Frigid reads: book review thread

[Cynical Cat]

Pratchett had real goblins and he happily subverted the "goblins are monsters" trope in "Snuff".

But he's Terry Pratchett, and even while declining from Alzheimer's he was still more imaginative than probably 80% of the world's published writers. If not 90%. 95%. Let's compromise and say 98%.

You want goblins we got your goblins here. The magi is going to read The Judging Eye and that has Sranc. Muhahaha!

[frigidmagi]

Master Sergeant by Mel Odom

So I was at the Phoenix Comic Con at the end of May (Great time if you can get there folks, I really do recommend it!) when I bought way more books then was good for me. You'll be seeing a number of these books popping up from well... Now, to November likely. Now I'll admit that this isn't the first book I picked up at Con that I finished, that honor would actually go to the Usagi Yojimbo graphic novels that I picked up. They were pretty awesome. I decided to read this one first out of the actually printed word novels because... I really like Mel Odom's earlier work.

Let me talk about Mr. Odom a bit, born in California and having lived most of his live in my own Oklahoma where he teaches college courses in writing. Mr. Odom has written about 150 novels, most of them tie in books (Preying for Keeps for example was a pretty decent Shadowrun book) which run the gauntlet from Sabrina the Teen Age Witch novels to Mack Bolan novels. He sold his first book in 1988 (when I would have been all of 7 years old). Basically this guy has been writing books almost as long as I've been capable of reading. My introduction to him was the 2001 book “The Rover” which to date I believe is his best work. It's an original fantasy work with the main character of a libertarian hobbit * COUGH* I mean huh... Halfing of course! Who gets mistaken for a great warrior and pressed ganged into a pirate crew and manages to have thrilling adventures by virtue of being one of the few people on his world who can read a single language, let alone dozens of languages. I'm not gonna lie I found The Rover pretty awesome along with it's sequels... Which I do recommend. It was on the strength of that series that I picked up Master Sergeant, I was expecting something original, quirky and engaging...

I didn't get it.

I instead got Starship Troopers (the movie), Halo, and a dozen other bits thrown into a blender and reduced to a generic feeling consistent honestly bland mil-sci fi story. We have Frank Sage, the half Argentinian/something else to make him ethnically ambiguous Master Sergeant and God Of Death who for the sin of being awesome has spent the last 6 years training soldiers to fight the Phrenorians (I'll get to them). Master Sergeant Sage doesn't want to be trainer of course, he wants to be the front lines killing aliens. Because that's what all these guys want. He finally gets transferred out of his training billet and send to... Makaum a hot, humid jungle death world full of rapidly changing plant, bug and reptile life that is scheming and fighting for the chance to kill humans. Because that's what all these worlds are like. Seriously it's always desert death worlds or jungle death worlds. I mean Warhammer 40k and the Starfist series have a greater range of planets then half of these books/movies/comics, what is with that? The planet's “government” made up of human colonists who survived a crash landing and lived a primitive lifestyle until recontact, is neutral in the war between humanity and the Phrenorians, so the aliens have a presence on the planet to. As do a legion of corrupt, scheming mega corps that would have the guys from Shadowrun and Cyberpunk calling them to dial it down. I mean if nothing else if your corporate security force has a rep for killing government soldiers in bars... It's time to ask some questions. Like if we're locked in a war of survival against alien bug monsters who can build starships... Why are we letting corporations fuck about doing whatever they want?

The General in charge of the planet doesn't want to rock the boat... Of course. And say it with me, doesn't understand or appreciate the awesome talents and morality of our hero Master Sergeant Sage. Our hero must of course whip his troops into shape, confront monstrous corporate security goons, win over the natives and carry out attacks on drug labs hidden in the dangerous scary jungle while not dying and not getting discharged. Lucky for him the guy in charge of the base a rather easy going Colonel honestly is willing to let him do... Pretty much whatever he wants and cover for him later. I mean there's a Major with a Senator daddy who is supposed to be a threat... But frankly you could have cut the character entirely from the novel without impacting the story in any meaningful way. The troops kinda of resent him for being a hard ass and making them train (which is honestly realistic, if you've settled into a routine and then some new jackass comes in and upsets everything by making you do even more work... You're not going to like him) but a small crew of NCOs and Officers (because fuck those junior enlisted guys amirite?) rally to his side to be bad-ass in the jungle waging a War on Drugs.

I'm going to be blunt. Sage is fucking boring. We've seen him before. The guy who father was in army, and his grandfather was likely in the army, who lives and breaths the army and fighting the war. Who has no friends or relationships outside of the army. No interests or hobbies outside of the army. The Army and being the living model of a cutout soldier is all Frank Sage has. Which is boring. Look, I didn't meet a single dude like that in the 4 years I served, you know why? Because such a person would burn out and end up in jail or a mental institution. Even the most Hard Charging, High Speed, Low Drag Moto Motherfucker had interests outside of the military, because that's how you stay sane. Otherwise you lose your edge and burn out.

Meanwhile the Phrenorians who are scropin like lurk in the background. Sometimes supporting Master Sergeant Sage because he's totally awesome and will create chaos that we being the true master race will take advantage of or mostly just not doing much past their actually kinda of cool intro. Zho GhiCemid is honestly a more interesting character then Sage, mainly due to his savagery. We meet him when he's molting and to hurry along the process? Dude literally rips off his own skin. The Phrenorians start off interesting but that changes as we learn more about them. They see themselves as super predators with a right to control the galaxy, they have an eugenics style program to breed stronger and better Phrenorians and birth defects and such are not tolerated. You can advance up the hierarchy by killing your superiors in certain situations and strength is honored and weakness is something to prey on. They are bug like in a lot of ways, but they don't depend on over whelming numbers, with the average Phrenorian being stronger and faster then the average human, in addition to have a stinger tail that will of course kill you dead. They are also just as smart and advanced as we are. So at least Mr. Odom manages to avoid the bug cliches. That said he trips right in other ones. I mean oh look Nazi Aliens intend on conquering the galaxy because it's their right. We have never seen that before have we?

That said, there is next to nothing that is new or interesting in this book. We've all seen the characters in here a dozen times before, we've seen the setting, the bad guys, the plot... Yeah. None of this is badly written mind you. Mr. Odom turns in a workmen like job of a novel that is nothing to be embarrassed about. The prose is solid, the world building consistent if at times questionable, the characterization okay... But... I saw every plot twist coming, knew how the conversations were going to end and what roles each character was going to play by the time of their second appearance. From a first time writer or someone still a bit new and raw like say Myke Cole I would accept that. Mel Odom isn't just that guy, he's a practiced veteran and worse, he's a veteran I know can do better. So I find myself disappointed. I expected more then something that could be a Halo DLC or short story in a book about the Imperial Guard. In a lot of ways this book feels like Odom just hitting points he believes his audience expects. Bar Brawl, check. Attack in market place, check. Jungle ambush, check. Scheming officers, check. So on and so forth.

