So Fight I: Echoes of War book III by Daniel Gibbs

 So Fight I: Echoes of War book III

by Daniel Gibbs

“I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air:”

1 Corinthians 9:26 King James Translation

This is the third Daniel Gibbs novel I've reviewed and the sixth one set in this universe. First, a disclaimer, a friend of ours and a patron of the review is the author of three of those books, that being Gary Stevens. That said, everything stated in this review is my honest opinion (And believe me, when it’s just Gibbs, he does not let his affection for the co-author color his judgment.  And I don’t hate myself enough to do so either.). Second, at this point, y'all should be aware of the universe. If this is your first review of mine I'll provide links to the other reviews at the bottom, go read those first. So I'm gonna make this real bare-bones in the context of the setting.

The series covers events of the war between two stellar powers, The Terran Coalition and the League of Sol. The League of Sol is a single-party communist state that demands total loyalty to the state and considers individualism an immoral act at best (At this point, you can all hear me screaming.). They also pursue campaigns to completely erase all religious beliefs and identities from human culture. For some reason, they don't go after other forms of identity, which I've discussed at length (We are dealing with Cold War Strawman Communism here.  The author has a complex.). The Terran Coalition is a capitalist, multi-party democracy where having a religious belief is considered the norm. To the point that atheists (while not discriminated against in law) are looked at with some high degree of distrust and skepticism.

That may be because the Coalition is made of the descendants of religious people who fled Earth to escape the League and second they've been fighting a brutal war against the League who is screaming at the top of their lungs that if they win they will ruthlessly purge religious belief from Coalition society. Frankly, I imagine if modern earth found itself fighting an alien power preaching convert-or-die to their religion that religious belief would become a lot less popular here (You’re probably right, but let’s not pretend that Gibbs thought about it in those terms.).

For thirty years the Coalition has fought completely in their home territory, just barely managing at times to keep their core worlds free from combat. This is a losing game because a purely defensive military campaign will eventually lose; but the League of Sol is not only far enough away to render their Core Worlds more or less untouchable, it's fleet power dwarfs the Coalition. The Coalition's biggest advantages are that they have a technological edge and they can devote more of their absolute military strength to the war.  The League has to guard many borders and can only devote a certain percentage of that fleet to smashing the Coalition (Honestly, this seems like something of a contrivance.  Yes, they cannot devote their full military strength to it, but the size discrepancy speaks to a massive industrial advantage that they should be able to leverage in a war that lasts for thirty years.  Naval strategy is build strategy, after all.  Especially because the technological edge is unlikely to last, again, without contrivance. {I will point out that the Coalition is in a completely different arm of the galaxy so they are at the end of a long logistic chain.  But raises questions to me of why try to conquer the Coalition now?  Surely they can wait until the League of Sol has a better logistical base to carry out the campaign from…} As I said, it’s a contrivance.  The League controls the engagement ultimately.).

This has changed in part because of the entrance of the Saurian Empire, an alien state with a long and complicated history with the Terran Coalition, but that has no desire to see the Coalition replaced by the League. Also aiding in the turn of the tide is the Lion of Judah, the Terran Coalitions first true battleship in a long time, made possible by the creation of an antimatter reactor, while everyone else is running on fusion (Ah!  There’s the contrivance! {Eh, the antimatter reactor is new, for 29 years the Coalition was using fusion tech} That’s part of why it’s a contrivance.  A state like the League is massively bigger and can throw resources at R&D in a way the coalition cannot, and they have the industrial capacity to make antimatter in a way that the Coalition comparatively lacks.  So how does the Coalition have that tech advantage or a tech advantage in general?{I’m assuming the League is educationally kneecapped.  Maybe they went all-in on Lysenkoism?  Or a more modern example, the USSR actually fell behind on computer technology because the backers of it lost a political factional fight}). The Lion of Judah is the ship of our main protagonist Col David Cohen. Because for some ungodly reason the Coalition uses Army ranks for everything.

