Bad Dog: Military Science Fiction Across a Holographic Multiverse By Ashley R Pollard

Bad Dog: Military Science Fiction Across a Holographic Multiverse

By Ashley R Pollard

Ashley Pollard is currently from London in the United Kingdom. She is a trained Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (Well this is bound to be interesting.), and received her degree from King's College in 2004. She also has a diploma in Mental Health Nursing from St. Bartholomew's School of Nursing, City University that she earned in 1999 (Wow. St. Barts has a really good reputation if I recall correctly. Good for her!). She worked in the British National Healthcare Service for 21 years. Alongside that, she's also worked as a clerical officer in the civil service, in a bakery, and has written for game magazines as a reviewer and a columnist. Those magazines include Games Master International, as well as freelance work for FASA on their Battletech universe and designing the board game OHMU Warmachine (although I should note that she appears to be credited as Ashley Watkins for those works). She is currently living in London working as a freelance writer and has published several novels and short stories. Bad Dog was published in 2017 by Triode Press (which I currently think is the name of her own self-publishing company because I can't any other books except hers published by them) and distributed by Amazon.

Bad Dog takes place in the ever-closer future year of 2071 in a world very much like our own but with some differences. In the 2030s a series of massive quakes brought the world to its knees causing the US to withdraw from many parts of the world along with many political changes. Including a second American Civil War.  We also know that there was a third world war sometime after 2049 but have no idea who fought it, never mind who won or lost (Huh. Second American Civil War followed by WWIII... Fun Times!{We have to fit everything in bro, there are only 50 years between now and the beginning of the story!}). We have very few if any details but the few we do have present some interesting possibilities. For example, our main character deploys from Confederated States Navy Ship Hornet, the Confederated states don't appear to be the south rising again as they are at least once referred to as the North American Confederated States. This would suggest the formation of a new nation by combining the US and Canada and/or Mexico. However, throughout the book, there seems to be little if any difference between the CS and the US (Maybe a governmental reorganization?). The CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon are still operating, there are still elections with a President being elected. Additionally, the CSMC operates just like the USMC only with more advanced gear. On top of that, our main character is a mixed-race woman who is a Sgt in the Confederated States Marine Corps (Well at least the fascists didn’t win.). Nor is this the only change without a lot of explanation, the People's Republic of China is gone, replaced by the Democratic People's Republic of China. What if anything this means is unexplained as Ms. Pollard maintains a tight focus on the story and doesn't engage in any info-dumping (Well that’s good. Maybe China went full Rojave? Always go Full Rojava.{Yes, because it’s so likely they followed the example of a band of Kurds instead of every other Democratic People’s Republic most famously the one next door. I’ll give you a hint, I don’t think a Rojava China is smuggling nukes into Afghanistan and running powered armor special ops teams} I can dream!). This means there is a lot more space for the character work and plot but it does leave the world-building feeling a bit thin. As if she just changed some names on the stationary to make things feel more science fiction-like. Balanced against this is Ms. Pollard's characterizations so let's talk about our main character, shall we?

Sgt Lara Atsuko Tachikoma is the daughter of a Japanese father and an American mother, a redhead and most importantly the operator of a suit of Marine Corps Powered Armor (Nice). These suits often called Dogs by their operators, act as something in-between heavy infantry and Light Armored Vehicles as they're immune to most small arms fire but can still be destroyed by RPGs and other anti-tank gear. Of course, the color-changing camouflaged armored plates called ChameleonFlage that mimic the surrounding environment make it harder to target the suits. Their suits are strong and heavy enough to carry enough firepower to wipe out battalions of infantry while being light enough to be carried and deployed by aircraft. This, of course, makes them perfect for a covert mission into the mountains of Afghanistan to find out what happened to an Army Special Forces team that has gone missing. The Army Team was investigating a magnetic anomaly found under the mountains for the CIA. Which likely has every veteran in my audience wincing and with good damn reason (It certainly has me wincing, and I never served…). Before I get further into that let me talk about Sgt Tachikoma, as she is our main character and is the viewpoint character for the majority of the novel. I have to admit that Ms. Pollard does a good job writing a Marine here. Sgt Tachikoma is deeply concerned with keeping her squad running at full efficiency and keeping as many people as she can alive in the process. At the same time, she has outside interests and doesn't come across as a one-dimensional meat robot; able to joke around with her fellow NCOs, display emotions, and talks about subjects that aren't military in nature. This is always a good start, I would say to any aspiring science fiction writer who wants to write military people to remember that we are people, not machines. Sgt Tachikoma does have a problem you can't find anywhere but in science fiction however; she keeps reliving the same day and folks it’s a hell of a day to relive over and over. Especially since it keeps killing her (Someone call Tom Cruise. I swear that was the best movie he’s ever done. Mostly because I get to watch him die horribly over and over again.).

Because the Army Team that disappeared? They're all dead, killed by the combined forces of a Chinese Power Armored Special Forces Company and a radical Islamist Afghan Warlord. That magnetic anomaly? A pair of shimmering pillars that might be the key to the advancement of humanity assuming we don't all kill each other over it first. The Chinese forces are willing to collapse the mountain using a nuclear weapon and the Warlord is fully on board with any plan that ends with “and the mountain is sealed forever” as he believes the pillars are an evil force. Considering that most people are locked into immobility when the pillars are activated I can't blame him for feeling that way. However when Sgt Tachikoma (Wait a minute… Tachikoma? Someone is making a Ghost in the Shell reference? {We have a part Japanese woman in a cyberpunk world piloting a powered armor suit, what do you think?}) wakes up after being killed in an ambush and realizes she's right back to where she started, she's gonna have to figure what those pillars actually are, as well as what the Chinese battle plan is exactly and how to win a battle where she has perilously little information about what the other side wants and what is going on. If she doesn't, she will die every time. So the question is, how often can you go to your death over and over before you crack? Ms. Pollard doesn't shy away from the emotional or psychological weight of going through the same events over and over and then dying, only to wake up and know you have to do it all over again. This is good because by examining how such events might turn Sgt Tachikoma into a psychological causality she adds a new dimension to a story that frankly has been done before. The most famous example, Groundhogs Day gives the plot its name but we have seen this is a military context as well in the Japanese story All You Need is Kill and the US film adaptation Edge of Tomorrow. I was also impressed with how Ms. Pollard treated the doctors and support personnel who had to deal with Sgt Tachikoma, having them come across as people who understand that Sgt Tachikoma is clearly under a lot of mental and emotional stress even if they can't understand why she's under such stress. (I mean, she is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. She would know.)

Another place that Ms. Pollard shines is how she writes the Chinese Military Force and the warlord. Many writers would be content to leave them as faceless beings that serve only as targets for our glorious Marines or mustache-twirling villains. Instead, Ms. Pollard is willing to give them space in the novel and make their case to the reader. While I would have shot Shangwei (A Chinese rank comparable to Captain) Looi Kin-Ming if I ran into him on the other side of the battlefield. I did sympathize with him as he was a man who was simply trying to do his duty to his country as he best understood it. Much like Sgt Tachikoma is a woman trying to do her duty as she best understands it. Even Yeshua Bin Yussuf is somewhat sympathetic here, even though I imagine just about all of us find his ideology rather vile. Yeshua doesn't plot to conquer the world or rub his hand over enslaving American girls. Instead, he is a man who knows he's leading a weaker force that has to play two more powerful forces off each other to achieve his goal of sealing off the mountain from human hands. He is a man who believes that a time is coming that will put all of humanity at great risk and his goal is to reduce the risk while making it easier to create a safe place for his followers to ride out the storm (I mean...yeah.). Even Mr. Anderson the CIA representative who brings in the mission orders is humanized and we're shown a man who doesn't want to send soldiers or marines to their death but is utterly convinced that the pillars under the mountain cannot be left to other hands. He is also willing to risk his career if it means helping Sgt Tachikoma break out of her repeating day (Wait, a CIA agent who is also a human being? I don’t believe you!). Ms. Pollard is able to humanize all sides in this small conflict and do so without any real wasted space. She avoids putting in any mustache-twirling villains or having enemies who engage in vile behavior to make sure the reader knows who to root for. Instead, we're presented a collision of forces all with understandable motivations and goals, while able to leave the reader still pulling for the main character. This displays a fair amount of talent and skill as it would be all to easy to simply declare one side or the other bad and full bad men. The Marine Company that Sgt Tachikoma also gets its fair share of moments meant to give us a view of the people under the uniform as well as reinforce their loyalty to that uniform and what it stands for. Which I appreciated.