Additionally Mel Odom doesn't really understand the military. That's nothing to be ashamed of, there is no reason for a man who never served to really get it. Nor is it a requirement to write popular or even good military science fiction, or more importantly good science fiction. Let me stress this, you don't have to grasp the modern military or it's cultures to do either there. But Mr. Odom relentlessly models his Terran Army on the United States Army. Now if you have to have an army, the US Army is certainly a good one to have for all it's flaws (insert snobbish Marine comment here). If you are going to model your fiction military on the US, get a feel for the culture of service, how it works how it's members think and feel. If someone who never served wanted to get a feel for the Marines for example, I would point them towards works like Terminal Lance and other things written by men and women who served. Because some things are timeless. I fully believe that in the misty past there were Roman junior enlisted bitching about how clueless and stupid their officers were and how their senior NCOs were inhuman assholes. I also believed that those same senior NCOs were constantly aggravated by their enlisted men's ability to come up with new and interesting ways to do stupid shit and create giant fuck ups. I also believe those officers were as clueless as I believed mine were. Now I think a United World Military would feel much differently then a US institution. That said this is science fiction we don't have to be slaves to reality here but we should try to make the work feel as real and alive as possible. To put it bluntly I didn't feel that Mr. Odom put the work in to make a believable military unit. Of course when you get to it there were only about 4 and ½ characters actually in the unit anyways as Odom didn't like writing about anyone who wasn't at least a Sgt. Seriously the Terran Army feels overstuffed with officers and NCOs. With Pvts and PFCs and such only mentioned in passing and Cpls only shown doing the work that no one else will do (well there's some realism at least). This leaves the military feeling like something manufactured by Hollywood who has at best a really mixed record when it comes to displaying what the military is like. This could have been done a lot better. I mean I took Myke Cole to town over Shadow Ops Control Point and he deserved it, but at least he convinced he knew what military life was like.

Despite it's predictability and flaws the book is well written. Which is what saves it from being awful. But also that well written prose serves to highlight just how mundane and generic this story is. I'm not saying every fantasy and science fiction has to be original, but they all have to be interesting and this isn't.

Master Sergeant by Mel Odom rates and gets a flat C. Hopefully Mr. Odom lives up to his talent in the next book I pick up.

So next up I take on a book that I know will be awesome and leave me in need of a hug and some booze. My good friend Julian has patiently awaited this day, I'm currently reading and will be soon reviewing R. Scott Bakker's The Judging Eye. After that I finally get to one of Alamo's recommendations, I'd like to thank him for his patience as well. That book will be George Washington's Military Genius by Dave R Palmer.

[Josh]

I've never forgiven Odom for uberwanking Argent. Nigel Findley presented Argent as the pro's pro, a guy who survived because as long as he did because he was thoughtful in a useful fashion, professional, and logical. As a friend of mine put it after Odom took over, it almost felt like "Why doesn't he just take his team to bust in and blow away Lofwyr and take over S-K?"

Findley was the best of the old Shadowrun authors. My current character is based on his take on Lone Star from Lone Wolf.

[frigidmagi]

The Judging Eye by Scott Bakker

This book was a recommendation to me by a very good friend. I had read the preceding series, the Prince of Nothing books on his recommendation and found them to be frankly... Disturbing masterworks. Bakker started with the idea of the 1st Crusade set in a world that is somewhat like our own but at the same time completely and utterly different. The events of that trilogy I will leave be other then to tell you that before reading this review you owe to yourself to pick up at least The Darkness that Comes Before and give it a read. If you like that book you'll like the rest.

Let me talk about Scott Bakker, who may be one of the best writers in fantasy today. I certainly believe him to be one of the more under appreciated writers which is saying something because fantasy and science fiction teem and seethe with under appreciated writers. Born and educated in Canada, he has degrees (a bachelors and Masters) in literature and theory and criticism from the University of Western Ontario. He also entered but never finished a PhD program for philosophy in Vanderbilt University. I was unable to find the reason he left, but I do wonder if a story I heard that several of his professors liked to harass him for writing children books was part of it. There is no proof of that, but it does point to rather infantile view some people have of fantasy and science fiction. If someone tells you that fantasy books are just for children or to live out teenage power fantasies, do me a favor and hand them Prince of Nothing and take a video of their faces as they read. Then send it to me because I will treasure it.

His education shows in his works, these books are dense and at times deep works who are at times preoccupied with ideas of the self, fate and humanity. They are balanced out and kept from becoming pretentious by the inclusion of harsh, unforgiving violence and a stark embracing of various hard truths of life especially for the underclass in a world that lacks the empathy and sympathy of the 21st century. In a world where famine still stalks even the wealthiest of men, such empathy is a luxury not even emperors can afford after all. At the risk of making a political statement I will state this, make no mistakes the empathy that the first world displays in it's constant quest to create a more fair and just world for all of it's citizen is a luxury. One afforded to us by the infrastructure and actions of our forefathers, who if nothing else built a world where famine and plague are unknown to their children in the 1st world. I do not say that is a bad thing, or that because it is a luxury that we shouldn't continue in that quest. Only that we should recognize that it is our wealth and security that affords us the ability to do so. But back to the review.

Little back story on this world, long ago when the best of men wore skins and worked in flint and the rest couldn't do that much, an alien ship crashed on our world. It was full of monsters. The book has a different name for them, but bluntly they're monsters in every sense of the word. These were creatures who had damned themselves and had objective proof that hell was a real place that you could end up in. They had one goal, stay out of hell at all cost. Their plan? To slam shut the gates of hell and heaven alike by killing enough of the sapient creatures of the world that there simply wouldn't be enough souls to keep the gates open. That's plan A guys, which frankly tells me they earned their damnation the old fashion way. They would opposed by the non-men, a long lived prehuman race that had already achieved a level of civilization sufficient enough to opposed them. They warred for eons until the monsters came up a simple plan. They would trick the non-men into destroying themselves and inherent the world. They came to the non-men offering peace and tricked them into asking for a gift. A gift of immortality. A gift that would later come to be called the plague of wombs, suffice to say that at the end, the non-men were a species of immortals without sisters, daughters, mothers or wives. Every female member of the species died. The non-men didn't take this lying down. They hunted down and killed everyone of the monsters expect for two who fled back to their ship and went into stasis.

The non-men then went insane as a species due to their brains being built to retain the memories of a mortal existence not being wired to deal with immortality. The only memories they could retain were usually the most traumatic and awful ones. The non-men civilization already on it's last legs would be pulled down by men. Who built their own civilization, with the mightiest being in the north where they had the most contact with the non-men. Some men developed sorcery, an ability to reshape the universe with your will, in exchange for damning yourself. A group of wicked sorcerers found the alien ship and woke up the monsters. They learned they didn't have to be damned... All they would have to kill 99.99% of sapient live and enslave the rest. They accepted and created the Consult. They then crafted the most terrifying weapon, Mog-Pharau, the No-God. It's very existence prevents the birth of new life, it is so awful and terrifying that every living person knows where it is instinctively. It dominates and controls the creatures of torment and war that the monsters bred. For the Tolkien fans, this is Morgoth unlessened by his corruption with the gloves off. It was slain by the no-men and men working together but only after the majority of mankind had been slain and the greatest civilizations of the time, the shining north was ground into powder. 2000 years later the Prince of Nothing takes place. 20 years after that the Judging Eye takes place.

Kellhus has conquered most of the known world and united it into a single empire for one reason. To assemble and supply the largest army in history that he will lead into uncharted wilderness to find the crashed ship of the Consult and kill them all before they can recreate the No-God and doom us all. To give you an idea, imagine someone at the time of the 1st Crusade united the Christian and Muslim world and assembled an army bigger then even the ones the Romans and the Persians could field and marched that army into western Siberia. Oh and western Siberia is full of man eating tool using monsters.