Now I'm going to stop for a minute to talk about the Saurians because I find them fascinating. First of all, it would have been easy to turn them into third-rate Klingons given their culture’s militarist tendencies but Mr. Gibbs avoids that. The Saurians are just human enough that we can sympathize with them but their outlook remains alien enough that they don't feel like humans dressed in funny costumes. They are more predatory and aggressive than we are but not to the point of being irrational or unable to work in a team. Mr. Gibbs also does a good job in communicating that the Saurians have a divided opinion on the alliance based on their own history with the Coalition, which isn't free of conflict. Much of this is done through the Saurian character serving as the XO on the Lion of Judah, a character with a rather sly sense of humor that I enjoyed. My only real problem is that the Saurians are a monoculture with a single religion revolving around a semi-divine figure they call the Prophet who comes across as an alien blend of Jesus and Mohammad. It's an interesting culture but I would honestly rather see aliens have more than one culture per species.

The League of Sol has almost been pushed out of the galactic arm that the Coalition and the Empire call home. Worse for them, Coalition Intelligence has determined the location of the massive logistical base that they used to springboard their fleets there in the first place. So now the Empire and the Coalition are massing for an attack on the single largest structure that humanity has ever put into space. A massive space station built between two arms of the galaxy meant to serve as a fleet base and logistical hub (See what I mean about industrial capacity?). Just the construction of such a thing is an incredible accomplishment and now the Empire and Coalition have to figure out a way to take it. Because if they want to take the war to the League to ensure that the League never returns, they need that space station.

The League isn't going down without a fight however, not only have they concentrated their forces to defend the station but they've brought new weapons to the party to try and cut down on the Coalitions’ tech edge and bloody the snouts of the Saurians. Additionally, a large enough victory here may actually allow the League to go back on the offensive. The attacking fleet is the most powerful offensive force that the Coalition and the Empire can wrangle up and if it is destroyed then the League can retake the ground that's been lost. So in a very real sense, this battle is for all the marbles. At stake is the ability to project power and whoever loses will be unable to operate offensively. On top of that, losing will open up League space to attack by the Allies. Something that could destroy their will to continue what has been largely an expensive but (for the state) a safe war of conquest.

As the campaign saws back and forth our hero, David Cohen, finds himself in command of the fleet. With the burden of fleet command and a ticking clock forcing him to commit the final attack before victory becomes impossible, Cohen finds himself in a moral dilemma. As the route to victory requires he does things that while they're not war crimes are still morally dubious (Hot take: This is why the concept of war crimes exists. In a fight for survival, there’s your line.  The war crime line.  Anything not past it?  If you can’t do it, why the fuck are you in command in the first place?  Trying to minimize death is one thing, but once the shooting starts… everything you do is morally dubious.). He also has to ask others to bend their own rules and do things that are not entirely clean or forthright. This leaves David asking himself how many moral compromises can he make before he becomes what he's been fighting this whole time. How far is too far?

There's also the difficult question of what do you do when people go too far? For that matter, what is too far? Because the pointed truth here is that the allies are fighting for their very existence. The cost of defeat here means the utter annihilation of their way of life and the deaths of hundreds of millions as their culture is forcibly changed through gunpoint and reeducation camps. However, David asks the very pointed question of what would be the point if in defeating the enemy they become just like him? Which is a fair question to ask, if to achieve victory you compromise everything you believe in and engage in actions that tear down and mock your stated ideals, was it actually victory? Or did you just survive and in the process lost everything you were fighting for.

The book also takes the time to look at the cost of victory, as the Duke of Wellington is believed to have said “Next to a lost battle, nothing is so sad as a battle that has been won.” Because even in victory, good people die or are crippled or hurt. The book does a very good job of reminding us that even in victory and even if fought for the best of reasons, war means death, destruction, and waste. Military glory is cold comfort to men and women who are dying far from family and home and it is often no comfort to their friends and family at home. It's not many stories that take the time to look at the fact that victory is often as painful for a lot of people as defeat.

The book does have its weak points and as usual for Mr.Gibbs, they revolve around his villains. I'm left at the end of the book asking why anyone shows our big bad, the League Admiral in charge of the war on the alliance, any loyalty? Because while he is a talented tactician and strategist, he's awful at managing his human relations. To be blunt that's a big part of leadership, but every time we see him he's sneering at everyone around them. Additionally, he doesn't treat anyone with anything close to a level of respect, he puts down his subordinates in public which undermines them in front of their subordinates. This isn't good for a military unit. He seems to hold bottomless contempt for everyone and everything to the point that reading the chapters in his point of view is frankly annoying. Why not let him be good at managing the officers around him and give him some charisma? At least then I could buy that he's a threat to the Committee that runs the League. (Because, Frigid, Gibbs is incapable of doing so on an ideological level.)