Ms. Pollard is able to tell and retell the story of a small unit conflict while retaining the tension and suspense with each retelling. She is also able to present a wide variety of characters and is confident enough to let these characters all speak to the reader in their own voices and let the reader come to their own conclusion from there. While the world-building was frustratingly sparse, it was sacrificed to maintain pace and give more space for characterization. While that won't work for everyone, I'm willing to accept that trade-off if it gives me some decent characters and a good story (So am I generally. People don’t typically infodump in the context of their own world to insiders, so…). Ms. Pollard does this in about 300 pages of planning on the decks of the CSN Hornet and tense battle on and under the mountains of Afghanistan. I was also impressed with her ability to use both USMC terms, ranks and slang as well as use the ranks and terminology of the People's Liberation Army. That said, the book isn't without flaw, besides the sparse world-building the plot itself is willing to leave a lot under-answered and the ending leaves us with a distinct feeling that this was only round one in a large fight. I do think the book could have benefited by focusing more on Sgt Tachikoma's platoon or even just her squad as by trying to juggle her whole company many Marines were left rather shallowly characterized compared to everyone else. I will also note that Ms. Pollard seems to prefer talking about NCOs and officers over the junior enlisted which is a common preoccupation with military science fiction writers. I'm also not crazy about the title, which feels like something from a Japanese light novel. At this rate, we're going to be using paragraphs for titles guys and that defeats the purpose of a title. That said I did enjoy the book a lot and found myself interested in her other works and I would recommend giving this book a try. Bad Dog: Military Science Fiction Across a Holographic Multiverse by Ashley R Pollard gets a B- from me. 

Thus ends our month of military science fiction women writers.  I hope y'all enjoyed it!  If you did and you would like to vote on upcoming reviews or discuss other theme months, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads.  A vote comes with only a dollar a month!  Thank you for being with us and as always Keep Reading! 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Valor's Choice By Tanya Huff

Valor's Choice

By Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1957. According to family legend, she told her first story at the age of three to her grandmother, complete with illustrations, about a spider having a rather bad day (Okay, that is almost war-crime adorable. But no need to call the ICC and issue INTERPOL warrants just yet.). As you can guess she kept on telling stories, being published at the ripe old age of ten when a pair of her poems were picked up by the Picton Gazette, which paid her $10. However, she wouldn't be published again until 1985, to be fair, most of us don't ever get published, so I'm still impressed. In between those first poems and her first novel Ms. Huff tried several different careers. Most relevant for this review, she served in the Canadian Naval Reserves from 1975 to 1979 as a cook. She also headed down to L.A for six months to work as a television writer and by her own words if she had had any idea how the industry works, she would still be in television. Ms. Huff comes from a working-class family so when she earned a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto Ontario, she became the first member of her family to earn a college degree. Ironically, she got her degree just in time for a large round of layoffs at the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) so she never actually got to use her degree (Oh that is just… sad.). She did end up working at the Bakka bookstore for eight years, becoming a manager for the store. Bakka books (now Bakka-Phoenix), founded in 1972, is the oldest science fiction and fantasy bookstore in North America and is still going strong. It's also known for having had many authors work there such as Robert J Sawyer, Michelle Sagara, Cory Doctorow, and others. These days Ms. Huff makes her living entirely through writing and lives with her wife Fiona Patton (also a fantasy writer) in rural Ontario (Aww Yeaah. Gotta represent the Ls the Bs, the Gs, the Ts, and those delightful magnificent Qs!). Ms. Huff is more known for her urban and other fantasy works but when I was searching for woman military science fiction writers, her name came up. Valor's Choice was published in the year 2000 by DAW books, let's take a look at it, shall we?

In the far off future, most of the races who achieve FTL travel and take to the stars have moved past the ability to commit violence; those who don't tend to destroy themselves. A number of these species came together to form the Confederation, a government designed to allow them to work out their problems in a civilized manner while respecting their different needs and giving everyone room to grow in peace. This worked out very well... Until they met the Others. The Others are a group of aliens who were expanding throughout space, and when the Confederation diplomatic corps was dispatched to politely suggest to the Others that there was more room for expansion on the other side of space if you would please... Well, the diplomats were returned in pieces and their ships booby-trapped to kill more people. At which point everyone involved took the hint that maybe the time for discussion over trays of bland finger foods was over and it was time for savage displays of power and brutal violence. Of course, they would need someone who could actually do those things and back it up. The elder races of the Confederation were nothing if not logical and came to the conclusion that if you are lacking a needed skill set in your organization, the logical thing to do is start an outside hiring drive! Thus the Confederation started looking for races that had achieved a certain level of technological skill, an ability to work in groups and accept beings of other species and cultures but were willing to kill the ever-loving shit out of fellow sapient beings. (Oh, this is going to be good.)

Now, this isn't a new idea, Alan Dean Foster loves the idea of humans being nearly unique among sapient races in our ability to embrace violence, using it in The Damned Trilogy and The Last Starfighter. Issac Asimov would use it in some of his works, as would Andre Norton. There are even elements of this in Larry Niven's Known Space universe (It’s a staple of HFY works in general.). What Ms. Huff does here is instead of making it some biological trait of humanity or special quirk of our psychology, it's simply an element of our level of development and not a unique one. As the Confederation recruits three such species and the book centers on the efforts of the Confederation to recruit a fourth. Humanity just happens to be the senior of the three races in question, mostly due to us being closer to the Confederation than everyone else. Which waters down the humans are special element of it, I approve of this as there are times when the humans are special plot point gets annoying. As such the Confederation uses human military terms and ranks and of course has its own Marine Corps. I will, from my completely objective and reasoned viewpoint (If you cannot tell, he is lying.{Nonsense}), say that their willingness to adopt a Marine Corps as one of their arms of military service shows the species of the Confederation to have some promise, even the utterly pacifistic ones.

The other two races are the glamorous di'Taykan, who look like very pretty humans with pastel-colored hair who also produce pheromones that get any mammal in range horny (... Well alright then. I have no idea how that would work, and I’m a biologist, but okay. {horny space magic} Clearly. My Asari Sense is Tingling.). The di'Taykan themselves have a fairly casual attitude towards sex, without the emotional bonds the act tends to develop in human beings. As a result, the di'Taykan have to wear pheromone maskers to keep the effect in check as well as be trained to follow rules against fraternization while serving in mixed units. On the flip side, everyone else has to be trained to realize that fraternization rules do not apply to di'Taykan as long as they are playing around with other di'Taykan. There are also the Krai, who are not pretty but are really strong, and can and will eat just about anything. So the Krai get double rations and had to be taught that Humans and di'Taykan do take it poorly if you eat bits of them that have been shot off or if you gnaw on the dead. By the novel start each of the races have been serving together not just in the same military but in the same units with great success, and Ms. Huff does a good job of showing a military that is running on compromises made so everyone can be comfortable enough to go forth and do terrible things to the enemy. The differences between species aren't ignored or glossed over but they are accepted and aren't used to excuse treating members of other species poorly or differently. Ms. Huff also does a very good job of showing a military that integrates men and women into the same units but if you're going to integrate sex happy space elves and a bunch of people whose first instinct on seeing a severed limb is asking if you're gonna eat that, mere differences in plumbing start to seem quaint (Amazing how that puts things in perspective.).

