Valor's Choice
By Tanya Huff
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.
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