We do learn a little bit more about the League, it seems to be mostly run by a committee that calls itself the Social and Public Safety Committee, which echoes one of the many governments of Revolutionary France. Which ironically were inspired by the American Revolution and the various committees that revolutionaries set up to take over royalist government functions (Committees of Public Safety are also not how communists do things, historically.{they pretty much were abandoned after the French Revolution if memory serves me, I don’t think even the 1848 revolutionaries used them}Not even the Paris Commune did.). Modeling the League of Sol on Revolutionary France isn't a bad idea, as it was a government that sought to remake its society but have to point out that this puts us on the well-trod and deeply rutted ground in regards to science fiction modeling historical regimes. The committee is written mostly as a group of little gray men in little gray suits meddling in things they aren't suited for which honestly... You've seen it before and frankly, you've likely seen it done better.

Mr. Gibbs does write his protagonists very well, he gives us deeply conflicted people who are trying to do something very difficult and do it without selling their souls. At the same time, he forces those protagonists to make compromises to win, compromises which enact very real costs and aren't just waved away. There are consequences for them and we're not just told that our main characters can do no wrong. On the flip side of that, having David constantly having the same moral conflict as to whether the Almighty is really listening to his prayers is starting to drag on. It's fairly true to life, agreed, but in a written story, there's a point where you resolve the conflict before the readers get tired of it. That said, if Mr. Gibbs could do the same depth and nuance for his villains then his work would be incredibly good. As it stands, his work is better than the average military science fiction, for example, I would put it above David Weber's current work fairly easily. If nothing else, it is refreshing to see protagonists who aren't rock-sure of their own righteousness. So Fight I by Daniel Gibbs gets a C+

        Well, next is the start of our annual month of Philip K Dick, where I look at the vast amount of work Mr. Dick has done that has been adapted by Hollywood and compare those adaptations. Next week as selected by our ever wise patrons is Second Variety followed by the film adaptation screamers! While the Febuary Poll is closing, the March poll will be up soon. If you'd like to vote for March's selection for as little as a dollar a month join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Hope to see you there! Reviews on other books in this universe:

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2020/05/echoes-of-war-fight-good-fight-by.html

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2020/08/breach-of-peace-by-daniel-gibbs-and.html

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2020/09/breach-of-faith-book-ii-by-daniel-gibbs.html

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2021/03/breach-of-duty-by-daniel-gibbs-and-gary.html

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2021/12/echoes-of-war-strong-and-courageous-by.html

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

In the Court of the Crimson Kings By SM Stirling

In the Court of the Crimson Kings

By SM Stirling

“Tollamune! Tollamune! Tollamune!” a voice cried “The King Beneath the Mountain comes! Let all align their behavior with his will! Let none harbor thoughts of disloyalty to the Crimson King! Sh'u Maz! He who maintains the harmony of the Real World comes! Show Deference!” page 330

Welcome back, readers! I hope everyone had a great holiday and a happy New Year. Now I would say something about how I hope this year will go but after the last two years, I'm keeping my trap shut. That said, thank you for returning and if this is your first review, welcome and I hope you enjoy it! (Attention Bajoran Workers Hello dear readers.  I’m your resident tyrannical authoritarian gay communist editor.  I too will not tempt fate by speaking of the new year, but hope that you are all well, in this instant, while you read.)

In the Court of the Crimson Kings is the sequel to the novel The Sky People, which we reviewed in December. To recap the setting, the novels are both alternative history and planetary romance (I discussed both genres in the last review so I encourage you to go take a look). In this setting, the point of divergence from our timeline is that a very advanced alien species showed up to our solar system and decided to turn Venus and Mars into life-bearing worlds. Not only did they terraform the two worlds but they directly seeded both planets with life from Earth. This included human beings, or to be more specific for my biologist editor and other readers, anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens human beings. With at least one group having been taken so recently that their language could be traced to the Indo-European language family.