Our main character is Marine Corps Staff Sgt Torin Kerr, who starts the book waking up after a very hard partying period of liberty (Sounds like a Marine… So she got that right.). One that was necessary because she was also coming off a combat assignment, attacking an enemy-held planet that led to heavy casualties in her infantry company. She topped off her liberty by having a one night stand with a di'Taykan, because well, she had spent a long time being shot at (You know, it occurs to me, if the pheromones work across species, maybe the diseases do too, at least to a certain extent.{Yeah but this is the future, they got magic space drugs which get rid of those, additionally given how aggressively causal di’Taykan are about sex, I’m thinking they don’t have a lot in the way of STDs} But… aggressively casual sexuality is the perfect environment for STDs! {Yes, but cultures tend to adopt more restrictive mores when there are a lot of STDs around}). Still, despite being hungover and sore she's able to arrive showered, dressed and pressed right on time to report for duty only to promptly wish she hadn't. Because there's a two-star general standing in the company CO's office and he wants her to pull together a platoon from the survivors for duty as the honor guard of a bunch of ambassadors to a race that they're trying to recruit into the Confederation. The reptilian Silviss are a race that has just achieved space flight and they're right in the path of the Others. They're highly aggressive, organized, and there are billions of them; they're also right in a sector where the Others are pulling together a major offensive and they could help shift the balance in the war. They won't respect a drill team, so the Marines need to send combat troops and the General has decided that her unit will be perfect for that. So Ssgt Kerr is gonna take a platoon of troops who are still coming down from a major combat organization, shine them up and keep them from causing an interstellar incident. If that wasn't enough, she's getting a new second Lt, the di'Taykan she had the one night stand with because God loves her suffering. Of course, things are only starting to get out of control (Oh. Oh no! Well, at least it won’t be awkward for the di’Taykan? {He’s fully aware that he shouldn’t be screwing his NCOs. So… It leaves him open to charges of unprofessionalism and trying to unduly influence a human. So awkward} Well, did he know?{Nooope!}).

Let me start with the good here, Ms. Huff does a good job writing the characters of the platoon despite having very limited space to work with. The Silviss are an interesting species with several competing cultures and it's only alien contact that stopped them from fighting wars with each other. Ms. Huff also gives us a Silviss character, who gives us an insider view of his species. Because of that, we see a species that a lot of writers would have turned into a villain species (using aggressive, predatory reptiles isn't quite as common as bugs but it's up there) given some nuance and depth, and shown as a species that won't be easy to live with but can be lived with. Of course, some parts of their biology leave me with questions. For example, male Silviss get hyper-aggressive and unreasonable when they hit puberty and the Silviss reaction is to turn them loose into large nature preserves to let them duke it out with sharpened sticks as a method of keeping the social disruption and the body count to a minimum. These young males have also managed to murder off every other large predator on their homeworld over generations of hormone-fueled berserk rages. They also outnumber the females something on the level of ten to one. Now the gender imbalance is addressed in part by them being egg layers but the whole life cycle raises questions. Ms. Huff also does a good job writing the action. The battles the platoon must fight (complete with a Roake's Drift style last stand... In sppaaaccceee) are written in a fast but smooth way allowing the reader to feel the franticness of the fighting without losing track of anything.

However, the sheer amount of characters means that Ms. Huff isn't able to delve into most of them very much except for the di'Taykan Lt. di'Ka Jarret and Ssgt Kerr herself. So we get characters like Bintu, who is a cold sniper amazon or Ressk, the Krai Marine who is also a super hacker of doom but that's it. They're well written as far as they go but there's not a lot of depth there. Additionally, the twists of the story, which I won't spoil here... I kinda saw a mile away and the twist frankly bogs the story down (Let’s be honest. At this point, Frigid has become the Bookatz Haderach, he who can see in many plot-threads at once.{I think it’s just a result so much reading. I mean how many books have I reviewed just this year? Those aren’t even all the books I’ve read this year} As I said. Bookatz Haderach.). Additionally, the elder races who are represented as ambassadors in this story don't help either. In the last stand that takes up the last third of the book or so, it looks like Ms. Huff is going to subvert the useless pacifistic plot that comes up from time to time only to veer right into it. It starts out well, with one group taking up duties as stretcher-bearers and another working to repair damages to the fortifications and so on but bit by bit each of these members of the older “wiser” races fall apart under the strain and end up barricading themselves in their rooms and just waiting for the end, abandoning the Marines fighting for them. I imagine that some readers could feel nothing but sympathy for them but maybe I'm too jaded by my own service because I just feel an odd mixture of contempt and pity that I can't really explain to a civilian audience but am left feeling that a military audience would readily understand. Overall Valor's Choice strikes what I would call a pro-soldier, anti-war or maybe anti-military tone in its writing. This isn't a terrible thing and I prefer it over military science fiction that glorifies war and the destruction it brings. However as much as I enjoy seeing an NCO call a general a bastard to his face, the whole plot felt a bit contrived and expected. Valor's Choice is well written but the plot choices and the lack of time and space to develop most of its characters leaves it feeling rather average. I'm giving Valor's Choice by Tanya Huff a C. It's solid and a decent read but unable to achieve anything more than that. That said, I do really like Ssgt Kerr and I do think we will be returning to the series. If nothing else, I want to see how the general gets her back because there is no way you call a general a bastard to his face without consequences.

If you enjoyed this month's theme, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a dollar a month gives you a vote on what books get reviewed and if we pursue theme months and so on.  Next week, our final installment of woman writers of military science fiction month, Bad Dog, Military Science Fiction across a Holographic Multiverse by Ashley R Pollard.  See you then and as always keep reading!

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

The Myriad By R.M. Meluch

The Myriad

By R.M. Meluch 

R.M Meluch was born Rebecca M Meluch in Garland Heights Ohio on October 24, 1956. She graduated from Westlake High School in Westlake Ohio and went on to get a BA in drama from the University of North Carolina and an MA in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. She also traveled to Greece, Israel, and Egypt following the trail of Alexander the Great, learning some Greek and Latin along the way. She also earned a black belt in Taekwondo. She currently lives in Medina Ohio with her husband Jim Witkowski. She published her first work Sovereign in 1979 and has continued to publish books and short stories until the modern-day. The book we're reviewing The Myriad was published in 2005 and is the first book in her longest-running series, The Tour of the Merrimack, a military science fiction space opera with a healthy dose of pulp. Let's look at the setup. (I do love pulp. Are we in the Age of Chrome™?)

The Myriad takes place in the future, humanity has not unified but has spread out across the stars (Oh that has to get messy). Most of the nations of the world have settled their differences more or less peacefully and set up the League of Earth Nations as a method of diplomatically maintaining peace. To be honest I can buy that; if there's an entire galaxy out there to claim, why burn resources battling it out for scraps on Earth? It's not all new colonies and expansion, however, because two superpowers refuse to bury the hatchet. The first superpower is, of course, the United States of America, out of all the earth nations it has the greatest numbers of colonies and territory, along with a massive military. Which it needs to deal with the Roman Empire. Not a reborn Roman Empire because in this universe the Roman Empire was kept alive as a secret society through the long centuries hidden among those who learned Latin (The Fuck? No, really. That is a reborn Roman Empire, that’s only continuous civilization in what has to be very surreal propaganda, and I know surreal propaganda! {Their argument would be that the Empire never needed to be reborn because it was never gone. This is simply the Empire claiming it’s due}). Once they could they gathered on the American colony of Palatine, threw off the masks, stepped out from the shadows and declared that Imperium has returned. Roman society is imperialistic, conquering any alien species that it finds (earth nations have agreed to noninterference) practicing slavery, mass cloning, and building fleets of robots to match the US' economic head start (Kill them with nuclear fire). Infuriated by the theft of an entire world, seeing Roman society as anathema to American ideals and insulted by the lies and double-dealings of a secret society, the US throws itself into a struggle to contain and push back the Romans, parsec by parsec if necessary. This is a fascinating and honestly novel idea that grips the attention. Imagine the questions this raises, are all the Romans in the Roman Empire? Are there stay behind groups on earth hampering the LEN's ability to resist and that's why the US carries the fighting (Probably)? If so, why doesn't this group have more control over the US, the only human power in the galaxy that can be considered a match for them? (Well, clearly, it’s because Americans don’t learn Latin anymore. They lost their ability to recruit. My God. He’s one of them! You know who! Oh Shit, and me! Ave Romam! Ave Imperii! Civitatibus Foederatis Americae enim mors!) How do you maintain the values that these Romans preach when modern society would have considered them evil and backward for centuries by the time you got your own planet? There are so many things you can do here! But this is not what the novel is about (It bloody well should be! {engage the book you have, not the book you want}).