The revolves around four characters.

Drusus Achamian, the sorcerer who taught the current God-Emperor Kellhus of man sorcery and more... And lost his wife to him. Drusus has spent the last 20 years holed up in a tower, abandoning his school and civilization to peer into the dreams that he and the other Mandate Sorcerers suffer every night reliving the first war against the No-God. He has gone deeper and further then any Mandate schoolmen before him, beginning to see not the fall of the north every night but bits and pieces of the life of the founder of his school. This leads him on a quest to discover the origins of Kellhus by hiring the most vicious band of adventurers he can find. Men who make their living by selling Sranc (more on them later) scalps. They will venture beyond the northern limit of the world men into the ruins left behind by the No-God to find the Dunyain, the sect of rationalist monks that bred and raised Kellhus. I'm incredibly sympathetic to Drusus and frustrated with him just like I was in the Prince of Nothing. He's intelligent, brave and at times cunning but is weak against temptation and has problems controlling himself. I nicknamed the last series Drusus Achamian is not allowed nice things and it seems to be holding true here. That said... Damn it Achamian if your will were equal to your intelligence, you would be the one ruling the world.

Esmenet, former whore and lover of Drusus Achmian. Esmenet is a living indictment against her society. Born as a lowly street whore, she was trod upon, ignored and reviled for being a whore. A role that society forced her into. It is one thing to disapprove of prostitution or even prostitutes, it is another entirely She wasn't taught to read until nearly 30 and afterwards she became one of the most read and educated women in society. Kellhus seduced her in cold blood because he believed that children from a mother of her intelligence and his inherited abilities (he's the product of a 2000 year eugenics program) would be useful. They are, but I'm honestly sure that they're all insane. She is now the Empress of humanity but uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Kellhus has taken his armies to the north on a desperate crusade to save the world and while he is gone revolution and worse simmers. Surrounded by people she isn't sure she can trust and heartsick, she has to try and keep Kellhus' empire with little support form him. Esmenet reminds me of people I've known, smart but damaged by events that occurred in their early lives, they keep making horrible decisions and trying to fix those by making worse ones. It's not really her fault, but there are times when you want to scream “Damn it Woman! Stop it!”

Psatma Nannaferi, Mother Supreme of the secret cult of the goddess Yatwer, the only divine being who seems to give 3 fucks about the lower classes. Psatma has been blessed by the goddess to destroy Kellhus empire and kill him. Which honestly doesn't sound like a terrible idea... If not for the fact that Kellhus is the only guy who can lead the army that is the only chance of stopping the end of the world. There's terrible timing and then there's this. I mean seriously Yatwer, it's gonna be hard to be a goddess of slaves when they're all dead or reduced to meat puppets. You're a fucking goddess wait 5 years and let Kellhus finish his damn job. Bluntly guys, this part of the book has me wondering just whose side are the gods of this world on. I'm told they cannot perceive the No-God, but surely they realize Kellhus marched an army into the wilderness for a fucking reason.

Varalt Sorweel, son of the king of Sakarpus, the last city before the endless wilderness. Kellhus conquers it so he can use it as a supply base. His father dead, Varalt is made king of a conquered nation and brought into the army as a hostage. He is forced to try to come to terms with the conquest of his people and Kellhus. Most of his part of the book is really just foreshadowing and built up, although there is a hell of a pay off in this book that I'm not going to spoil.

All four of these characters to lesser and greater extents are revolving around Kellhus. Kellhus shows up in this book, but we don't spend anytime behind his eyes. Which heightens the mystery and makes him less human. Which is a good idea given his role in the plot. Knowing who he is lying to and who he is telling the truth to would remove almost every element of mystery in the book. I am in some circles considered a pragmatic man and I am willing to forgive a lot when the goal is preventing the extinction of all human life on the planet but Kellhus is a character who takes me to the very edge of what I am willing to forgive. Partly because I often find myself doubting that all this was necessary. Kellhus is the kind of guy who makes you wonder just what means saving the world really excuses?

Another character in the book worth mentioning is Esmenet's daughter Mimara, who Esmenet gave birth to during her time as a whore and ended up selling Mimara into slavery during a famine. Mimara ended up a whore before agents of Kellhus rescued her. She is still bitter about this, additionally, she has the gift of sorcery. She tracks down Drusus and ends up accompanying him on his quest. She's an interesting character, understandably full of sharp edges and angry but not inhumanly so.

My favorite part of the book is Drusus with the Skin Eaters, the adventurer company Drusus hired to take him to ruins beyond the edge of the human world. They end up venturing into an old no man mansion under ground called the black hall. I am told that at first it was meant to be a call back to his days playing Dungeons and Dragons but has he realized there was no way to avoid a comparison to the Mines of Moria he decided to embrace it. I enjoyed the quest through the black halls, which exposed us to terror and wonder and the sheer weight of history on Bakker's world. It's a heavy weight that the inhabitants are at times barely aware of. The Skin Eaters themselves are an interesting group, although I have mixed feelings about them. Many of their rules for being out in the field (or the slog as they call it) make perfect sense. They are in the wild beyond hope or help up against monsters that would make the Reavers of Firefly say “Whoa, hey slow down, no need to be that cruel.” A certain amount of ruthlessness is called for if you want to survive the experience. That said some of their actions are brutality for brutality's sake. These are very flawed men, but honestly only flawed men would choose to live such a life wouldn't they? Bakker doesn't shy away from following the logical outcome of such a conclusion.

That sentence could be used to sum up all of Bakker's writing in a way. Bakker is one of the better writers I've seen. Better then Larry Correia. Better then Katherine Addison. Better then George RR Martin. He refuses to shy away from any of the implications of his world or work, which can make his books somewhat disturbing. The Sranc are a perfect example of this, created by the alien monsters as biologic war machines, their sex drives are linked to murder and torment. They are Tolkien's Orcs with every ounce of humanity and dignity mercilessly scoured away and replaced only with the savage desire to torture, rape and murder and feed on the still warm and cringing remains. Where has Tolkien was unable to create a race beyond salvation because of his personal beliefs Bakker carried it out to the finish. Because Bakker's train has no damn breaks. For me the most vivid example of that lies on page 285, when a sorcerer tells Varalt that before Kellhus he was damned to hell but his faith in Kellhus has saved him. Or more exactly “But now I am saved.” If you have the vaguest idea of what Christianity is about you should understand why I howled. Both in anger at Kellhus for daring such blasphemy and in appreciation of Bakker's willingness to take his story that far. Which was the logical end point of Kellhus deciding a religion was the best way to get the army and empire he needed. I was exhausted and wrung out after finishing the Prince of Nothing series and I found myself a bit tired after reading this book. Still it remains one of the better books I've read in the last 2 years.

The Judging Eye gets an A. A well done book by a great writer. The only real compliant I have is some fool of an editor stuck the prologue “What Has Come Before” section in the very back of the book! Stop that! Short sections that give background needed to understand the story go in front! Where the reader can see them and understand before being confused as hell.

[Cynical Cat]

The magi's opinion of the Judging Eye and the author is similar to my own and I'm glad he got around to reading it. For the record I highly recommend this series and Matt Stover's Acts of Caine. I'd love to get the magi's opinion on the Caine books, starting with Heroes Die.

[frigidmagi]

The magi's opinion of the Judging Eye and the author is similar to my own and I'm glad he got around to reading it. For the record I highly recommend this series and Matt Stover's Acts of Caine. I'd love to get the magi's opinion on the Caine books, starting with Heroes Die.

