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.
Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders
So that's why you asked about battleships going off on their own... :-p
ReplyDeleteI wanted a second opinion and I knew you'd spent time studying the doctrine and practice.
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