These revelations have given a new life to the space program, which had faced serious questioning in the 1980s, the time of the last novel. Because it was very obvious that Venus and Mars were life-bearing worlds, history played out a bit differently here. The Cold War, instead of being a vicious twilight struggle carried out by the USSR and the USA over ideological and imperial ambitions, became a more muted struggle carried out by scientific advancement and achievement in space (This is a much better timeline.{The equal rights amendment passed in this timeline too.}). In this history, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the coups in Argentina, Iran, and the revolutions and civil wars across the third world never happened. With an entire solar system before them, the US and the USSR instead suppressed conflict on Earth. Here the Middle East is a sleepy backwater, imported Martian technology made it insanely easy to create bio-fuels that burned cleaner and longer. The European continental powers created a 3rd power block to create their own space program, while the Warsaw Pact and Asian communist powers united into the Eastbloc for their own efforts (Yaaasss). Meanwhile, the US and the UK have practically united the Commonwealth and Organization of American States (Presumably Cuba is aligned with the EastBloc?{As far as I can tell… No} WTF), as well as bringing in allies like Japan to operate a common space program. Here NASA has a budget measured in the billions and the Pentagon has very little to do.

Now on Venus, civilization is a new thing, with humanity still struggling to advance past the bronze age due to dealing with an extremely active ecosystem inhabited by actual factual dinosaurs (I swear this makes my brain melt…{Stirling didn’t want to sit down and work out a new evolutionary tree, he wanted to write freakin Dinosaurs on freakin Venus, I sympathize with him}). On Mars, however, civilization is ancient and advanced. In some ways more advanced than ours, especially in biological sciences. They are, however, held back by the lack of high energy fuels such as fossil or fissionable fuels (Huh?  That doesn’t make any sense.  Fossil fuels I get, but Mars is gonna have plenty of Uranium and Thorium.{A super-advanced alien species dropped by, terraformed at least two planets, and seeded them with life, for all we know removing the uranium and Thorium was part of the experiment} That still doesn’t make any sense.  I’ll just be over here, Cronkenberging myself.). Another thing holding them back is the fact that their planet is literally dying, while even a terraformed Mars is a harsh place compared to Earth, it's getting worse. Every year there's just a little less water and the Deep Beyond, the bare near lifeless desert that every Martian dreads, gets a little bigger (This also makes no sense.  Unless it is a result of Mars having a shitty electromagnetic field and slowly having its atmosphere blasted off by the solar wind, so it continually loses water vapor into space with the rest of the atmosphere that is imperfectly replaced by some sort of terraforming tech still in place?{The story doesn’t say, only that water is growing rarer and the Deep Beyond is advancing}). It's not something that is going to kill Martian life anytime soon but by the best estimates, in 10,000 years there won't be enough resources to support urban civilization. In 20000 years it'll be impossible for complex life to survive. The Martian response to this is fairly philosophical, although to be fair, I don't think even us Terrans would be given to do much about a problem that was 10,000 years out at best. I mean we keep kicking the can down the road for problems that are only decades or years away (Indeed.  We needed to be swarm-building nuclear plants 20 years ago to avoid the catastrophe.  Now it’s geoengineering and swarm building nuclear power plants…).

However, it's not the future of Mars that interests our protagonist Jeremy Wainman but its past. Once, Mars was united in a single world empire led by the Tollamune Emperors, who started as the rulers of Olympus Mons and at their height commanded a world. However, the empire fell and much was lost in the fall. Jeremy however believes he's found one of the lost cities, the city of Rema Dza, out in the desert near the edge of the Deep Beyond. Alongside veteran Sally Yamashita, he's on a quest to find what had been an important city when the Crimson Kings ruled the entire world. They can't do it alone however and given the lack of Terran numbers on Mars, they have to turn to the locals for the numbers to make this expedition out into the dangerous Martian wilderness. This is where our Martian protagonist Teyud za-Zhaly, a Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence and a member of the Thoughtful Grace Caste. Let me go a little deeper on that.

The Martians, due to their superior biological technology, engineered themselves into genetic castes; for example, the government of Olympus Mons is made up of people from administrative Castes. People who have been genetically engineered and trained for generations to perform civil service.  Unfortunately, genetic engineering only gets you so far and they are still prone to intrigue and corruption. The Thoughtful Grace caste was bred to be the elite military arm of the Crimson Kings, that said trained and highly fit Terran Humans can keep up with them due to being from a planet with 3 times the gravity of Mars but they're still no one you would want to get into a fight with. Frankly having Teyud along is a good thing for Jeremy and company because where they're going they're going to have to face off against a wide array of horrors as life out in the Martian wilderness is a savage unrelenting struggle for survival and Terrans are a convenient source of protein. Especially slow unobservant ones.

Neither Jeremy nor Sally can afford to be slow or unobservant, even with a super-soldier like Teyud looking out for them because the dangers of the wilderness are only the beginning. The city of Rema Dza holds its own dangers and will not surrender them willingly. As if that wasn't enough of a problem, what they find there may have implications that will pull them into the most dangerous levels of politics on Mars, where death by parasite infestation while on display is all too possible (That’s impressive…). Their enemies have many resources to bring to bear: wild tribes, pirates on great rolling landships, commandos riding jet-sized killer hawks, and more. Against this Jeremy, Sally and Teyud will have to use wit, sword, and pistol to escape their enemies; while figuring out just what it is they've discovered and deal with secrets that could bring them all down. Thankfully their enemies are not united and are often as at odds with each other as they are with our heroes. Our heroes are also not without allies of their own. Allies that are more powerful than they can guess as they're playing a game with much higher stakes than anyone can realize.

I'm going to be honest with you readers. I love this book. Jeremy is a great protagonist, clever without being overbearing, active, and observant, but also flawed enough to lose. He's an anthropologist and an archeologist. This means he's more patient than I'll ever be and a greater fan of pottery shards. I will state that sadly Jeremy doesn't have any military experience so like Marc we were this close to greatness! This is close to the combat anthropologist protagonist that we all so desperately need but I'm sure that will come in its own time (Frigid really just wants someone to put him in a novel.  He’s vain like that.{We all have our ways of trying to get representation.  I call for more college-educated veteran characters who aren’t right-wing, you write massive fan fictions that always have at least one Jewish Gay Communist in the cast.} They’re not always Jews.  My Psi Corps fanfic for instance.  I just Do Not Write Straight Protagonists.). Meanwhile, Teyud is alien enough that reading the chapters from her viewpoint is exciting in and of itself but she is human enough that you can empathize with her and she remains sympathetic. Teyud simply doesn't think like a 21st century American but is flexible enough to understand the viewpoint of one like Jeremy. Frankly, she is a joy to read. Also, Mr. Stirling's use of Martian word choices to show the differences in languages and thought processes is wonderful. It's not too intrusive and flows well in the narrative.

I'll admit my love of this book is bolstered by my love of the older Martian novels, the hidden references to Barsoom and other martian books tickled me without distracting from the plot. At the same time, Mr. Stirling is perfectly willing to show his own vision of Mars, without being shackled by the older novels. Which is exactly what he should do, as much as Princess of Mars holds a place in my affection. I would rather people show me their own ideas and visions rather than trying to hammer Barsoom into a mold it's not meant to fit into. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with fanfiction but in the end, I tend to want to see writers show me their ideas and characters rather than their skill at playing with someone else's toys. Mr. Striling does that here. While showing all due respect to the stories of yesterday and in doing so gives us a grand vision of what might have been.

If you want to see what a modern planetary romance can look like or if you like a good science fiction adventure story, this is your book. I'm giving In the Court of the Crimson Kings by SM Stirling an A. Honestly, I think this book is one of his best.

I hope you enjoyed this review, next week we're looking at book III of Daniel Gibbs Echoes of War series, So Fight I. After that, we're heading into a month of Philip K Dick, where I look at the works of Philip K Dick and how they have been adapted by Hollywood and discuss their influence. Those works along with this review and the next book were all chosen by the vote of our ever-wise Patrons. If you'd like a vote, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads the Febuary poll is still open and our March poll will be going up soon! A dollar a month gives you a vote!

*A quick note, I've run into some argument over whether or not Stirlings Mars has uranium and oil or not. Since it's based on the dialogue of a character in the book, who is a Martian administrator and not a scientist, it's entirely possible that Stirlings Mars has fissionable material and the character is flat out wrong or their civilization just hasn't really found any.

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-sky-people-by-sm-stirling.html review of the last book in the series

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

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