Because shortly before the novel starts, the Roman Empire surrendered. The Romans haven't been able to devote their full military power against the fleets and armies of the US. Because on the far side of space is a swarm directed by a singular will that has only one directive: devour all life (Uh Oh! Well, alright then). Calling these creatures the Hive, the Roman military, heavily dependent on robots and drones, finds itself at a loss against the heavy electromagnetic interference that swarms generate rendering their electronic minions useless. Worse, Roman drones depend on FTL communication, which attracts the Hive. The US navy is much less automated and has frankly developed better defenses because Roman electronic warfare is better than ours so our computers have much more shielding and protections then Roman ones. The Romans realize this when they capture the newest American Battleship, the USS Monitor and realize it's the perfect Anti-Hive ship... And they can't build any copies in time to protect their provinces. So the Emperor swallows his pride (What? A roman emperor swallowing his pride? That is not possible, he’d commit suicide, or be killed by his own Praetorian first!) and surrenders to gain the protection of the US fleet. So the fleets of the US are re-positioned to face down an alien fleet they had no idea existed, alongside an enemy they loath to protect our entire species. While this idea isn't as novel as the one above it's still very workable and when the Hive does show up in this book Ms. Meluch does a good job of conveying the alienness and horror of their existence and makes them distinct from the many, many other hordes of hive minds in science fiction. Although I would like to see more friendly or even neutral hive minds in science fiction (A mutual friend did write that civilization of slightly twitchy sapient ants, though they aren’t a hive mind proper…). Just tossing that out there. The war between the mightiest powers of humanity and all-devouring Gorgon swarm of the Hive, however, is also not the main thrust of the book.

The Merrimack, greatest battleship in the fleet (which is odd to say but I'll get to that) is cruising alone in unexplored space hunting for the homeworld of the Hive when it discovers something very odd. In a distant globular cluster, there are three worlds that are inhabited by a single alien species united under a single government. They don't have FTL travel but somehow, they are crossing light-years in months (So they do have FTL travel. By definition.{let me rephrase, they have no FTL that works by any observable method because they’re using rockets that fly via reaction mass} What. The. Hell.{Thus the mystery!}). Things get more mysterious when they realize that the aliens aren't native, they're from another world far from the cluster and the aliens won't explain how they got here or how their systems work. Captain John Farragut and his Roman Intelligence officer Augustus, who is a Roman cyborg called a patterner for his ability to interfere with computers directly and develop useful intelligence from the patterns of raw gathered data, must work together to figure out what the aliens are doing and if it is a danger to Earth... Or an advantage to their respective nations. This is made more complicated when the LEN shows up and proceeds to wreck diplomatic relations and endanger everyone. This isn't a bad plot either, even if it's not the one I want. However, I won't punish a novel for being a different story than what I wanted. There's a lot of other things to take the Myriad behind the shed for.

The Myriad has a very interesting setting and a fairly interesting plot but is completely hampered by paper-thin characterizations, utterly pointless and wasted scenes and subplots that would have had people rolling their eyes in the 1980s (By the Grace of Marx, that is terrible.). To begin, I'm going to talk about the stuff that offends me that I know most of my readers won't care about but since this my review, you're gonna have to sit through it (Or not. You can leave. However if you do leave, you won’t be able to revel in Frigid’s suffering with me, your snarky commie editor.). The military forces we are presented here make no damn sense. First of all, we have the Marines of the USS Merrimack, who are presented as high-school dropouts, dumb jocks and trailer park rejects (Jokes the Navy, Army, Chairforce, and Coast Guard make about Marines eating glue - and the fact that PFC Moron exists - notwithstanding, they won’t take you without at least a high school diploma, and you do have to pass the ASVAB. So there is a certain minimum level of functionality required. Also, Mad Dog Mattis {He prefers CHAOS please} is unto a god {he’s more of a prophet}. He had a reading list that they still absorb with the zeal of Chinese students reading chairman Mao. On the other hand, if you ever lose your US Marine, all you have to do is pull out your phone and play the USMC Hymn at max volume. They’re drawn to it like a moth to flame.). They also pilot super-advanced fighter craft, serve as heavy gun crew, and are the infantry force for the Merrimack. By this, I mean every bloody Marine does the same thing. Infantry and pilots are drastically different specializations that have very different requirements, mentally and physically. Both of these take a lot of training to gain and upkeep the skills needed. Additionally, infantry often works best when it has air support. If your damn pilots are on the ground with a rifle they can't provide that air support. Air forces, on the other hand, cannot take and hold objectives so if your infantry grunts are flying a mile up and a mile ahead, they ain't taking or holding shit are they? (More than this, pilots, especially space pilots, need to be able to do math. Dropouts generally cannot math. There are also space limitations in a cockpit so that big meathead dudes often cannot fit inside, even if they would make good infantry. If the marines had specialized roles, this might be vaguely acceptable. Modern marines do. There are arty marines who sometimes worship Thor, combat pilot marines, infantry marines, logistics marines. Hell, there are even intel marines, which hurts to think about, but they exist. Now, first and foremost they are all riflemen, they’re all trained for that, but anyone who uses their logistics bros as cannon fodder on the ground unless everything has gone to shit needs to be taken behind a chemical shed and shot.) So as you can see, this only divides and weakens your forces and frankly is likely to produce a batch of troops who are utter crap at being pilots and infantry and will have their tails hammered up between their ears when they run into a group of real professionals. So, I'm going to kindly ask any fantasy or science fiction writers who read this review, to stop doing this bullshit. You wouldn't write an entire hospital of doctors who are also mechanical engineers on their second shifts and you shouldn't write platoons of infantry troops who are also pilots. Additionally, why the hell is the Merrimack off by itself!?! It's a bloody battleship, battleships have escorts! You never send a battleship off by itself because that's asking for it to be isolated and overwhelmed! I know that star trek does it all the time with the Enterprise, but the Enterprise has more in common with an age of sail frigate than a battleship of any era (The UFP also cheats. You can think of any ship as a tradeoff between firepower, protection, and mobility. A destroyer focuses on firepower and mobility, cruisers are even mixes, battleships are firepower and protection. The UFP doesn’t make the choice, they just maximize everything by throwing more energy production into everything through the sort of mad science that would have them rigging multiple warp cores into a torus.). Hell, Ms. Meluch makes the point for me when after two engagements with the enemy, the Merrimack is severely depleted of supplies. Which maybe could have been mitigated if it had escorts and a fleet tender or three with it! Third, why is a battleship named the Merrimack? The Merrimack is most famous for the Confederate States using it's burnt out hull as the start of building their own ironclad ship the CSS Virginia. Other ships have carried the name since the civil war but they were all coalers or oil tankers in the US navy. We don't name battleships after supply ships, I mean why in the stars would we break from naming Battleships after states? We're an interstellar power in this story so we must have vastly more states to choose from! If Ms. Meluch was trying to name the ship after the confederate iron-clad, I would have to say naming US navy ship for a ship that only fought and sank US navy ships is in poor taste. Thanks for reading that folks, let me get to the stuff y'all likely care about.