I will throw that on the list.

[frigidmagi]

George Washington's Military Genius
By Dave Palmer

“Washington or no Army”
Continental Army toast page 74

Back to non-fiction for a bit and given the recent holiday (that being July 4th or the American Independence Day) think a book about George Washington is called for. Ah, Washington, the first and greatest of our founding fathers and perhaps the most mythologized. The US has been prone to over reacting in how we see our founders, in recent times two groups have staked out their ground and gone to brutal war over it. The first group holds up the founders as flawless demi-gods sent down from the shining heavens by the Almighty Lord God himself to lovingly hand craft the pure and wonderful city on a hill that would become the United States. The second group decries them as a pack of ingrate wealthy elitists grown fat upon the suffering of slaves and natives who turned snarling upon the poor innocent government of the United Kingdom for meekly suggesting that the colonists should pay taxes.

My own position is bluntly that both groups are so ridiculously out of touch with reality that it is a wonder they even got the names of the people they are worshiping or slandering right. The founding fathers were men, as such they were flawed and imperfect. They did things that were to be frank immoral and wrong. They also were gifted men, who did things great and amazing and acted with charity and goodness. Such is the nature of humanity. They crafted through messy compromise and dickering and titanic labor a nation that would prosper, grow and become one of the mightiest nations in history, whose impact on culture and history can only be denied by the stupid, blind or extremely ideological blinkered, but I repeat myself there. Entire fields of art and science have been invented in this nation, deeds good, great and worthy of remembrance have been done here. I cannot deny that shameful and horrible things have been done. I also cannot deny that many people have suffered unjustly simply for their gender, race and more... I do believe that erases nor eclipses the good. I will stop here as this is suppose to be a book review not a political polemic.

As for Washington himself? I would argue that he is worthy of praise for one simple reason, he surrendered power. That doesn't sound like much... Until you compare him to the great number of successful revolutionaries who did not and the price their nations paid for that. Compare Washington to Castro, or Mugabe or others and suddenly praising him for that doesn't seem so silly does it? Disregarding that, as the book doesn't concern itself with that, I have never considered Washington to be among the great military generals and strategists of the world or even the United States. Lt. General Dave Palmer (retired), veteran of two tours of Vietnam, former superintendent of West Point and a noted historian of the American Revolution in his own right seeks to change my mind in this book. Let's discuss if he actually pulls it off.

Palmer starts the book by addressing the general facts of war and society in Washington's time. Pointing out that when we peer back through the centuries we are viewing a much different time. This war happens before the industrial revolution, an event that so dramatically changes human life on this planet that some historians have suggested that the generation of the founding fathers have more in common with the men of the Roman Empire then us, who live a mere 240 some odd years later. War was certainly different as were the armies that carried it out. Europe was still shaking off the memory of the destruction of the 30 year war and trying it's level best to avoid any total wars. Armies were expensive and as such battle was something to be avoided. A victory where your army took heavy loses (loses that would take years to replace) could lose you the war. European armies were usually made up of economically unproductive classes (that is the aristocracy and to be blunt the criminal and jobless) press ganging (basically kidnapping someone into service) was common and as such desertion was epidemic. This was because every man in the army was a man not on the farm or doing other more economically productive things. The gulf between enlisted and officer class was wide and deep, with the enlisted being in the main uneducated, rough, very low class men and officers being to the manor born. The American Revolutionary army was different in the sense it was made up of volunteers from all walks of life serving for a cause. In some ways it was a warning ripple of what the French Revolution would unleash in some decades time. For that matter the war itself was more like the French Revolution in that society itself had to be brought into the war. For most of the wars of 1700s, society was incredibly uninvolved. In fact citizens often didn't know or care if their nation was at war or at peace. It was normal to carry on trade and commerce with nations your government was at war with. The Americans wouldn't have that luxury but would be involved in the war whether they wished to be or not.

Palmer then proceeds to introduce us to the important facts of the ground. The nature of life and the set up of the colonies. How the population of some 2.5 million was shotgunned across the eastern seaboard. Despite that there were cities, Philadelphia in the 1750s was the 2nd largest city in the British Empire for example, the vast majority of Americans lived in small settlements in a large wilderness. We are also introduced to the British government of the time of the revolution and frankly, it is unimpressive. For example two quotes about King George:

“Had he born in different circumstances it is unlikely that he could have earned a living expect as an unskilled laborer,” British scholar page 36

“He was lethargic, apathetic, childish, a clod of a boy whom no one could teach” also page 36

We also learn an important fact, at this point in time, the British Army numbered roughly 50,000 men. These men had to police an empire stretching from Canada to India. This I think fully explains what is come next. These sections of the book are very informative and well written, I really enjoyed the first 25% of the book and I even managed to learn some things.

The next part of the book is where Palmer proceeds to make his argument. He divides the American Revolution into 4 phases. The first phase which was from April 1775 to June 1776, where the revolutionaries take the offensive and eject royal government administers from the 13 colonies and directly engage the British Army. Here he argues Washington takes the led by pushing for aggressive action against the British army in Boston and elsewhere. While Washington was able to gain success in New England, the revolution army in Canada ending up failing. At the end of the 1st phase we see the royal government and the British army forced out of the colonies and into Canada. Following on the heels of this comes the Declaration of Independence in July and phase 2.

The 2nd phase was intensive defensive with Washington working overtime to keep his army in the field and intact. This phase ran from July 1776 to December 1777, part of the reason for the defensive nature of the war was to put bluntly an extreme failure to estimate the British response. The Continental Congress had estimated that King George III would send 22,500 redcoats, 10,000 to hold Canada with the rest coming into to invade New England. In order to be able to meet this army on the field, the Revolutionaries in Congress determined they needed a 2 to 1 advantage at least in numbers. They set a goal of recruiting 65,000 men. They managed to raise an army of 25,000 and they would be meeting a British/German army around 48,000 strong. The Germans of whom over 30,000 would serve in the newly made US came from all over, their appearance enraged the colonists who believed that proper Englishmen did not sic foreign mercenaries on each other (this suggests that they were unaware of large chunks of English history but side issue). At this point if the Continental Army was destroyed the field, that would be the end of the Revolution. Recognizing that the Hudson river and control of it was vital, he fortified it (including founding West Point itself) and proceeded to deny a decisive battle to the British Army that was now twice his size, better trained and better equipped. However he also refused to break contact, constantly shadowing the British Army staying just out of reach of a lunge that would bring him into grips. I have to admit this is an amazing achievement. I have some idea of how hard this would be from my own military experiences, where it is the tendencies of firefights to grow bigger. My own experience is limited to that of a junior Corporal in the Marines though, I did not have to control militia during a retreat. Washington did and he did it well enough to avoid destruction. It was during this period that he received a nickname from the British Army, they would call him 'Old Fox.' As a bitter winter fell on the US in 1777 and Christmas came near, it was the opening of Phase 3.

