Echoes of War: Strong and Courageous By Daniel Gibbs

 Echoes of War: Strong and Courageous

By Daniel Gibbs

  I reviewed book one of this series waaay back in May of 2020. So when it comes to the authors I'm just gonna note that one of my friends and a patron write in this universe, although I have not met Mr. Gibbs himself. That said, everything in this review is my honest opinion. 

Okay, let's do a quick overview of the Echoes of War Universe for those of you in the cheap seats. Our protagonists are citizens of the Terran Coalition, a federation formed by people fleeing a totalitarian communist takeover of Earth through a newly discovered FTL drive. While not everyone agreed with the idea of living under the Coalition Constitution, leaving to settle their own planets with blackjack and hookers, most did and the Coalition was the largest human power in local space. While there were wars with aliens and those same neutral powers, for the most part, the Coalition managed to find ways to live peacefully working out solutions to sexism, racism, and other problems that allowed people to live free and full lives. Of course, everything changed when the League of Sol attacked. 

The League of Sol is what that totalitarian communist government that took over Earth grew up to be. They cemented their hold on Earth and expanded to the stars, settling who knows how many worlds and building a vast fleet to spread the word of Marx to the stars (See, a Marxist state cementing their hold on Earth and then going to the stars would be pretty rad. {I don’t know about that…} There is a whole genre of music called Soviet Wave which is literally built on a kind of Nostalgia for a Lost Future that the USSR never got to have.  But the League of Sol is like… strawman communism {I will agree to that}.). Centuries later they found the Coalition and for some reason just jumped straight to attacking. Which I gotta be honest I find dreadfully unrealistic and dull (Because you’re smart.). Even if you're Sauron reborn cradling your newly forged ring, you know that intelligence - that is information about your enemy - is the difference between victory or defeat. A period of peaceful coexistence would have allowed the League to gather information about the Coalition's abilities and weaknesses as well as create a 5th column behind enemy lines (Which is what I would do, because I’m not dumb.). Instead, by falling upon the Coalition out of nowhere, they cemented the peoples of the Coalition together to resist for decades with minimal social fracturing as the Coalition peace movement never got anywhere near the 1960s. 

Meanwhile, in the neutral planets, the League did pursue a more rational policy, selling itself as a counterweight to the local hegemony of the Coalition (This is smart.). Now as is the nature of human politics the behavior of the Coalition when it was the only 500-pound gorilla in the room built-up resentments and grudges. Not only that but the League presented an alternative vision of the future, one without class division or massive wealth imbalances. It is not shocking to consider that many among the neutral planets were drawn to such ideals and some even considered joining the League. Especially since it looked like the Coalition would slowly but surely lose their war to the League anyway. One such neutral planet was the planet of Monrovia which voted to join the League in a free and open vote. 

However, there was a wrench in the gears. The League doesn't allow for religious belief (Which, as the atheistic Jew communist in the room, I can tell you is completely insane.{What bothers me is the hyper focus on religion while ignoring things like ethnic and language identity, if you’re trying to break down all barriers between your populace, you have to aim at those to} ), preaching the idea that the State is everything and the ultimate expression of humanity (Which is just shitty communism, because the whole point of communism is to get to a point where the state dissolves. {Which will never happen}). Monrovia had a large minority of religious people, who were utterly opposed to giving up their beliefs. So something had to be done and the decision was made to reeducate those people, quietly, for their own good. As well as the good of the rest of the planet of course. While this made a lot of people uncomfortable, everyone agreed that it was necessary and even the people being sent to the camps would ultimately benefit. The ones who survived anyway. It was all for the greater good. Besides with the League winning, it was all just a matter of time anyway... Wasn't it? (Again, completely nuts.  If you want to get rid of religion, the way to do it isn’t to be all nasty about it. You make a society such that religion becomes… redundant.  You create a society that’s so good that people have less need to console themselves and find purpose with religion.  Won’t happen immediately, but religion will eventually fade into relative irrelevance if not non-existence. {I should note as a religious person myself, I disagree with this, in fact anthropology has looked into this and found strangely that religions that require more of you tend to thrive in these environments.  However, for the vast majority of citizens my editor is right, make life comfortable enough and they just kinda stop being religious})

The problem with an argument that declares something to be just a matter of time is that not only does the universe love to prove such a declaration wrong; it also ignores that a situation can change instantly if new variables are introduced. Also, new variables are always going to come crashing into anything that's not a controlled experiment. As you might have guessed the Terran Coalition didn't play along, building an experimental new battleship, the Lion of Judah, and foiling an underhanded attempt by factions in the League to use a peace conference as a cover for a terrorist attack. This brought in the most powerful Alien nation in local space, the Saurian Empire, on the side of the Coalition and that has turned the tide. 

