So Fight I: Echoes of War book III
by Daniel Gibbs
“I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air:”
1 Corinthians 9:26 King James Translation
This is the third Daniel Gibbs novel I've reviewed and the sixth one set in this universe. First, a disclaimer, a friend of ours and a patron of the review is the author of three of those books, that being Gary Stevens. That said, everything stated in this review is my honest opinion (And believe me, when it’s just Gibbs, he does not let his affection for the co-author color his judgment. And I don’t hate myself enough to do so either.). Second, at this point, y'all should be aware of the universe. If this is your first review of mine I'll provide links to the other reviews at the bottom, go read those first. So I'm gonna make this real bare-bones in the context of the setting.
The series covers events of the war between two stellar powers, The Terran Coalition and the League of Sol. The League of Sol is a single-party communist state that demands total loyalty to the state and considers individualism an immoral act at best (At this point, you can all hear me screaming.). They also pursue campaigns to completely erase all religious beliefs and identities from human culture. For some reason, they don't go after other forms of identity, which I've discussed at length (We are dealing with Cold War Strawman Communism here. The author has a complex.). The Terran Coalition is a capitalist, multi-party democracy where having a religious belief is considered the norm. To the point that atheists (while not discriminated against in law) are looked at with some high degree of distrust and skepticism.
That may be because the Coalition is made of the descendants of religious people who fled Earth to escape the League and second they've been fighting a brutal war against the League who is screaming at the top of their lungs that if they win they will ruthlessly purge religious belief from Coalition society. Frankly, I imagine if modern earth found itself fighting an alien power preaching convert-or-die to their religion that religious belief would become a lot less popular here (You’re probably right, but let’s not pretend that Gibbs thought about it in those terms.).
For thirty years the Coalition has fought completely in their home territory, just barely managing at times to keep their core worlds free from combat. This is a losing game because a purely defensive military campaign will eventually lose; but the League of Sol is not only far enough away to render their Core Worlds more or less untouchable, it's fleet power dwarfs the Coalition. The Coalition's biggest advantages are that they have a technological edge and they can devote more of their absolute military strength to the war. The League has to guard many borders and can only devote a certain percentage of that fleet to smashing the Coalition (Honestly, this seems like something of a contrivance. Yes, they cannot devote their full military strength to it, but the size discrepancy speaks to a massive industrial advantage that they should be able to leverage in a war that lasts for thirty years. Naval strategy is build strategy, after all. Especially because the technological edge is unlikely to last, again, without contrivance. {I will point out that the Coalition is in a completely different arm of the galaxy so they are at the end of a long logistic chain. But raises questions to me of why try to conquer the Coalition now? Surely they can wait until the League of Sol has a better logistical base to carry out the campaign from…} As I said, it’s a contrivance. The League controls the engagement ultimately.).
This has changed in part because of the entrance of the Saurian Empire, an alien state with a long and complicated history with the Terran Coalition, but that has no desire to see the Coalition replaced by the League. Also aiding in the turn of the tide is the Lion of Judah, the Terran Coalitions first true battleship in a long time, made possible by the creation of an antimatter reactor, while everyone else is running on fusion (Ah! There’s the contrivance! {Eh, the antimatter reactor is new, for 29 years the Coalition was using fusion tech} That’s part of why it’s a contrivance. A state like the League is massively bigger and can throw resources at R&D in a way the coalition cannot, and they have the industrial capacity to make antimatter in a way that the Coalition comparatively lacks. So how does the Coalition have that tech advantage or a tech advantage in general?{I’m assuming the League is educationally kneecapped. Maybe they went all-in on Lysenkoism? Or a more modern example, the USSR actually fell behind on computer technology because the backers of it lost a political factional fight}). The Lion of Judah is the ship of our main protagonist Col David Cohen. Because for some ungodly reason the Coalition uses Army ranks for everything.
Now I'm going to stop for a minute to talk about the Saurians because I find them fascinating. First of all, it would have been easy to turn them into third-rate Klingons given their culture’s militarist tendencies but Mr. Gibbs avoids that. The Saurians are just human enough that we can sympathize with them but their outlook remains alien enough that they don't feel like humans dressed in funny costumes. They are more predatory and aggressive than we are but not to the point of being irrational or unable to work in a team. Mr. Gibbs also does a good job in communicating that the Saurians have a divided opinion on the alliance based on their own history with the Coalition, which isn't free of conflict. Much of this is done through the Saurian character serving as the XO on the Lion of Judah, a character with a rather sly sense of humor that I enjoyed. My only real problem is that the Saurians are a monoculture with a single religion revolving around a semi-divine figure they call the Prophet who comes across as an alien blend of Jesus and Mohammad. It's an interesting culture but I would honestly rather see aliens have more than one culture per species.
The League of Sol has almost been pushed out of the galactic arm that the Coalition and the Empire call home. Worse for them, Coalition Intelligence has determined the location of the massive logistical base that they used to springboard their fleets there in the first place. So now the Empire and the Coalition are massing for an attack on the single largest structure that humanity has ever put into space. A massive space station built between two arms of the galaxy meant to serve as a fleet base and logistical hub (See what I mean about industrial capacity?). Just the construction of such a thing is an incredible accomplishment and now the Empire and Coalition have to figure out a way to take it. Because if they want to take the war to the League to ensure that the League never returns, they need that space station.