Phase 3 opens with Washington crossing the Delaware River to make his now famous attack on Trenton and would continue until October 1781. A major change was an open military alliance with the French and the fact that the French fleet would be operating in the Atlantic against the British. Additionally the flow of armies and perhaps more importantly money from France, gave Washington room to risk. If he suffered heavy causalities, he would have the time and space to replace them. With the French money came a stream of European Officers willing to serve and train. Within Valley Forge those officers would hammer out the first professional American Army and Washington would use that army to attack. Cities would be retaken and the British Army would find itself under constant attack. Facing newly aggressive American forces and a French fleet prowling along their rear, the British began to retreat from many of their toe holds in the colonies. 1780 would prove to be a year of major set backs for the Revolutionaries as the British would invade the southern colonies and internal problems threaten to have the colonies fly apart, notable was the betrayal of the Revolution by Benedict Arnold. Washington was just able to keep the army and therefore country intact to strike back in 1781. The South was retaken, a French army arrived to fight alongside the Continentals and at last came the victory of Yorktown.

The final phase, phase 4 was mostly negotiation between the British and the Americans. Washington had to work to keep the United States from losing the peace as the final peace treaty was hammered out and to ensure that the army didn't turn on Congress. Something I can state is a mighty tempting idea at times even today (I might still be bitter about that veterans jobs bill guys). Considering that many of the men of the continental army hadn't been paid in months and most of them never would be, it must have way more tempting than I could possibly imagine. Still it was achieved and it might have one of the important things Washington has ever done. Well stepping down from the Presidency was more important but this one is close.

The book has a lot of interesting information and presents a thought provoking argument. As an overview it works fairly well. The division of the war into the 4 phases makes a lot of sense and is well thought out. However, Palmer clearly assumes his reader knows the details of all the campaigns he mentions because he never bothers providing any on his own. This weakens the book deeply in my view making a history book that needs to be paired with at least one other book to be of any use to anyone who is not already well aqquinted with Revolutionary war history. Frankly the lack of examination of the individual campaigns weakens the case, without showing us the actions that Washington preformed to justify calling him a military genius... It's a just a generalized argument. It's a strong argument, and it's enough to make me say I have to rethink my stance on Washington's tactical and strategic skills but the book should have spent some more time examining the campaigns Washington undertook. As it stands I don't believe the premise is supported by the book all that completely and frankly, I remain unconvinced that Washington should be called a military genius. Despite that it's a good basic overview of the war and gives an examination of both governments and explains of the reality of war in the time very well.

Because of that George Washington Military Genius by Dave R Palmer gets a B-. Read it, but read a book with a more detailed overview of Washington's campaigns first.

[Josh]

Yeah, either view of the founders dehumanizes them into a talking point, which cheapens the entire discussion.

I think the biggest point about Washington was that the Continental Army won a war that they generally had no business winning. This was accomplished by means of a huge assist from France, but Washington had to keep things running well enough to convince the French that we were worth the investment of blood and coin.

He wasn't an Alexander or a Napoleon or a Caesar, but he was the right guy in the right place at the right time.

That he did surrender power (in spite of the common assumption that the presidency would be a lifetime title and also in spite of Hamilton's fervent hopes otherwise) was one of the luckiest breaks we had in an era full of lucky breaks.

[General Havoc]

Napoleon was reported to have constantly complained to his close confidants, whenever the French National Assembly sent him messages about when he was going to resign his positions, that "They would try to make of me another Washington."

We could have done far, far worse.

[frigidmagi]

The Seedbearing Prince
by Davaun Sanders

Disclosure, I know Mr. Sanders from work. We were members of the same training class and I learned he was a writer while talking to him over a variety of subjects. Finding out that he had written pretty near to an entire series, I had to take a look. Especially when he told me this whole series sprang from the most vivid dream he ever had.

The Seedbearing Prince is Mr. Sanders first book and the first book in a series. Let me first discuss the setting because it is amazing! It is new! It is interesting! I find myself yelling at the book “wait, wait go back and tell me more about shit!” It's not medieval Europe with a new coat of paint! The setting is the World Belt, a star system where the planets and dwarf planets (or whatever we're call them these days) are linked together by what seems to be a super dense asteroid field. I mean so dense that some of these asteroids have atmosphere and life on them, to point that creatures know as Rage Hawks fly from asteroid to asteroid in search of food and nesting grounds. As you might guess standard science has been beaten up and thrown out of town more or less. I mean we have an asteroid belt with a functioning ecosystem.

Now they have space ships called transports to carry people and cargo from world to world but sometimes they need to send messages quietly and quickly. This gives us one of the most metal occupations to show up in these reviews, men who make their living by letting themselves be shot off at high speed (using high tech artifacts called portals or jump points) into an asteroid field where they use grapple hooks and wing suits to basically spiderman across a moving asteroid field! Let me state that at this point I don't care what science has to say about how possible this is, it's just awesome. The worlds are all independent with their own cultures and governments, all these governments are bound by a set of treaties overseen by an interplanetary organization named after their headquarters, the massive space fortress called the The Ring. The Ring hosts a number of groups working together to keep the World belt safe and going. The Preceptors are scholars/scientists, the Defenders are the military order so on and so forth. There is an entire system here with Shard, our main character's home world being part of it. Shard is a farming world, who provides many world with large percentage of their food (the World Belt doesn't appear to be a purely capitalist system, the Shardians don't seem to be making a lot of money on this for example) they're a very rural people as a result but honestly seem like nice people. There are also some nice cultural bits (such as a festival) while we're on Shard for people like me.

Just from my first read through, I would say that that Mr. Sanders has done some work in thinking through this setting, or at least more then some people I've reviewed here. At the same time, he avoids a cardinal sin of fantasy and science fiction writers everywhere, he doesn't explain things to death. He has a story to tell and you'll get what information is reverent to the story. Which frankly is likely the best way to do these things, as a lot of people get bored silly when someone explains how things work. I know for example in say David Weber's books, especially the later ones, I tend to skip the pages and pages of explaining how missiles and anti-missile systems work But this isn't a Weber review so I'll stop here. I will say that instead of over dwelling on things however, Sanders rushes us past some parts of the setting. This is a shame. For example the world of Aran is a hot, dry world but manages to avoid being 'Arabs in space' the story gives us glimpses of an interesting culture but we're kinda hurried along. I can understand not wanting the plot to drag down but there is such as a thing as rushing as well. I don't think this will annoy to many other readers though, as most people I run into aren't as enthralled with cultural details, but I honestly want to know more about dry Aran, freezing Suralose (a planet the characters barely spend a day on!), the city world of Montollos and the fortress ship/station of The Ring. How are they governed? How does trade work? How are families organized? What are the differences world to world? How do they say farewell to their dead and welcome new births? None of these are part of the story and I'm just going to have to hope he writes some appendixes or something.

The characters are well written and fairly enjoyable. When I first started reading, my thought was that Dayn (our hero) would be another Luke Skywalker, a farm boy wishing for more but not really doing anything about that wish until events take the choice from him. I've found these characters can get annoying if badly written, I've often wanted to smack a couple of them for one thing or another. Dayn avoids this by being proactive. He pursues his dream of being a courser, one of the crazed men and women who grapple and glide across a freaking asteroid belt! He's gathered the gear, he practices in secret, he has a plan to head out and declare for it and he sticks to that goal. Despite, everyone and everything getting in his way. In fact Dayn here is actively driving the plot having found the magic macguffin (called a seed) in the course of his training, which he does by going to the one place everyone else tells him to avoid. Dayn is not a prophesied figure here, nor is he from a blessed bloodline or some such rot. He's a young man whose drive and attempts to realize his dream have pulled him into a much wider world then he was previously aware of and into events that he had considered much to large to ever concern him.