The characterizations in the book are very thin for most characters. Part of the problem is the sheer number of characters that Ms. Meluch introduces. Most of the book focuses on Captain Farragut, Augustus, and the Marine Colonel Steele (Oh My God. That is a gay porn name if ever I saw one. *Looks it up* No. Nothing direct, though as you might imagine Steele is some part of the stage names for a lot of gay porn actors.) and Flight Sgt Kerry Blue. However, there are a host of supporting and minor characters. Every one of those characters can be summed up in a line or two. Dak Shepard is big and dumb. The XO is super competent and a beauty queen. Reg is an ambitious Marine who wants to go to college. The scientists are smart but childish and unmanly. Don Cordillera is grace and wisdom given male form, etc, etc. Captain Farragut is actually a fairly well done and human character, I kinda have a sneaking affection for the character, his relationship with Augustus is a complex and complicated one driven by hostility, respect and an acknowledgment that in a sane universe they would be trying to kill each other but their nations and species must come first. Augustus for his part is also interesting because Ms. Meluch makes him hard to get a read on and goes full in on him being a Roman and therefore refusing to act like an American. Colonel Steele is a pure stereotype with the book joking about how dumb he is but that's okay because he's a good guy or so the book says. I want to note, it's not the characters saying that, it's the 3rd person narrator. Kerry Blue is a woman Marine and everyone's opinion starts and ends with her sexuality and holy shit it's dripping with hypocrisy. Let me explain, we got another Marine who rejoices in the name Cowboy. He’s described as having a woman on every ship and in every port and celebrated for doing so. Kerry is pretty much the same but mocked and derided because she's a girl (*Slow Claps* Also, this is what we commie feminists call a double standard and it is unfortunately very common in real life as well as in fiction. So Ms. Meluch did get something right here! Huzzah! {Yeah I’m okay with some characters having that opinion but when the book presents it as an unchallenged fact, it annoys me, especially when it clashes hard with how the rest of their society is presented} Right, which makes me think that she’s not saying ‘this happens and it’s bad’ but ‘this is how the military is and should be’). Frankly, I got more respect for Kerry because at least she is bloody honest about it and unlike Cowboy doesn't have a pregnant spouse back home. To be fair, Colonel Steel hates Cowboy's guts but a good chunk of that is because he wants into Kerry’s pants (Uh Oh). Which leads me to my next point, the amount of discussion the male officers get up to about the good looks and sexual behavior of their female counterparts is ridiculous. To Farragut's credit when he realizes he's falling for a married officer on his ship, he takes steps to make sure he can't act on his feelings (I will note this will make him a better human being then Cowboy) to bad his other officers don't follow his cue. Ms. Meluch is giving us behaviors that don't fit with the set up she's presented us. A United States that allows women into front line units and has so many female officers that a good chunk good of the Battleship's officer corp is made up of drop-dead gorgeous women can't afford to have its male officers acting like characters from a 1970s sex comedy (This is true. In a situation like this, as true to life-as-exists-now as it is, the military would absolutely have to come down on that shit so hard it would dissuade even the horniest of PFCs. Because let’s be honest, this shit might very well be 1960s level, but shades of it exist right now and it’s unacceptable. In the far-flung future with fully integrated units and command structures… oh hell no.). Instead, Ms. Meluch writes as if the US has a 21st-century military joined with a 1960s cultural mentality. John bloody Ringo managed this better in his Empire of Man series and he has a whole meme devoted to the stuff he gets up to in some of his books! (Can Confirm)

We do have human characters who are not from the US or Rome, a band of LEN diplomats who are incredibly bad at diplomacy. I assume this because Captain Farragut has used so much of the awesome in the universe that there's not a lot left for the rest of the human race. To be fair, in the book we're told they're some kind of a natural preservation team meant to keep humans from contaminating alien societies but you'd think they would have gotten diplomacy 101 (Every Single Country has an equivalent to our Foreign Service Exam, and while mistakes happen, they train hard for this shit. Presuming these are career civil service and not political appointees.). Instead, we treated to “diplomats” breathlessly shocked that the Roman believes that war is a good thing and that an American naval captain believes that there are worse things than fighting (Excuse me as my palm repeatedly impacts my face.). Next, they'll faint because they'll find out there's gambling going on in casinos (What? But casinos are great for schmoozing, which is half their job! {What in my description makes you think they’re any good at their jobs?}). The whole subplot with the LEN is a giant waste of space, instead of learning about how nations that aren't the United States or Rome are dealing with the realities of interstellar government; or how their cultures changed in relationship with that; we get shallow stereotypes of Europeans who can't bear rudeness or violence. Unless it's rudeness or violence directed at Americans and Americans who despise their “allies” to the point that you ask why the US even bothers being in the alliance? You could have cut this whole section out and devoted it giving us more about the other officers and marines on the Merrimack or to the mystery of the Myriad cluster or given it to the bloody aliens! I mean the actual-factual aliens get a depressing amount of screen time, there's simply not a lot done with them and we're left with knowing very little about their culture other than they are ruled by a dictatorship and broke away from their homeworld. Seriously only one member of their species even gets any real attention. Instead of learning about them, however, we get a dinner party with pointless huffing and an air of look at the dumb Euros who want to negotiate with the Hive (Jesus Fucking Christ. {Shouldn’t you be swearing by Jupiter or Sol Invictus?}).

What really burns me about the whole thing is that the book is actually written well, Ms. Meluch shows great talent and skill when she writes action scenes for example. The interactions between Captain Farragut and Augustus are wonderful to read. When we're looking at Roman-American relations we get hints and clues that it's as complicated and twisted as Soviet-American relations during the Cold War. Then we get officers telling each other not to worry about the possibility that Kerry might get raped by an alien despot because she doesn't know the meaning of the word no or a series of cardboard cutouts pretending to be characters in a science fiction novel so as to pad the word count or scenes that make me long for the cutouts. The sheer unevenness in quality and tone leaves me feeling like I've been left at the end of a bungee cord and treated like a yoyo. But the final insult for me is the fact that the whole novel is a reset plot, with the final chapters telling us that pretty much everything we read didn't happen and all the deaths, character growth (what little there was) and insights are all washed away by the universe resetting. I'll be honest folks, that made me see red. I hated it when I saw it on television in the 1990s. I got sick of it when comics did it in the 2000s and I am utterly done with putting up with this in the year of our Almighty Lord 2019! So this has killed any interest I have in the series completely and utterly dead. Now I know there's a fandom for the series, but frankly, you can count me out. Between the utter loss of suspension of disbelief I had at Ms. Meluch's presentation of the armed forces, the wasted plot lines, and the fact that all of it was reset...I'm giving The Myriad by RM Meluch a D, if it wasn't for the fact that it's a great setting and Captain Farragut and Augustus the grade would be lower.

So this novel was part of a series of military science fiction written by women, as voted on by our patrons. If you would like to vote for upcoming reviews, vote for theme months, recommend future books for review, considering joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads. Next week we're going to hope for a better experience with Tanya Huff's Valor's Choice. Until then, keep reading!

