Warp World Forbidden Revelations By Kristene Perron and Joshua Simpson

Warp World Forbidden Revelations

By Kristene Perron and Joshua Simpson 

Warp World Forbidden Revelations is the final book in a five book series, the first book of the Warp World series, entitled simply Warp World was released in October of 2012. I reviewed that book in 2014 and followed up by reviewing every other book in the series. Before I get into that, let's talk about the authors. Kristene Perron worked for 10 years as a professional stunt-woman gaining an in-depth education in all the ways a person can be hurt or killed; nomadic in many ways she lived on both sides of the equator before settling down in Canada with cats and a husband. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications and she’s won awards for those works. Joshua Simpson is a native of East Texas (The poor soul) and has a long colorful list of careers, among them long-haul trucking, safety man for a nuclear power plant, stonemasonry; and he currently works as a pain relief specialist, focusing on nerve release techniques. Which as far as I can tell means he causes you short term pain in order to bring you medium to long term relief and improvements to your health (Basically when you’re injured, even relatively minor injuries, scar tissue can form and your sensory nerves close to those areas can get stuck on the scar tissue and become inflamed. The fix is to manually unstick them, which can be painful). Continuing my stubborn tradition of full disclosure, Josh Simpson is a friend of mine and he was incredibly kind in providing me an e-copy of this book for the review. That said this is my honest opinion on the book, as I believe that's what my readers deserve. I should note there are spoilers here for the series if you haven't read the books stop here, pick Warp World up and see if you're interested.

Forbidden Revelations brings to an end the saga of Seg Erananat, combat anthropologist, brutal reformer, unrepentant rebel and tired exhausted hero; and Ama Kalder, ship captain, rebellious slave and force of nature. They are also both hopelessly in love with each other and completely devoted to the same goals. Those goals were never humble or small either, first was the liberation of Ama's people from the colonial rule of foreign overlords, then it was the reform of Seg's people away from a system of monstrous slavery and dehumanization while huddling in increasingly smaller and smaller patches of their own planet. A planet that was being eaten by a phenomenon known as the Storm (Seg's people simply aren't very creative nomenclaturists as I've noted in the past) the Storm simply destroys any and all life it touches along with draining away the energy source known as Vita. Vita is if I just strip it down to the simplest explanation, a magical energy source created and fueled by faith and hope. Something that Seg's people were so lacking in that they developed a technology to visit other worlds to simply loot their stores of Vita; which they needed to do because the technology that powered the shields that kept the People (I mentioned not being very creative?) safeish was powered by Vita. Meanwhile, their social structure was barely held upright by the slaves they kidnapped from those same worlds and consigned to a nightmarish existence. Seg sought to turn the People to a less barbarous existence by creating a new settlement where there was no slavery and thus spread reform and liberty throughout the world. He failed and in the end, the World of the People was devoured by the Storm. There was one bright spot in this however, Ama managed to survive being exposed to the Storm and as a result, has gained new abilities and a growing understanding of the what the Storm is. However, these abilities come at a dark cost and leave Ama concerned if she is even human anymore. On top of that is another horrid wrinkle. I often wondered in my reviews why the People didn't just eat the cost of warping to new worlds to flee the storm and simply settle on a new world. This book also answered the question. Every time the People visited a new world, they opened a path for the Storm there and as a result, every world the People raided was destroyed by the Storm in a decade. The leaders of the People knew this and did it anyways for centuries, making them perhaps one of the most prolific bands of mass murderers ever as their victims could easily be numbered in the tens of billions if not more. It's interesting to note that even characters who wholeheartedly supported the People's system react with horror and remorse at this revelation, suggested that even in their degenerated brutal state some lines were simply too much.

Forbidden Revelation takes us back to Ama's homeworld, where her people the Kenda have been rebuilding their nation free of the imperial yoke. Two groups of the People have survived and found refuge in this world. One group made up of the people who followed Seg's vision of a better world and society and the other group is a band of mercenaries and spies who were lucky enough to escape into the Warp when their world was finally destroyed. The group that followed Seg ended up in Kenda lands, the group of people that gave birth to Ama and allied with Seg, way back in book one. Things have gone pretty well for the Kenda; they achieved independence and under the rule of Ama’s cousin Brin are slowly unifying and building a cohesive nation-state so as to resist any further aggression. The other group landed in the middle of nowhere. This group is taken over by Issensio, a spy who managed to cause a good amount of grief to Ama and Seg in prior books and has now talked and shot his way to being in charge of this group of People. Despite being washed out of the same school that produced Seg, he's one of the most intelligent, driven and gifted people on any world he ends up on and he's now driven to find a solution for a pressing problem. You see, due to everyone warping over to Ama's world and dumping thousands of people on it... It doesn't have a decade until the Storm shows up, it has a year, maybe... Tops. To that end he'll even ally with Lissil, the woman who schemed, plotted and decided if she couldn't rule Seg's settlement next to him, she would burn it all down. Lissil is from Ama's homeworld to, she's a Welf, a third ethnic group that was reduced to abject servitude below even the Kenda. Lissil basically fought her way up from the very bottom of the heap based on her willpower, physical beauty, native intelligence and utter lack of anything that could even be considered a moral code. She might not as dangerous as Seg, Ama, or Issensio but that's only because she lacks their training and resources.