The League isn't going down without a fight however, not only have they concentrated their forces to defend the station but they've brought new weapons to the party to try and cut down on the Coalitions’ tech edge and bloody the snouts of the Saurians. Additionally, a large enough victory here may actually allow the League to go back on the offensive. The attacking fleet is the most powerful offensive force that the Coalition and the Empire can wrangle up and if it is destroyed then the League can retake the ground that's been lost. So in a very real sense, this battle is for all the marbles. At stake is the ability to project power and whoever loses will be unable to operate offensively. On top of that, losing will open up League space to attack by the Allies. Something that could destroy their will to continue what has been largely an expensive but (for the state) a safe war of conquest.
As the campaign saws back and forth our hero, David Cohen, finds himself in command of the fleet. With the burden of fleet command and a ticking clock forcing him to commit the final attack before victory becomes impossible, Cohen finds himself in a moral dilemma. As the route to victory requires he does things that while they're not war crimes are still morally dubious (Hot take: This is why the concept of war crimes exists. In a fight for survival, there’s your line. The war crime line. Anything not past it? If you can’t do it, why the fuck are you in command in the first place? Trying to minimize death is one thing, but once the shooting starts… everything you do is morally dubious.). He also has to ask others to bend their own rules and do things that are not entirely clean or forthright. This leaves David asking himself how many moral compromises can he make before he becomes what he's been fighting this whole time. How far is too far?
There's also the difficult question of what do you do when people go too far? For that matter, what is too far? Because the pointed truth here is that the allies are fighting for their very existence. The cost of defeat here means the utter annihilation of their way of life and the deaths of hundreds of millions as their culture is forcibly changed through gunpoint and reeducation camps. However, David asks the very pointed question of what would be the point if in defeating the enemy they become just like him? Which is a fair question to ask, if to achieve victory you compromise everything you believe in and engage in actions that tear down and mock your stated ideals, was it actually victory? Or did you just survive and in the process lost everything you were fighting for.
The book also takes the time to look at the cost of victory, as the Duke of Wellington is believed to have said “Next to a lost battle, nothing is so sad as a battle that has been won.” Because even in victory, good people die or are crippled or hurt. The book does a very good job of reminding us that even in victory and even if fought for the best of reasons, war means death, destruction, and waste. Military glory is cold comfort to men and women who are dying far from family and home and it is often no comfort to their friends and family at home. It's not many stories that take the time to look at the fact that victory is often as painful for a lot of people as defeat.
The book does have its weak points and as usual for Mr.Gibbs, they revolve around his villains. I'm left at the end of the book asking why anyone shows our big bad, the League Admiral in charge of the war on the alliance, any loyalty? Because while he is a talented tactician and strategist, he's awful at managing his human relations. To be blunt that's a big part of leadership, but every time we see him he's sneering at everyone around them. Additionally, he doesn't treat anyone with anything close to a level of respect, he puts down his subordinates in public which undermines them in front of their subordinates. This isn't good for a military unit. He seems to hold bottomless contempt for everyone and everything to the point that reading the chapters in his point of view is frankly annoying. Why not let him be good at managing the officers around him and give him some charisma? At least then I could buy that he's a threat to the Committee that runs the League. (Because, Frigid, Gibbs is incapable of doing so on an ideological level.)
We do learn a little bit more about the League, it seems to be mostly run by a committee that calls itself the Social and Public Safety Committee, which echoes one of the many governments of Revolutionary France. Which ironically were inspired by the American Revolution and the various committees that revolutionaries set up to take over royalist government functions (Committees of Public Safety are also not how communists do things, historically.{they pretty much were abandoned after the French Revolution if memory serves me, I don’t think even the 1848 revolutionaries used them}Not even the Paris Commune did.). Modeling the League of Sol on Revolutionary France isn't a bad idea, as it was a government that sought to remake its society but have to point out that this puts us on the well-trod and deeply rutted ground in regards to science fiction modeling historical regimes. The committee is written mostly as a group of little gray men in little gray suits meddling in things they aren't suited for which honestly... You've seen it before and frankly, you've likely seen it done better.
Mr. Gibbs does write his protagonists very well, he gives us deeply conflicted people who are trying to do something very difficult and do it without selling their souls. At the same time, he forces those protagonists to make compromises to win, compromises which enact very real costs and aren't just waved away. There are consequences for them and we're not just told that our main characters can do no wrong. On the flip side of that, having David constantly having the same moral conflict as to whether the Almighty is really listening to his prayers is starting to drag on. It's fairly true to life, agreed, but in a written story, there's a point where you resolve the conflict before the readers get tired of it. That said, if Mr. Gibbs could do the same depth and nuance for his villains then his work would be incredibly good. As it stands, his work is better than the average military science fiction, for example, I would put it above David Weber's current work fairly easily. If nothing else, it is refreshing to see protagonists who aren't rock-sure of their own righteousness. So Fight I by Daniel Gibbs gets a C+
