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