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

Trading in Danger By Elizabeth Moon

Trading in Danger

By Elizabeth Moon

Elizabeth Moon was born in Texas, on March 7th, 1945. She grew up only a few miles away from the Mexican border, giving her experiences with another culture. This gave her an appreciation for how the culture you grew up in and the ones you were exposed to early can shape your view of life. This followed her to Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she took a few courses in Cultural Anthropology and graduated with a BA in history in 1968. She served three years in the Marine Corps as a computer specialist with the rank of First Lt. She married her husband Richard while they were both in the service in 1969. After leaving the Marines, she attended the University of Texas in Austin and graduated with a second BA in biology (Huh). She also did some graduate work in biology at the University of Texas. Her son Micheal was born in 1983. While she started dabbling in writing science fiction in her teens, she considered it a sideline for the most part. She didn’t begin seriously writing until her 30s, starting with a newspaper column in the county paper and selling short stories to Analog magazine and having one printed in the Sword and Sorceress collections. Her first novel, Sheepfarmer's Daughter was printed in 1988. She has since written roughly 28 novels and over 50 short stories, winning the Nebula award for her science fiction work Speed of Dark and being a Hugo finalist in 1997. Today we're going to be looking at a military science fiction work of hers, called Trading in Danger, which was first printed in 2004 is the first book in the Vatta's War series. Let's take a look.

Trading in Dangers starts on the worst day of Kylara Vatta's life, or at least the worst day of her life so far (Oh no. That does not bode well.). When she woke up that morning, she was a Cadet at the top of her class in her home system of Slotter Key's naval academy. She was engaged to the only other Cadet who was even close to her performance and was confident of having a productive and honorable career in Slotter Key's Space Navy. By the time lunch rolls around, she has been forced to resign in disgrace, due to helping a cadet who had claimed he was in trouble but was actually looking to make some trouble (Oh that just sucks.). She breaks off the engagement with her fiance and has to go home in disgrace. Of course, this could be worse because Kylara is the daughter of one of the major trading clans of her home system (Damn. Well, at least she had her golden parachute to fall back on I guess. Yes, I can feel pity while at the same time despising capitalism.). Vatta Transport is one of the great shipping firms of her neck of the galaxy, owning dozens of faster than light ships and her father is the Chief Financial Officer of the company and her Uncle is the CEO. So it's not like she has to worry about what she'll do for a living, just if she can bear working for the family company (I’m sure she’ll manage. But at least she has actual worthwhile training as opposed to other corporate spawn promoted well past their level of incompetence. {Considering they make Vatta family members go on trade trips as apprentices at the age of 13, I imagine they spend a lot making sure family members have the right training and skills, space is unforgiving after all} Excellent! Also this is all very age-of-sail.). To keep her from suffering further political attacks and to keep the press away from her, her father arranges to make her Captain of Easy Shipping. One of the Vatta's ships is reaching the end of its operational life span, so it's one last multi-system cargo run and then a trip to the breakers. Of course, someone has to Captain the damn thing, so it might as well be Kylara. Not seeing any other options and being eager to get away from relatives even more eager to say I told you so, or worse sympathetic ones (Okay, yeah that would be completely insufferable.). She isn't fast enough to avoid being burdened with three nearly inedible fruit cakes made by her aunt Gracie but everyone has their burdens to bear.

If this were an easy cargo run to the breakers, we wouldn't have a story, would we? Never mind a military science fiction story. While still feeling the sting of being made a political sacrifice, Kylara decides the best thing to do is move forward, and to her, that means trying to find some side jobs to make the cargo run more profitable. Maybe even enough to refit her old tub of a ship into something modern enough to keep. So when she finds out that one of the planets she's stopping at is having trouble because a shipment of farming equipment disappeared, she figures she's got step one mapped all out. Just make a quick trip out system to pick up some farm equipment, sell it for profit and see what she can do from there. Of course, she ends up flying right into a developing warzone and because Ms. Moon delights in her character's suffering, the ship's FTL engine fails just as they come in the system and it's very expensive to fix (Oh wow. Yeah, Ms. Moon really does like making her characters suffer. Damn.). Kylara could just call home for some cash but someone blows up the ansibles and things really start to get out of control. Now in this universe, ansibles are the devices that enable faster than light communication. Ansibles as a distinct term (meant to be a contraction of answerable) first showed up in 1966 in a novel by Ursula Le Guin. In Ms. Moon's book, they're run by a fairly ruthless corporate monopoly InterStellar Communications (Kill them in book two...). They maintain their monopoly in many ways, such as keeping strictly neutral in local disputes, not openly censoring or messing with data passed through using their network and hunting down and brutally killing anyone who screws with their network (So, it’s a natural monopoly by way of network effects rather than actually anti-competitive practices? Or do they do chicanery to keep anyone else from setting up their own network? {Worse, they monopolize the tech and come after anyone researching it} But… how? That is one hell of a sweet legal arrangement they have there. {They have a fleet and are not afraid to use it}). In fact, it's been decades since anyone was insane enough to even think about trying until Kylara got a ringside seat to someone blowing one up.

Kylara is in a star system she can't leave, she can't call out, and is surrounded by armed mercenaries and unknown enemies. It's not even a system she's ever been in before, so she doesn't even have a home-field advantage to work with here. Everyone else has more weapons (Is she even armed? {She has a crossbow!} So her ship is not even armed. Christ. Wait a crossbow? Really? {Yep!}), more resources, and the advantage of initiative on her. All she has is her training, her wits and an aging crew of civilian specialists who thought they were on one last milk run. At least her goal is simple, stay alive, keep the crew alive and keep control of the ship. The question is can she achieve even that much? This means that the title of the worst day in the life of Kylara Vatta is now an open question, right alongside the title of the last day of Kylara Vatta's life.

Ms. Moon does a great job of making this feel like a real, living universe despite not delving too deeply into the history or politics of the setting. What you can quickly grasp is that humanity has settled the stars and lives in a large number of single systems, or even single planet nations. You can also pick up that interstellar trade is common and Ms. Moon makes it clear by showing us institutions and customs that have grown up around interstellar trade. Such as Captain's guilds, places where ship Captains can go while in port for a place to stay and to make it easier for them to find cargo and passengers. The fact that Kylara's home system of Slotter Key has consulates on every planet and Kylara routinely visits them for information and support as well as having to do favors for various consuls and representatives to keep the wheels of trade greased. Kylara has to hire security while visiting foreign planets and there are listings of companies that she can refer to complete with notes on just how dependable and safe each company is. There are inter-system commercial laws and regulations that everyone agrees to follow and the mercenaries have their own lawyers, even. All of this reinforces the idea of a large trade network binding these planets together on multiple levels and I enjoyed the little details that make it work. Another element that I found interesting and that Ms. Moon explores without letting it overwhelm the plot are the implants. The implants are cybernetic computers that are usually implanted into the skull, they serve much like modern-day cell phones and personal computers. The characters use them to access most of their technology and store their information. Ms. Moon doesn't infodump any of this but lets you find out by witnessing the implants in action. We also find out that some in-universe religions don't allow for people to have implants and they're considered deeply disadvantaged in some respects but that's not a major plot point in this book.

Character-wise, this book is primarily about Kylara Vatta, with most of the other characters only impacting the story in how they relate to her. While her family does make an appearance in the first couple chapters of the book, it’s the ship crew that plays supporting cast. Mostly the two elders of the crew, Gary and Quincy who are the cargo master and chief engineer respectively. Both of them play the role of elder adviser and for me at least the rest of the crew didn’t really create an impression. That said, Kylara is capable of carrying the book. She's a young woman who is going through a lot of stress (Clearly.) and keeps finding herself in worse and worse situations. Often just by simply doing what she thought her duty was. It makes her rather easy to sympathize with as we've all been in situations where we did exactly what a decent person was supposed to do and have it completely blow up in our faces (Many times.). While coming from a privileged background as the daughter of a major trading family, she's still an outsider in that her military training splits apart from the civilians around her and the fact that everyone keeps misreading her intentions and plans. At the same time, Kylara also has to question herself because if she's doing everything right, why does everything keep getting worse. Which at least makes her more self-aware than a lot of people I know. Kylara is very much not trying to be a hero in this book just keep her crew safe and get out of this situation alive. As a military science fiction book, this might seem questionable but let's be honest the soldiers and marines aren't the only people in a war zone. In fact, they're often the minority of people in a war zone (By orders of magnitude sometimes. I mean, look at the movie Enemy at the Gates. It’s about the siege of Stalingrad and we see all of two civilians. In reality, there were 400 thousand of them, and by the end, only between 10 and 60 thousand remained alive within the city. Imagine a story about some poor schmuck factory worker trying to survive that.) and Ms. Moon uses this story to focus on other types of people who might find themselves in a war and trying to get out alive. This makes the stakes somewhat smaller than your average military science fiction but it also makes them more immediate. Kylara isn't fighting for honor or her nation's survival, she's working to make sure she makes it through the day. She doesn't care what everyone is fighting over or for because it has nothing to do with her but she might end up catching a stray bullet over it anyway.