I even like Dayn's family, usually the families in these stories are dysfunctional in some manner or the Father is the kind of person who can't stand the idea of his children having dreams and desires that he wouldn't have. While there are family conflicts and Dayn does catch familial disapproval when he does something reckless and foolish (and being a teenager he does) but it's never over board and Sanders does manage to give you a sense that this is a caring family where the members actually love each other even when they're being complete idiots. So I do feel I need to stick in some kudos here for Dayn having a reasonable and pretty good father in his life who isn't absent, drunk, abusive, neglectful or Darth Vader. It's something I would like to see more of.

We have Lurec the Preceptor, who bluntly is a nerd but not an annoying one. Lurec doesn't let himself be pushed around and is willing to stand up for himself and Dayn despite not being very physically capable. That's okay though, Preceptors are suppose to be scholars and thinkers not soldiers. That's what Nassir is for, a grim, closed mouth Defender, who frankly is rather cranky and sometimes gets up my nose. He reminds me of a couple of Sargent I didn't care for while I was in the Marines. Nassir is a Defender, a kind of super soldier trained (created?) from volunteers in The Ring. They exist to fight the antagonists of this series (we'll get to them). Nassir seems to regard his post as Dayn's bodyguard more or less as a punishment, despite being told how important this job is and why. The Defenders in general are portrayed interestingly, we're shown them repeatedly refusing to raise their hands against the people of the Belt, but at the same time they come off as distant, cold, disdainful and in some cases paranoid to the point of violence. We're also shown Defenders who are friendly, social and tolerant as well (such as a minor character named Eriya that I liked). The people of the Belt have mixed feeling towards their Defenders and I can see why, but they're going to need them.

Because of the antagonists. The World Belt was once a much nicer place, but something happened and now it isn't. One faction named the Voidwalkers withdrew beyond the World Belt to plot and basically be bad people. The Voidwalkers that appear in this story hit me as kind of cross between Ring wraiths from Tolkien and a Games workshop Chaos Space Marine. They're dark, mysterious and often wrapped in shadow. They can have horrifying effects on the mind of men and women, making their very presence a weapon. They can hide in plain sight and have many agents lurking in the cracks and corners of the societies of the World Belt all working to bring about the down fall of the system and it's worlds. They ride great and terrible monsters that most men cannot stand against. They come clad in armor and through forgotten sciences have access to technology and powers beyond the understanding of their opponents and are as a result of that disdain of their enemies because of that. In fact we often hear them referring to the people of the World Belt as Degenerates. Despite all this they are mortal and Sanders manages to make characters out of them. While they have limited time in the limelight, they are shown to be human beings who can think, plan, feel and unfortunately for Dayn love and hate. This keeps them from being to cliche, I think. The Voidwalkers work to their own ends and manage to be threatening without being invincible, doing enough damage to retain credible threat status. We see them slap around Defenders and drive entire companies of men into screaming madness for example. However, they do get hurt and even killed, letting us know that whatever else they are, they're at the bottom of it all mortal men. Which makes them more interesting then formless spirits of malice that others

Over all I really enjoyed the book with only a couple minor issues. I felt that we didn't really get to know anyone expect our main three and even then we didn't really get to spend to much time with Nassir or Lurec. We meet a lot of people who come in and out (and in some cases come back) and we honestly don't get to spend a lot of time with them. Which is unfortunate. We also run through a lot of the setting, Aran stuck with me, as did Shard but much of the rest of the setting is taken at a run. If I have a complaint I would say Sanders should slow down a little. Not by a lot, the story is well told and I enjoyed it a lot.

The Seedbearing Prince is a good science fantasy story in an interesting setting with likable characters in a story that's interesting and managed to avoid cliches I thought were going to be part of the story. I enjoyed reading it until the final page. However the pacing needs a bit of work and we could use more character development for people whose names aren't Dayn. I also have a bug up my nose about the ending but I'm sure the next book in the series will fix that (there are 3 books published already). Because of this The Seedbearing Prince gets a B+ and I'm pretty hopeful that the next book will get into the A range.

[frigidmagi]

GlowGems For Profit
By Dr. Bruce Davis

Once again disclosure, I happen to be a friend of Dr. Davis' eldest son and I'm on pretty good terms with the good doctor. In fact he gave me a discount on this book at Phoenix Comic Con provided I do a review (here we are Doc!) on it. In fact he autographed it for me! I bought 2 other books by him that I will review before to long I think. Everything I write in this review is my honest opinion but as always be aware.

A recurring theme in science fiction, especially when writers wish to step away from great epic events or show casing super clean utopias, is that of a small ship operating on the edges and in the cracks of civilized space lead by rough charismatic men and their strangely loyal crews. Although these men are often caught up in epic events, they are often envisioned as people who don't walk the halls of power or play in the elite levels of society. These are men like Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds, men with pasts, with skills, friends and most importantly men with ships. The law weighs fairly lightly on these men and their ships and they get what you want to where you want for a price. Morality may weigh a bit more on our Captains, but often not by much. These stories have carved out their own niche in science fiction (and with books like the Black Lung Captain in steam punk fantasy as well).

Here Dr. Davis throws his hat into the ring with Glowgems for Profit which introduces us to Zack Mbele, former revolutionary, military officer, prisoner and human lab experiment. As is the usual, Captain Mbele's side lost the war, interestingly enough it's a good thing for Captain Mbele that his side lost. He had ended up on the wrong side of a political purge during a Glorious People's Revolution on Mars, which as Glorious People's Revolutions tend to do, had fallen to eating it's own young (although doing it before the war is won is usually a bad idea. Even Mao and Pol Pot waited to win the war before starting their lunatic murder sprees). It was during that name that Mbele was subjected to all manner of cruel and unusual experiments mostly having to do with nanotechnology. He survived and got a gift out of it. Most people just died. The origin is on par for the course honestly, what's really interesting is that while Mbele is given science fiction superpowers (with NANOMACHINES SON!) they play at best a minor role in the story. This story is not about Captain Mbele's nano powers and these nano powers don't play much of a role in solving his problems. Which is to the stories credit here. That said they do give him an edge in a gun fight but a lot of his problems in the story can't be solved by gun fights. Not to mention some of those gun fights are only won because Captain Mbele follows the rules of gunfights (shot first, bring friends, tell your friends to bring guns, if possible have them bring friends with guns). Mbele is our viewpoint character and our Captain Reynolds for the book if I may be so bold. He's scummier then Captain Reynolds, which most of the novel captains are (novel writers not having studio execs pushing them to make the characters cleaner for one thing), he's also more broken by his experience. He's turned to drug use and booze and that leads him to be somewhat erratic. I may be understating the case by a wide margin there, as Mbele will repeatedly make decisions in the story that lead you to question how the hell does he manage to survive taking a shower let alone being a ship Captain. On the flip side when someone is shooting him he makes rather inspired and rational decisions that keep everyone alive. So while I'll ask why the hell Mbele is still alive from time to time I am reminded fairly often why he's the Captain. It's just his decision making is addled by his unhealthy habits which are spurred on by his frankly ruined mental state.

Freed after the war by the Federal government of Earth, who stormed the prison after the glorious revolution failed, Mbele finds himself with a ship and a crew made up of an A.I named Sylvia and Deuce (said friend with gun), a Sgt in Mbele's old unit who decided to stick with his Lt after the war was over. There's not much to say about Deuce, he's a very quiet character content to follow Mbele's decisions no matter how questionable they get. His main role is to show up with a large rifle and shot things or threaten to shot things. I'm hoping for more character development later in the series.