While the Lion of Judah is an impressive leap of technology and firepower, it's still one ship and a single ship doesn't win wars. Entire fleets of fresh allies and arms and equipment produced by factories out of range of the League, however... This means the Lion of Judah, under the leadership of Colonel David Cohen, can also be sent on diplomatic missions to neutral planets to convince everyone that League victory is no longer unavoidable. So when the battleship shows up in Monrovian space right when the homegrown resistance has gotten enough evidence to expose the government turning reeducation camps into concentration camps? Well, this leaves the leaders of Monrovia alone holding the bag and right next to the now expanding Coalition's borders. 

The Coalition on the other hand can't afford another war, so the leaders of the Coalition intelligence services call in outside help. The Little Sisters of Divine Recompense are an order of warrior nuns, trying to make an increasingly deadly galaxy safe for people without powerful protectors. Answering the call, they'll gather in their thousands to fight an army a million strong to liberate the camps and save as many lives as possible. They do this by using for the most part nonlethal means, although no one's invented a non-lethal air to air missile. They aren't alone as Colonel Cohen and a number of his senior officers join as volunteers and that homegrown resistance movement will take all the help it can get. The sisters' resources and numbers are incredibly limited, however, and they will not conduct a regime change, focusing instead on stopping the mass murder and providing aid and evacuation to the victims. As the alliance is strained by disagreements over tactics, ethical boundaries, and even mission objectives can our rag-tag band of do-gooders hang together? Or are they doomed to hang separately? 

I find it interesting that once you get away from the League, the universe that Mr. Gibbs created becomes more complex and interesting by leaps and bounds. The government of the planet of Monrovia isn't controlled by snickering monsters gloating over every death but by human beings. Many of them are tormented by what they've agreed to but keep telling themselves that they're in too deep to stop and there just isn't any other choice. The morass of self-preservation, groupthink, learned helplessness, guilt, and desperation keeps pulling them deeper into a metaphorical bog of awful choices. Which makes the storyline all the more horrifying. Because you don't need especially bad people to commit genocide, just people convinced that they're doing the necessary or right thing and a minority dehumanized enough that they can be targeted. 

Our regular characters are still fairly interesting and they provide a good point of view for the readers. Most of them are people trying to do the right thing even under orders, others such as our crew of volunteers are people willing to put themselves at high risk to do something right. It's here that we have our most interesting conflicts though. As the Sisters steadfastly refuse to engage in high lethality war, sticking to mostly less than lethal munitions and operations to clear camps, detention centers, and what not depending on a technology and mobility advantage against the Monrovian numbers and home-field advantage (This tactic is, by the way, insane.). They face increasing pressure to not only resort to more traditional means, by which I mean bullets, but also to expand their operations to overthrow the government. The Sisters argue that they can't clean up after overthrowing the government and without significant buy-in, by the population, such operations are doomed to long-term failure. Meanwhile, the homegrown resistance keeps pushing and straining for the death blow against their oppressors. Mr. Gibbs actually puts in work to keep the resistance from being too sympathetic by having them do things like engaging in suicide bombing and underhanded tactics like using the sisters as stalking horses to draw out targets (The latter is good.  The former is bad.  Better to use kamikaze drones if you’re gonna do Propaganda of the Deed.). 

The League is mostly a vague background threat here, while the Coalition itself is rendered in shades of gray. With a number of supporting characters pointing out that if Monrovia had resources necessary to the war effort, there would be a Coalition battle group in the void above and Coalition Marines swarming the ground. Combined with Mr. Gibbs's really nice character work and this book is frankly better than the first one. For example, there are a number of atheists on the good guy side and this results in what I felt were adult discussions of faith vs non-faith. Including atheists working to stop the camps pointing out that someone doesn't need faith in any higher powers to see a difference between good and evil or to realize that mass murder is wrong. This makes the book much less about ideological conflict and more about what we do when confronted with something horrible and how we should never consider ourselves immune to becoming monsters.

That said there are minor characters from the League who show up in the book and they stand out by how one-dimensional and lackluster they are compared to everyone else. I also feel like there should have been some long-term consequences for the senior staff to go racing off on a private adventure. So I'm giving Strong and Courageous By Daniel Gibbs a B here. This honestly tells me if you can pry Mr. Gibbs away from the League he's capable of writing a much more interesting story. 

Well, this is our last review of the year folks, so I hope you enjoyed it.  Our patrons are still voting for what review we will return with but right now it looks like In the Court of the Crimson Kings by SM Stirling.  That said if you'd like to weigh in on that, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where the polls for January and February are both up and you can vote on both for just a dollar a month.   Your insane editor and fearless reviewer will return on January 21st but until then, have a happy holiday and Keep Reading! 

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

The Sky People By SM Stirling

 The Sky People

By SM Stirling

I talked about Mr. Stirling's background in my review of the Peshawar Lancers so I won't rechew that soup. The Sky People was published in 2007, by Tor books. The Sky People is a combination of several genres and it's one of the reasons I really enjoy it. In this case, it's a combination of alternate history and planetary romance. I believe I've discussed both these genres before but let us do a quick overview. Alternate History is an examination of changed history, Man in the High Castle being a recent popular example. Now in most works, the rule is to change one thing and see what the effects would be but this can be difficult. For example, if the change I made was thousands of years ago, who can say what those effects would be in full? 

 Planetary Romance is an older genre and is basically a person who goes to an alien world and has adventures there. The how and why of getting that person to an alien world is generally regarded as unimportant, they can fly there on a spaceship, be teleported via experiment, or even summoned like magic. Traditionally the world in question is not a high-tech world but an exotic place with a mixture of technologies in play or is even a high fantasy setting in space. This is, unfortunately, a much-ignored genre these days but maybe someday we can see a comeback. The important part is our main character is from someplace else having adventures in a world strange to both the character and the reader. 

Our main character, in this case, is Marc Vitrac, a Bayou-born Cajun swamp rat who has done good. How good? He's beat out millions of candidates to qualify as a member of the colonial/research team for Venus. As one of the operatives of Jamestown - the US-Commonwealth joint station - in the year of our lord 1980 AD, his job is to gather information on the indigenous life forms of Venus, both past and present, and try to map out the evolution of life on a whole new planet. He also has to manage relationships with the natives, who range from stone age nomads to bronze age city dwellers. He's good at his job too, which is a good thing since life on Venus is driving the paleontologist and biologist of the Jamestown team slowly mad. Let me explain that a bit. 

Since the 1960s when the first Soviet probes landed on Venus (RIP USSR), life on Venus has been shockingly Earth-like (What?). Various literal dinosaur species are ranging across the hot, wet world (Well it is hot…).  On top of that, there are various mammalian species that show a close relationship with earth species, like the Tharg who aren't bovinoid but flat out bovine, or the natives who are homo sapiens as far as anyone can tell (No!  No!  This is not okay! {Merry Christmas buddy!}). The only real difference is that the natives have a slightly better sense of smell but that might be due to the difference in atmospheric pressure increasing their reliance on their nose because they can't depend on their eyes and ears as much. The fossil record doesn't just mirror Earth, it's full of fossils that might as well as be from Earth (Okay, what the fuck is going on here?  Did someone terraform Venus? {Read the book!}). 

These revelations, as well as the 1960 probes showing Venus and Mars, were life-bearing planets have radically changed a lot of things on Earth. Both the USSR and the USA worked together to tamp down any sparks of the Cold War. Because why fight over patches of dirt on one planet when there might be an entire galaxy out there? (Except that the Cold War was never actually about patches of dirt, but rather ideological hegemony. {Which can be expressed in a variety of different ways, in this case by competing to prove which system was superior at reaching out to the solar system and using the knowledge gained in that reaching} ) As a result, the middle east is a sleepy backwater with Jerusalem patrolled by an international peacekeeping force. Vietnam never happened and the Soviets aren't sending troops into Afghanistan (This is a much better world. {Of that, we can agree}). In 1980, NATO is a dead letter with Western Europe split off to form the European Union, which struggles to compete with the two superpowers. The Sino-Soviet Split never happened and the Common Wealth of Nations, the Organization of American States and the US are all slowly merging into a single organization to better share scientific and material resources for the space race. So increasingly the Warsaw Pact+the PRC and the US+OAS+Commonwealth nations competing, peacefully, for influence and turf in a solar system with three life-bearing worlds. 