Now the book isn't perfect, while it tells a complete story in and of itself, it's a story that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. For example, there's a lot about the antagonists that is left unanswered by the end of the story. This is a small problem because we left with little understanding of the motives, or desires of the antagonists other than there’s a shadowy group of people who are using the cover of a war to blow up vital infrastructure for unknown reasons. Part of the reason it’s not gone into is that Kylara is too busy staying alive to try and solve mysteries but I found myself with a lot of unanswered questions about what exactly happened by the end of the book. Part of that is because Trading in Danger is the first book of the series, another part is because there's no realistic way for Kylara to find out. While we do get a few chapters from her father's point of view, most of the book is told from Kylara's and Ms. Moon plays her cards close to her chest. Some plot twists could have also been foreshadowed or pulled off a bit better because some character revelations are a bit out of nowhere. Ms. Moon uses that to great effect so I have to think it was a purposeful decision on her part. That said this fun read and a good one and I would recommend the entire series to anyone interested in a military science fiction that avoids a lot of the time tested presentations and ideas. Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon gets a B+ from me.

This book was the second in our series on military science fiction written by women.  A theme that was we arrived in response to votes by our patrons.  If you would like to vote for upcoming books to review, discuss the reviews or vote on theme months like this, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can vote for as little as a 1$ a month.  Next week we continue Women of Military Science Fiction (WMSF) month with The Myriad by R.M. Meluch. Until then, Keep Reading! 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold

The Warrior's Apprentice 

by Lois McMaster Bujold 

Ms. Bujold (born Lois McMaster) was born on November 2nd, 1949 in Columbus, Ohio. She was born into the shadow of a great man. Her father Bob McMaster not only helped create a manual that is considered a cornerstone of material engineering (principles of nondestructive testing) but went on to become one of the first TV weathermen (Wait, these are two very different things. That must have been a very meandering career path.). Her father was celebrated for his television work because of the effort he put in to educate viewers of why the weather happened, not just what was happening. This left her feeling like she had big shoes to fill. Another way her father influenced her was introducing her to science fiction and fantasy. She was reading science fiction novels by the time she was nine and became a fan of this new television show called Star Trek. To the point of creating a fanzine called Stardate with her best friend Lillian Stewart Carl. They worked on the fanzine while they were in college, with Ms. Bujold attending Ohio State University, originally for an English degree but she lost interest. She first mett John Bujold at a science fiction convention and married him in 1971, leaving OSU in 1972. She divorced John in 1991. She had two children born in 1979 and 1981 and found herself at home with two small children. During this time Ms. Carl became a professional writer. In fact, she published first. This convinced Ms. Bujold that she could do it to. Turns out she can do it really well. (This is something you could do in the 1970s. Drop out of college to get married, then be successful later. Don’t do it kids, no matter what your parents say about how they could have done it In Their Day™. You probably can’t.{Eh, You can if you go into a trade, there's always a need for welders and carpenters, just don't become unskilled labor friends, the world is unkind to them}You can, but depending on the trade that market can also be volatile, and you’ll still likely end up getting screwed in recessions.  Certainly, though, don’t go “unskilled”.)

She ended up writing three novels in a series while trying to get published, the first was Shards of Honor, the second is Warrior's Apprentice (the subject of this review), and Ethan of Athos. She faced a lot of rejection at first. Science fiction publishers told that she was writing young adult fiction, and young adult publishers told her she was writing science fiction. On the advice of Ms. Carl, she tried a new company that had just started. Baen Books, which at this time was Jim Baen, his wife, and about six employees. Mr. Baen, not only read the books but bought all three and promised her that if she could write three books a year for seven years he would make her a star. Her reaction was to hyperventilate and ask if she could write one book a year for twenty instead. Which honestly worked for her. Ms. Bujold has won six Hugo awards (four for best novel, two for best series), three Nebulas and two Locus awards along with a host of other honors. The only writer who has won more Hugos for best novel was Robert Heinlein himself and only if we count two retro Hugos that were awarded after he died. Her books have been translated into seventeen different languages and just about everything she's written is still in print, which is harder to do than you would think. We're going to look at The Warrior's Apprentice today, which was published in 1986 alongside Shards of Honor and Ethan of Athos. All the books are in the same universe and have characters from other books appearing in them. The reason I went with The Warrior's Apprentice (despite Shards of Honor happening before that novel) is the fact that it's the first outing of what would be the series’ main character and central star, Miles Vorkosigan.

Miles is an interesting character with a large number of contradictions in his life. Born the son of Cordelia and Aral Vorkosigan, he is among the highest of elites on his home planet of Barrayar, however, due to an attack on his mother, while she was pregnant with him, Miles is also physically frail. His bones are extremely brittle and prone to breaking, because of this his growth is stunted and he often needs to wear leg braces and other supports. This is a problem for Miles for several reasons, part of that being the history of Barrayar itself. Let me give y'all a quick explanation, so keep in mind this isn't a complete history. Humanity travels to other planets by the means of using wormholes, it was through one such wormhole that Barrayar was surveyed and colonized. However, when the colonists arrive, the wormhole closed, washing the colonists and the planet in a wave of radiation. The planet was still undergoing terraforming, it had a breathable atmosphere and water but the native plants were mostly toxic to Terran creatures. So the colonists found themselves cut off from the galaxy, with much of their infrastructure incomplete or not yet arrived and a terraforming effort that was collapsing. Much of their technology was destroyed by the radiation. On top of that the radiation wave caused mutations in newly born children and not the cool marvel comics kind, but the kind where most newborns don't survive their first couple of weeks because their bodies simply don't work (Radiation does not work this way. The sorts of radiation that would be released by a wormhole collapse are gamma waves, and some very fast-moving sub-atomic particles that don’t stick around and do damage. We’re talking about acute radiation sickness here, not flipper babies.{I’m thinking that Bujold’s wormholes work differently, because well, it did.}). The toxic plant life also had effects on developing unborn, causing birth defects that weren’t genetic in nature. Without even 20th century medicine to fall back on, the Barrayarians adopted a brutal policy of infanticide for mutated or deformed newborns. This is honestly a part of human history we don't discuss much (because even societies that practice it usually find it horrible, not even Sparta celebrated its child murders) but we find examples of it in every stage of history and across every culture; but that's a topic for another day. Barrayar also regressed socially becoming a planet with a feudal culture and political set up, creating a society that was sexist, classist and authoritarian but was clawing its way forward with native technology being at the steam age. Then the wormhole reopened and Barraya was invaded, while they fought off their invaders, it took them 20 years and 5 million dead (Wait. What? Okay, I am gonna have to assume that this because the invading civilization simply could not be bothered with occupying the place. If they’ve technologically regressed to the steam age there is no way they could repel an extrasolar invasion. Roland Emerich movies to the contrary, we couldn’t do it now.{The invasion wasn’t very popular with the invading Empire’s ruling caste, that’s a complicated story for another book, and the rebels had a lot of outside support. Even then a number of cities were nuked. This didn’t help with the whole birth defect issue}That… is marginally acceptable.). Having acquired advanced technology and after spending some time rebuilding, they started invading people as well. Until they were stopped, partly by outside resistance and partly by not-quite-a-coup by Miles’ parents. His mother Cordelia was not born on Barrayar, but the more advanced Beta colony. Miles’ father served as regent for a new Emperor and then stepped aside once the boy hit sixteen. While regent he pushed to modernize and try to sand down the edges of Barrayar society. But let's turn back to Miles.