The story is set within the boundaries of our own solar system, only one that has been fully populated by what I assume was one hell of a colonization effort. As we can guess Captain Mbele prefers to hang out in the outer edges of the solar system where the law is weakest and the questions are fewest. In the beginning of the book he is lured to the inner system, to Earth's very orbit by an old friend, a fellow veteran of the revolution and cellmate who goes by the name Rabbit. Rabbit went through the same experiments but was left a cripple trapped in a wheel chair and with a double handful of social and mental problems. Dr. Davis does display this real well, in that these mental and social handicaps aren't just things that rabbit can get over when he wants to or just bad habits, they are real compulsions (frankly this isn't the right word either) born of trauma and drastic injury that imprison Rabbit as surely as his wheel chair does. These are also pretty well written, Rabbit is paranoid and given to odd flights of fancy. He rambles uncontrollably when asked questions. He can't help these behaviors and while the story as told from Captain Mbele's viewpoint doesn't rub our faces in that behavior, it lets us know it's there. In short Rabbit feels like a real person who has been damaged instead of a Hollywood damaged in incredibly convenient ways characters. For those wondering, no I'm not going to stop taking pot shots in these reviews.

Of course Rabbit is also a computer hacker beyond the understanding of us lowly mortals, having been a member of the Glorious Revolutions cyberwarfare Divisions and like Captain Mbele ended up purge. Rabbit has a lot more of a character then Deuce does and serves a vitally more important role in this story. Rabbit isn't just Captain Mbele's friend or the guy who clued him into a job, he's Captain Mbele's moral compass. When Captain Mbele has a moral qualm, it centers on his relationship with Rabbit. The promises he made to him, his behavior towards him, etc. The fact that Captain Mbele works so hard to shield Rabbit from harm and tolerates behavior from Rabbit that most of us wouldn't helps humanize Captain Mbele and for me at least makes him bearable because without this relationship Captain Mbele would seem like a giant self aggrandizing drugged up dick. Part of that is the next person we're going to discuss.

Cleopatra Jones is a hot, sneaky, killer of a woman with a shadowed past and questionable goals. That's putting it nicely, when we meet her she's shooting at the man trying to hire Captain Mbele. Despite this... Rocky start, Mbele decides to bring on to his ship and to be blunt trusts her more then the guy paying him money. While this does pan out in the story, barely I can't for the life of me see why Mbele would do this beyond well thinking with his pants. I do like Cleo Jones, she's fairly interesting although I think she could use more development. I mean where did she get her training? Why is she out in the outer rim doing low grade hits and body guarding? What's going on here? What I didn't care for was Captain Mbele's reaction to her. I've seen it before, where a guy basically leads with his crotch and it never ends well. Frankly I kinda lost a bit of respect for the character. On the flip side I do think that was what Doc. Davis was aiming for. I also kinda found Cleo and Mbele's relationship to veer from possibly helpful to dangerously toxic. On the one hand, she's pushing him to get off drugs and stay sober. On the other hand she encourages his reckless streak and some of his self destructive behavior. This is not a fairy tale relationship that magically redeems both parties. It's two very damaged, very bad people getting into bed with each (literally) and that relationship while having some positive effects is feeding their bad behaviors. Which is realistic, I got to give the Doc that. I'm not sure how I feel about Cleopatra Jones outside of her relationship to Captain Mbele, as we're presented with her pretty much entirely in that context. This is mainly because we only get Captain Mbele's as our viewpoint character which means everything is filtered through his perspective.

The bad guys are fairly interesting, in that you have the remains of the glorious people's revolution, stripped of all political pretension just preying on people with their skills and remaining hardware. You have a large nasty drug gang trying to diversify it's holding, which is actually kinda ripped from the headlines stuff. I mean I've been reading about Mexican cartels branching out into stealing coal mines and farms for Heaven's sake. Captain Mbele is fairly fearless and brazen when dealing with them as well, which is fun to read honestly. I actually enjoy the parts where he deals with people he considers his enemies more then I do the parts where he deals with his allies. Plus I respect a man who's willing to talk shit to the leader of the biggest meanest cartel in the outer solar system. That said the villains aren't given a lot of development and a couple of them are left rather flat by that. I felt some more work could have been done here.

The plot itself is really well done. It's twisty and turns fairly quickly and has the good grace not to get to impressed with itself and move on fairly quickly. It turns on the lies and evasions of Cleopatra Jones and the man who hired Captain Mbele in the first place and of course there is a lot of money at stake. The world (system?) isn't in danger though so Captain Mbele is in no danger of being turned into a hero... Although he does manage to act almost heroically by the end of the book. There are several shoot outs that are well done as well. I should note that this book is noticeable more violent then Queen Mab Courtesy, which Doc Davis wrote later on. The violence is well written which I like and avoids being overly analysis. We also get a good variety with gun fights, some melee fights and some violence on a star ship scale. The characters are realistic, deeply flawed and damaged people who often display poor decision making skills... Which if we're going to be honest is what you expect from people who decided breaking the law was a good career path. Which to be honest is part of the issue. I'm one of the people who didn't like Breaking Bad because constantly watching flawed damaged people screwing up doesn't appeal to me. I will say at Captain Mbele tries to rise above himself in this story and I'm left with enough good feelings to come back for the sequel.

Glow Gems for Profit gets a B. It's a good book, especially if you enjoy the genre. If you don't have my hang ups regarding character traits you'll enjoy a lot more then I did. That said I enjoyed it quite a bit. Now hopefully Dr. Davis explains just what the hell Cleopatra Jones deal is in the next book.

That said next review we return to Warp World!

[frigidmagi]

Warpworld II Wasteland Renegades
by Kristene Perron and Josh Simpson

For those of you who don't remember the last review, I know and am friends with Josh Simpson. In fact he gave me a copy of this work to review. We also met every Sunday over Skype to roll dice and play games that housewives in the 80s declared works of Satan. So if Josh reads this review? Remember the Organics always win Josh. That's my full disclosure for this review!

Wasteland Renegades is the second book in the series, which picks up right after the first one with not even a breath between them. Additionally the books are heavily interconnected, events from the first book shape almost everything in the second and relationship continue apace in this one. What am I saying here? Read the first book first! Otherwise you will be lost and confused. You have been warned. That said the books tell two complete different stories in and of themselves. This is not a single story chopped into bits, but a story with a beginning, middle and end. So in general I am okay with this. After all, if you try to watch Empire Strikes Back without seeing A New Hope, you are going to have a lot of questions about what the hell is going on. I've never heard anyone suggest that this makes Empire Strikes Back a lesser movie somehow. That said the longer you make a series the greater a need for discrete jumping in points where you can pick a book and not be completely lost in the sauce.

One of the things that separates Renegades from the first book is that it takes place entirely on Seg's homeworld. The homeworld of the People, who threatened by a monstrous wall of death (that they have oh so inventively named the Storm) that cruises their world devouring entire cities the way I scarf down ranch chips. To avoid that fate the People (this group is so bad at naming things) have retreated into great cramped and overcrowded cities barely shielded through bullshit magic and supported by mass slavery. Their magic (the characters will insist it's science but frankly it's magic and I'm going to refer to it as such) shields need what they call Vita, which as far has I can gather from the books is some form of concentrated emotion/faith. They get it and the slave labor they need to run their economy by attacking unsuspecting worlds and stealing it. Renegade introduces us in full to a culture of people who survive by preying on the unsuspecting and unwary. For almost 300 pages you will have your face rubbed in just what kind of culture this produces.