However, even with vast sums and manpower being funneled into the space race, the actual shipping of people and materials is incredibly expensive (This also undercuts the notion of the Cold War being suspended {I didn’t say it was suspended, it was shifted to space, there’s a difference}). So every person who ends up on Mars and Venus is in the top 1% when it comes to intelligence and physical ability or as close as you come balancing the two. Everyone there is the result of a brutal selection and training process designed to send our best to other worlds. In this regard Marc, while not a scientist, is clearly an educated man who understands more than the regular swamp rat and has been trained to at least be able to serve as a competent lab assistant in research, while also being able to survive for days at a time out in the bush with minimal equipment and his wits. He doesn't even have to worry about the Soviets since their base, called Cosmosgrad is hundreds of miles away, although it would be nice if they would share their information on native life (If we are still in a paradigm of great power competition, why would they? {Because hoarding scientific knowledge has never worked out well?  It certain never works out well when we try to.} Are they not sharing unilaterally? {the scientific knowledge the American-Commonwealth missions find are made public, the implication is that USSR does not do so}). 

When an East Block space ship goes down in a crash in an unexplored part of Venus, it's a catastrophic loss for everyone. Marc, Chris, and Cynthia are selected as part of the crew of the lighter-than-air ship sent out to search for survivors, with Cosmosgrad sending over one of their own, with the wife of one of the ship's crew members, to aid in the search. However, they'll have to deal with the storms of Venus, the wildlife, and native politics to achieve their goal, and worse... What if the surviving crew of the ship no longer wish to be rescued? Or what if they've been suborned by something else? Something old, cold and advanced beyond the wildest dreams of humanity? (You mean like what very clearly terraformed Venus?) Something that may not be happy to see Terrains mucking about on Venusian clay and be willing to do all sorts of things to correct this deviation from the plan? 

So right off the bat, I think Marc is a great character. The only way to make him better would be to make him an outright anthropologist or have him be a Marine instead of an Army Ranger (I feel like this is wish fulfillment on your part.{nonsense I am clearly objective in everyway}). He even tames a Great Wolf, a sort of ramped-up Dire Wolf to serve as his loyal henchdog, and frankly does a better job than any of the Starks. Taming the native wildlife is another staple of Planetary Romance and I was honestly pleased with how well done it was. His Cajun background gives him a different viewpoint than a character from say New York City would have. Honestly, science fiction could stand to have more characters from groups like the Cajuns or the Creole ethnic groups. Now some folks may find the inclusion of Cajun-style French distracting but Stirling keeps it limited to easily figured out phrases and words. Not entire conversations like some writers I know (Oh hi Mark!  Yes, dear readers, in my own writing I will do sections in German, Yiddish, and sometimes even Russian, with contextual translation.  But then again, I am insane.). I will say that if you hate Marc, however, this book is not going to be for you because Marc is the viewpoint character for at least 85% of the book, with most of the rest of the book given over to a character I'm not going to discuss to avoid spoilers. I will say those of you who have read the books should feel free to discuss them. 

I also liked how, despite there being a love triangle (Because of course there is.), everyone manages to be a professional and an adult. I can put up with a certain amount of romantic mucking about but when it turns into self-destructive melodrama it makes my teeth hurt. Stirling clearly feels that people who have gone through a training regime designed to instill self-discipline and control should be able to deal with such things better than your average high schooler and I am incredibly thankful for that. There are of course other romantic entanglements in the story, this is in the tradition of Burroughs after all, but I'm not going to discuss them to avoid spoilers. 

I really like the supporting characters as well.  Stirling can give us an array of interesting characters from other viewpoints and backgrounds. The plot is fairly straightforward, but that's not a bad thing and sets up a fun and engaging adventure of survival in the wilderness against forces unknown and hazardous. Stirling does take his time to set up the main plot but the 100 pages he spends before that aren't wasted, giving us a look at the bronze age city-state that is the most advanced civilization on Venus and that the US-Commonwealth mission has shared things such as medical advancements, farming knowledge and is starting with much debate to share iron working with. He also gives us a full view of the Venusian wildlife which is pretty awesome. My view is that it's a shame there are only two books in this series but according to what Stirling has said on the Spacebattles.com website, that's entirely due to popular demand. The only real issue I have is that at the end of the book there are hints at this massive adventure that Marc had that we'll never get to see due to the book being under 300 pages. I could have lived with another 100 or 120 pages of the book devoted to that. Still, I encourage you to check out this book as the Sky People by SM Stirling gets an A-. 

    I hope you enjoyed this week's review, if you'd like a voice on upcoming reviews or to discuss current one consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where the polls for January and February's reviews are already up!  Next week we return to Daniel Gibs Echoes of War Universe with the second book in his series Strong and Courageous.  Until then, stay safe and keep reading! 

red text are remarks by your editor Dr. Ben Allen

black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders