Embers of War
The Embers of War trilogy, Book 1
Gareth L. Powell
Titan Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Artificial Intelligence, Girl Power, Soldier Stories, Space Stories
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Description
The decimation of the sentient forests of Pelapatarn ended the Archipelago War between the Outward and the Conglomeration factions of humanity - but at an inconceivably steep cost that still reverberates though not just the human Generality, but the Multiplicity of alien races. Nobody who was there, soldier or medic or sapient ship, emerged the same. In the aftermath, the war ship Trouble Dog renounced her commission and joined the House of Reclamation, a neutral organization dedicated to interstellar search and rescue. Her captain, Sal Konstanz, still has nightmares about what she saw as a medic on Pelapatarn, and the officer Alva Clay etched her own memories into her skin as tattoos. All hope that saving lives instead of taking them will give them some measure of healing or atonement - but the stars are a dangerous place, and humans still seem determined to make it even more dangerous. The Trouble Dog's latest mission, reaching a downed civilian space liner on the edge of disputed territory, will test them all ways they never dreamed... and lead to discoveries that no one could ever have imagined. In the midst of it all, both ship and crew will learn the hard way that in order to preserve lives, sometimes it's necessary to remember how to kill.
Review
A sapient war ship rejecting war? It sounded like a great concept, and it is... to a point. Unfortunately, Embers of War never quite dives as deep
into its situations as I might've hoped, with a tendency to repetition as the characters - including the ship - rehash the same internal arguments and dilemmas,
sometimes in the space of the same paragraph. What should be deep, troubled people end up feeling like fairly superficial entities, pushing into caricature more
than once (particularly in the case of the new ship medic Preston, who is so green and incapable of coping with life I expected him to actually piss himself,
or at least wet the bed, at some point in the book. For that matter, the only other males in the cast lean heavily on masculine stereotype, bordering on parody,
making me wonder if a Statement was being made, or if this was a deliberate hamstringing to make the women look stronger, an unnecessary move that only weakened
the characterizations further. But, I digress...) Even the alien mechanic Nod, an almost plantlike entity, seems a little too familiar under the surface, the
sort of detached presence I've read and seen a few too many times to find truly, well, alien. The story itself has some nice images and ideas and action
sequences - I was particularly intrigued by how the organic brains of the war ships were based not just on human genetics but canine as well, to give them loyalty
and tenacity - but once the sheen wears off there's a certain... flatness, for lack of a better word, to those, too.
I liked the Trouble Dog, and it's a passable, fast-reading space opera, but the more I read the less I found myself buying into the story as a whole. By
the end, instead of feeling I'd just consumed a satisfying meal, I was pushing scraps around my mental plate and wondering how to politely decline any offers of
dessert.