Skip to main content

Friendly Fire (SF) - Gavin Smith ****

Way back in the hoary old days of pulp science fiction, militaristic stories were common, culminating in the truly unpleasant Starship Troopers (1959). From the second half of the 60s, though, when I first got seriously into SF, far more thoughtful and interesting books began to dominate. The military SF space operas never went away, but were relegated to the backwaters. Space opera as a sub-genre became far more sophisticated with Iain M. Banks' superb Culture series. 

However, first person shooter video games such as Doom, plus movies such as Star Wars plus its successors, and the rise of superhero films, brought the militaristic aspect front and centre to the cinema and now it's relatively common again to find novels that glorify big guns and combat. With The Bastard Legion, Gavin Smith showed how to do it with style, combining a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style subversion of the genre, featuring one woman in charge of 6,000 enslaved hard criminals, with a superb example of 'if you're going to do it, go large.'

In this sequel we get some interesting development of a number of characters who appeared in the first book (I would recommend reading that before this). Even Miska Corbin, the woman who stole the prison ship, has some development of personality in that she now seems to accept that she is a psychopath. As before, the basic premise of training up criminals as mercenaries under the duress that they are fitted with collars that will blow their heads off at a thought from Miska is genuinely effective, though the morality of the whole enterprise remains troubling. The fact that Miska is effectively running a black ops unit for a government agency is, I suspect, meant to make her indulgence in mass murder and slavery acceptable, but it really doesn't.

That all sounds a bit negative, but it is without doubt a rip-roaring read. Smith makes almost the entire second half of the book a single continuous piece of action, where it's very difficult to put the the book down because the writing has immense inertia - it just carries the reader along on an explosive shockwave. Apart from the character development, there is also the added promise of a big picture behind the storyline. Although the book does come to a successful end, some major unknowns are introduced, clearly lining up the next title in the series. Thankfully, though, this doesn't involve the disconcerting sudden stop in the narrative that makes some series books infuriating to read. 

My only technical issue was that it did sometimes feel as if it had been written a little too quickly. Several times there were word repetitions that felt like a first draft - and though the main task towards the end of the book gets full coverage, there is a secondary task where it feels as if Smith hadn't the time to write it, so let what amounted to a deus ex machina sort things out.

Although there's always a pleasure in revisiting familiar characters, I wasn't quite as struck by this book as the first in the series - I think because that dramatic main premise is no longer a novelty - but it's a worthy successor and I look forward to reading the next one.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...