So while Miles is very much a member of the upper crust, he is hated by many for his physical weaknesses and deformity. His reaction is a determination to prove them wrong by becoming a military officer like his father and grandfather. Miles' personality is fairly interesting because he swings from hyperactive to morose with very little in between, which honestly suggests bipolar disorder to me (or just a teenager…{this is very much in excess of your average 17 year old. Consider he’s dealing with the burden of people openly stating his parents should have aborted him} No no. Under those conditions, that is normal non-disordered teenager.). Additionally, while he presents an outer face of sardonic wit and cynical intelligence that doesn't quite work for a 17-year-old, he's honestly incredibly insecure and desperate for the acceptance of his society, the love of his old playmate and the validation and respect of his father and grandfather (No no. All of this is perfect for a seventeen year old.). Although he would rather die than admit any of that out loud, pretty much like your normal teenage boy. It also doesn't help that his father and grandfather are titans within his society. His grandfather was one of the m

en who led that long insurgency starting when he was seventeen and his father is one of the most important men on the planet, having had a major role in creating the empire. Much like how Ms. Bujold felt like she was in her father's shadow, Miles feels trapped in his own father's shadow. The novel opens with Miles taking the officer exams to enter the military academy, sure that this will gain him his Grandfather's pride and prove himself to his Father. He's aced the written exams and all he has to do is finish the physical exams and he'll be in. However, Miles manages to break both his legs on the very first obstacle, a wall that he climbs handily enough but doesn't manage to get down from very well at all. This leaves Miles in despair and seems to kill his Grandfather out of disappointment, which is bad but comes just as the old man seemed to be accepting Miles as a person and possibly even a grandchild. This leaves Miles battling depression and when he's offered a chance to take a trip off-planet, he takes off latching on the idea of finding out the identity of the mother of his childhood playmate - and his major crush - Elena. While on Beta Colony, he overhears a confrontation between a pilot trying to keep his ship from being junked and his creditors and decides to intervene on a whim and things get out of control from there. Having assumed the pilot's debts and taken him into his service via feudal oath (the Barrayarians take these dead seriously) Miles needs to raise money fast and he finds a cargo that can do the job. It's a covert cargo of weapons to a warzone. Through a blockade run by a powerful mercenary fleet being paid by the other side. With an aging unarmed cargo ship and a crew of five. Payment on delivery (This kid is an idiot {Listen, it’s his first time and he’s a noble. He’s never had to parse a business contract before}.).

Things swiftly go from bad to worse on their arrival, as they find themselves trapped in a warzone with no friendly ships to call for aid. Miles finds the only way to ensure his survival and the survival of the people he's responsible for is to find a way to subvert or neutralize the mercenaries who are the dominant force in this war. He's got to do this with the only weapons he really has, his ability to think fast on his feet, his utter lack of shame, and willingness to tell any lie necessary to achieve his goals (So, either an idiot, or an inside joke in our Star Wars RPG game. Maybe… both? {Written in 1985, published in 1986, so it’s more our Star Wars game is an inside joke on this novel}). Another interesting thing is that it's Miles impulsiveness that got him into this situation, this whole series of events is a direct result of his character flaws, flaws that dog throughout the story and exact a terrible toll on him that will likely haunt him for the rest of his life. However, while he is impulsive and prone to wild mood swings, he is honestly very intelligent and capable of solving problems. This doesn't come off as some sort of Xanatos style plans-within-plans style of intelligence but rather the intelligence of a man who can pile improvisation on top of improvisation and keep a dozen lies up in the air at once. He's also backed up by the grim and dour Sgt Bothari, who has been his bodyguard and in a way his surrogate father for his whole life. Sgt. Bothari is a dangerous man but one who is willing to do anything to keep Miles alive and even happy. I can't discuss his character without spoilers, so I'll just say I find him tragic and uncomfortably real.

He's also supported by Elena, who is Bothari's daughter. Elena and Miles grew up together, so while Elena is uncomfortably aware of the class differences between them, Miles is willing to completely ignore them if it means her love and acceptance. Now, I suppose this could be considered a feminist storyline within the plot because Elena finds herself growing into a capable and competent person and commander once she's outside of the sexist society of Barrayar, which doesn't allow women to serve in combat positions or hold to many positions of authority. While this doesn't bother Miles, it does put a rift between them because Miles is focused on getting home and Elena is starting to think she doesn't want to go back. However, Miles is a lot like her in that to find out just what his gifts were and their full extent, he had to leave Barrayar behind. The big difference is because of his class and gender, Miles can go back and exercise those gifts and Elena can't. This brings an element of coming of age to the story and subtly reinforces Miles' privileged status even if he spends the entire book as an underdog. The struggles and obstacles that Miles has to go through are very real but at least because of his class, he'll be rewarded equally to his struggle. Whereas Elena's reward will be to be told to forget this ever happened and find a nice young boy to marry (See, that’s what she can do if/when she gets back home. Work to violently overthrow the patriarchal and feudal social order! Break out the guillotines! Bring on the Bourgeois Revolution as a first stage and then, the Next Stage. You know what that Next Stage is! We shall not make excuses for the terror! Sorry, that just kinda came out there. Damn Lenin demons *takes a deep breath*. I need to remember Rosa.{This is why we have that 3 dollar patron level folks}). The group is rounded off by a pair of strays (Why are you disparaging the valiant proletarians by calling them strays?{because they're literally people on the verge homelessness that Miles picked up because he could. Them being strays isn't a judgment on their value of people, it's a matter of fact statement of their socio-economic state}), that pilot that Miles picked up earlier and a Barrayarian deserter who Miles took with him out of a combination of pity and desperation as he has the engineering skills to keep their old ship from falling out of the void. I'm not going to discuss these two either because of the massive spoilers that would result.

As military science fiction, this book is an odd one. Taking a character from a very militant society who at first look cannot physically fulfill the role that society demands of him and throws him into a situation where he needs to make his gifts fit the situation or perish. While there are many battles within the novel, the main struggle is a psychological one as Miles has to win the battle not on strength of arms but through misdirection, cunning, and sheer audacity. I say audacity because who would ever commit to as big a lie as the one Miles peddles throughout the story and expect it to stick? Which is another unorthodox look at war in this novel, which is just how much perception and deception play a part in it. As a military science fiction novel, The Warrior's Apprentice goes very much against the stereotypes and shows us just how much room there is in the genre for variation. It is also a very well written work and I do encourage everyone to give it a try. While it is a sequel to Shards of Honor, it's a completely self-contained work. You can read The Warrior's Apprentice on its own and you're not missing anything important to the plot or the main characters partly because Shards of Honor happened before Miles was even born. Ms. Bujold puts a lot of social commentary here but does it without preaching. the social implications of what Elena's gone through and Miles’ position are part of the plot and there's no soapboxing to be here. This honestly makes it more effective and I think less likely for the reader to simply ignore or reject it. Also, I think Miles is a hero that works just as well in the 21st century as he did in the 20th so hopefully he'll be in print for some time to come. The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold gets an A.

So this opens our month of looking at woman writers of military science fiction!  Which was a theme voted on by our patrons.  If you would like to join us and vote on possible theme months or upcoming book reviews, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a 1$ a month gets you a vote and there are greater rewards at higher levels.  Next week join us for Elizabeth Moon's Trading In Danger.  Until then, Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders