down from parent to child. The Royal Families have adopted strict rules on sexual relationships, flat out banning sex outside of marriage (with even Royal Heirs being branded and banished if they're found doing so) and a number of rules dictating who royals can marry. Mostly the children of royals, or nobles who tend to be distant relatives of royals (Oh. My. God. After 1500 years, approximately 60 generations of introgression - serial inbreeding - they would all basically be clones, there would be no heterozygosity left, they’d have no immune system and they’d be completely incapable of successful reproduction because every single embryo would have more recessive lethals than you can shake a stick at. The Spanish Habsburgs have absolutely nothing on this shit, even the Targaryens have a healthier genome! Hell, out-crossing to other families won’t even help, because they’re all inbred to hell and back too from just the small population size. Her brother would be identical to her….brother-cousin-husband and he’d be deformed. Stillbirths, so many fucking stillbirths. It’s a miracle the society hasn’t collapsed under its own Arkansanian weight!). Roy being from an entirely different planet doesn't qualify and Katreena is beside herself, thinking her only shot is to jump into another marriage and claim the kid is from her new husband.

Now I can understand why Katreena would be frantic about this and frankly I don't blame her for the whole thing with Roy, as the sex happened during a walking-dream when she wasn't entirely in her right mind (neither was Roy) and she had no idea what the consequences would be. I don't blame her for deciding to lie about it because... The alternative is anything from being flogged and banished to having a massive X branded on her face and banished. That said... Her husband George died three weeks ago. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to just claim it was George's kid? (Ironically enough, no, because the kid would look very much like someone else’s kid! Really she’s screwed either way!) I mean if they have magic that would prevent you from doing that, wouldn't it prevent you from passing the kid off as her new husbands? Sure the kid may be born a bit late (and not suspiciously Quasimodoesque) but that happens fairly often. Is it dishonest? Yes, but so is marrying another dude and telling him that the kid is his! At least this way you minimize the people you have to lie to and the harm you do. For that matter, what do you think George was doing the whole time visiting his ex-girlfriend?  This whole plotline just comes off as unnecessary to give Katreena something to fret over and have a conflict that she needs to resolve. If you realize the solution that I did, it has the side effect of making Katreena look like an idiot on top of that. I don't think that was Mr. Duncan's intention but there is it. (And yet, it is realistic. Assuming she survived being an embryo and a fetus, and then somehow doesn’t die from ‘not having a functional immune system’ and not being physically deformed, chances are she’d be as dumb as a box of rocks! This plot line makes an unintentional but huge amount of sense.)

Thankfully this isn't the only conflict in the book. The Serken find New Terra and send troops looking for their lost pilot. Roy finds himself pulled into a new theater of war, as he has to convince the kings of New Terra to follow him against the alien invaders and push them off the world. He is aided in this by a... Of course... A prophecy proclaiming the aliens would come again and a Commander from elsewhere would appear to lead the armies of the kings. Not everyone is happy to see Roy because the prophecy also promises the kingdoms will fall. I'm not going to repeat my rant on prophecies I think most of you got the gist of it in the last review. I will say that the prophecy in this book brings the story down, often being used by characters to resolve problems and avoid conflict. This robs the book of suspense and makes the solutions feel a bit cheap.  It's prophecy that causes the Kings give him command for example and is used to slap down every challenge to his authority.  I don't think that was Mr. Duncan's intention but it's hard to avoid when you make a prophecy front and center of your plot.

The story is well paced and bringing these two settings together under a single roof is rather difficult, which makes it interesting that Mr. Duncan would set such a tall task for what is as far as I can tell, his first book. There are a number of first book problems; the dialogue is overly formal and at parts a bit stilted. Mr. Duncan also has a tendency to tell the reader things instead of showing them. We are told Roy's emotional states rather then shown them, we are told about problems in the Alliance rather then shown them and how they're impacting the story. I'll admit this can be a problem because if you want to focus on say, a single confrontation taking place on a out-of-the-way planet, how do you show the problems in an interstellar alliance? Another thing is we don't meet any of the allied aliens. In fact the only aliens we really see are the Serken and if it wasn't for their advanced tool use I wouldn't be sure they were sapient. I also have problems with elements of the setting; for example, why would you spend the time and effort to kidnap a small Scottish village to do your mining when it would be easier and cheaper to just build robots? Plus non-sapient robots don't use magic rocks to rebel against you and can work longer without rest periods. New Terra's society works alright and Roy is a very believable and interesting character, he's a full grown man who while carrying a heavy loss (the death of his wife) is able to function and have friendships and develop goals for the future. Katreena was less impressive to me and I'm not sure Roy would be all that interested in her without the influence of a magic rock. This damages my ability to buy into their relationship, which is one of the big plots of the book. To be honest in each scene that they were together in, I wasn't really sold on Roy's feelings for Katreena and was left wondering how much of that was actually them vs the rock (Maybe intentional?). I do have to give Mr. Duncan points for aiming high and trying to tell an original story but I think another draft or two would have been very helpful. I have to give The Warrior's Stone by Matthew Duncan a C-.

Alright, next week, we're giving Colette Black another shot with Noble Ark.  This Sunday join us as Kristene Perron discusses her take on worldbuilding. Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.