Meanwhile, Ama wakes up separated from everyone else in the very stronghold of her first enemies. The capital city of the Shasir, the people who colonized the Kenda in the first place. She finds herself in the midst of a political and religious dispute. It turns out that the technology worshipping religion of the Shasir has some secrets of its own. Secrets that tie back to Ama's ancestors and to hidden secrets of her own world. Like why they bothered to hide a continent from everyone and what's on that continent and what ties these secrets to the Storm? The secret may be carried by a single priest named Sa'lais, a true believer who is bound and determined not to let his people repeat the sins of the past and use a weapon so horrifying that they built an entire religion around the idea of keeping anything like that from ever being developed again. Ama has to figure this all out fast because as usual she is surrounded by people who want her enslaved or dead and is operating on a quickly shrinking margin of error. However, Ama has learned a good deal since the early books and Mr. Simpson and Ms. Perron shows us a matured Ama who is more world-wise and less foolish then earlier books. She's also however colder in a lot of ways, some of that being fueled by the changes wrought in her by the storm and others by the deep emotional and mental scars left by the abuse she suffered at the hands of the People. While that gives her the tools to survive even in the very heart of her enemies, it does show us that she had lost part a piece of her goodwill and for lack of a better term innocence. Ama no matter what she has lost though is just getting started and will save her homeworld no matter who she has to go through to do it. Seg on the other hand...

Seg Erananat has seen better days, he's once again separated from Ama and now from everyone else in a strange new place that is somehow in between the World and Ama's homeworld and operates on completely different laws. He's not alone either, surrounded by people from his past he has to figure out who his enemies and who are allies are and do it with full knowledge that history may be entirely misleading. Seg is having to deal with all of this while under the massive stress of being afraid that everyone he loves and knows is dead, devoured by the Storm or lost somewhere in a hostile universe out of his reach. He's also carrying enough grief to kill a lesser man, as he not only saw his world die (and knows his actions hurried that along) but has lost out on his ambition of saving his people and making the People into something worth saving. He's also carrying personal grief for losing his family just as he buried the hatchet with them and made peace. He cannot even be sure that he saved the people closest to them or delivered them to even worse fate. So this Seg is one who is aged beyond his years, feeling like he has failed at everything and is very close to his limit. That doesn't mean he's out of tricks or out fight though, after all, men are most dangerous when they think they have nothing left.

This book reveals to us the nature of the Storm, the hidden secrets of Ama's world and the last terrible secrets of the People. These aren't the only revelations however, as we see just what kind of deals that everyone will cut and what actions they are willing to do when everything is on the line. While everyone has been playing for fairly high stakes throughout this entire series, Ms. Perron and Mr. Simpson have found a way to bring the stakes for the last showdown to an even higher level. The result is a series ending that brings us to new levels of tension and suspense even as they wrap everything up for the final curtain. On top of this, just about every action, the characters take on all sides make sense, I can't find anything to point at and yell that this an incredibly stupid action. Other than letting Lissil run around free but Issensio doesn't have a lot of choices there. I wouldn't call the book perfect however, there were parts of the storyline that dealt with Ama's family that I found a little too neat and pat for example. Also, the fact that we're on the very last book and thousands of pages in... They have to insist on dropping in new characters. Now bringing in a new character isn't a terrible thing but that means giving up space and time to develop them while competing against established characters. It's tough to do without annoying your audience (think of all the fan hated characters that show up in late seasons of television shows or loathed comic book characters who try to change the dynamic of beloved characters) while Sa'lais doesn't irritate, he simply doesn't get developed to the scale that characters like Viren, Gelsh or Jarin did across a couple of books they appeared in. So I don't really feel all that attached to him or invested in his journey in the book. I'll admit I would have rather seen more of Viren then Sa'lais but then Viren might be my favorite supporting character and in my opinion, he never gets enough face time. I'll also note that if you haven't read the last four books in the series you going to be utterly and completely lost as it picks right up from the end of book four and takes off running like a charging horse. That said, the book did completely pull me in and I completely enjoyed it. Warp World Forbidden Revelations by Kristen Peron and Josh Simpson gets an -A.

As always the red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is me, your reviewer.

As a quick note, I've spent the last couple months going over recommendations and tallying them up.  Counting books that I already have and are "on deck" for review, we're at almost 140 books, my fellow readers.  That's a good 2 or 3 years worth and people aren't shy about adding more to the plate.  So after some consideration, I've opened a patreon.  1$ gets you a vote on what we review next!  So join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads

Join us next week for The Red Knight by Miles Cameron.