I was expecting something militaristic, regimented with every resource heavily and carefully rationed to prevent waste. With everything devoted to the goal of driving back the Storm from every inch of the World that the People can liberate. I was expecting a grim, stoic culture where sacrifices are expected from every member and every privilege is bought dearly because a luxury is wasting something that could have gone to raking away more space and time for survival. I figured the Houses were regional leaders in charge of disturbing resources. As you might have guessed I didn't get what I expected. The People lived dominated by noble houses where the upper ranks wallow in luxury and the lower classes live crammed lives marked by privation and heavy labor. Basically the lower classes of the People barely have it better then the masses of slaves whose labor keeps the system running but they get through the day by telling themselves that they're members of a superior race and at least they're not slaves (I've heard this before...).

Through out the first half of the book we are mercilessly dragged through the People's society through the eyes of Seg and Ama. Seg grew up in this society and he thought he hated it before. Now that he's had experience with another culture and with other people, he knows he hates this damn place. Remember in the last review how I said that I had Seg's upbringing I would be a raging asshole on my good days? I was wrong, Seg isn't a good guy, he isn't practically Gandhi. To be as together and as a good a guy as he is... He's the freaking Buddha returned! Because from what this book showed me of Seg's family and society... I would have ended up hunting the People in the streets eating their damn faces!

As a group they are that fucking awful! Seg wants to change his culture and save his people and for the live of I can't see what he thinks is worth saving in this psychopathic mess of a culture. Most cultures could do better then Seg for a hero, but for the People? Seg is miles better then what they deserve, but he is the hero they need, like it or not. He's a genius and well written as one, but his social skills keep flopping down to the level of a rather unwashed badger. I keep finding myself moved towards a deep well of pity for his mentor Jarin, who earns every bit of face time he gets in this book (I was really glad to see more of him!), is kept very busy cleaning up after Seg and trying to keep him from getting lynched. It's because of Jarin that Seg finds himself with more allies, including what passes for a reporter in the People's society. Frankly when it comes to PR, Seg is going to need all the help he can get. But let me get into the People's society here.
Imagine Rome, only all the grandeur, grace, beauty, ambition and humanity have been ruthlessly cut out and burnt away, leaving only a relentlessly hungry maw of a society. A stagnant parasite that makes no art, creates no great works, formulates no new science, strives towards no great goal but only seeks to cling to it's gray ugly half live by devouring whatever it can steal from the unsuspecting. They can't even name things decently! Their planet? They call it “The World”, themselves “The People” and so on and so forth. They are so drained of any spark that summoning up the ability to give something a decent name is to much for them! Their society is Capitalism and Imperialism stripped of any virtue and reduced to just constant exploitation and pillaging. I did at first wonder if the People were suppose to be compared to our society but frankly their society is to alien even with it's superficial similarities, (frankly you would have be someone on the level of Noam Chomsky to stretch it that far I think). It's a society where 3 men torturing a slave to death on the street gets less no reaction, a not even a “hey man take it inside.” You would get more reaction from 21st century Americans for torturing a squirrel on the sidewalk then the people have to give for slowly and painfully murdering a human being! With the exception of maybe slightly more then a dozen of the People, I found myself wishing for their slow and complete extinction. I mean at least Mordor was fucking honest about being a pit of despair and oppression.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am trained as an Anthropologist. We are taught that every culture has it's saving graces and while there are higher moral standards that we cannot excuse breaking (I'll admit this one varies and is disputed but I'll have nothing to do with the deep end of moral relativism), we need to understand a culture not judge it. I'm also a Marine, I've been out in other cultures and had some pretty intense interactions with them. So understand where I'm coming from here. The People's culture deserves to go extinct. It deserves to die. I don't say this lightly.

I will say that Ama's arc in this story definitely pushed me to that conclusion. Ama frankly gets herself into boat loads of avoidable trouble through the fact that she does not listen! This is frankly a theme with her, she never listens! It's good that we have a character flaw that is shown not told, but to be honest I found myself wanting to reach into the book and shake some damn sense into her. That said Mr. Simpson and Ms. Perron punish her dearly in this book for her headstrong and reckless nature. The price she pays on many levels is tragic for both her and Seg. I can't go any further without spoilers, I'll just say that Mr. Simpson and Ms. Perron do not pull their punches and do not flinch from following things to their logical conclusion. I'll also say the bastard who inflicted that tragedy got off light, but Seg was pressed for time here. My main compliant is Ama isn't given much to do in this book beyond suffer and try to repair herself. It makes perfect sense but I'm hoping she gets to do more in the next book.

Ama isn't the only member of her people in this book, a group of 50 of them volunteer to follow Seg, giving him his own private armed force. Seg recruits from various raiders to help train these manics into something resembling a professional armed force. It's an uphill battle the entire way. It also brings back Viren who remains one of my favorite characters and introduces us to Lt. Fismar. Who is Awesome! Fismar is a raider veteran and is one of those guys who has no illusions to the truth of his society but decides to do his best to not sink into despair. He's aware that the whole People vs Slave thing is utter bullshit (one of his good quotes “We think there are People and there are Caj, but the truth is there are People who are Caj and just don't know it.”). Despite having no military training the writers manage to make Fismar a rather believable figure and a good trainer. I would have done things differently (for example I would locked Cerd, an ex-pirate that Viren hates, in a room with Viren until they either killed each other or learned to lived together) but I'm hard pressed to find any real mistakes in the training regime given the resources that Fismar had to work with. I'm less enthralled with Elarn, the People medic but he grows on you through the book, much like Seg did in the last one. Elarn and Shan the pilot are meant to be stand ins for the normal members of the People, so at first you really dislike them but as they remove the sticks from their rears and drop the constant refrain of unearned superiority they become people you can bare, maybe even like. Lissil, the Welf women becomes a character of interest here as well. She frankly disturbs me a lot mainly because I can understand exactly how she became the way she did. Growing up as a member of a permanent underclass, her only means of advancement was the fact that she was pretty and knew how to play men like violins so she did so. Whenever we get a peek into her head it's a cold, rather emotionally barren place, not because Lissil is a bad person but because she was never given a chance to be anything but a cold calculating women who sees men as a tools and playthings. Why wouldn't she? That's all every person in her life ever treated her as...

Frankly I like the second half of the book a lot better. Mainly because it involves taking Seg and Ama taking revenge on people for screwing with them and many parts of the People's society getting wrecked. After the mounting wave of things I hate in the first book, it was a relief to see some of them blown apart or otherwise gutted. The authors take this society that they have dragged us through and unleash the simmering resentments and hatreds that are building up with some rather explosive consequences. Additionally Seg takes his crew of half trained manics and decides to give the folks at home a full blown demonstration of why he's a genius and they're lucky he lets them breath on his planet. He does this by being the first man of the People to reconquer space from the ruins left by the Storm in centuries. Storming (heh) a fortress held by a group of people descendant from a band of exiles who have degenerated into a society straight out of Colorado City, complete with lost boys. Frankly I enjoy seeing people like that getting shot, so it was rather good for me. The combat in this book is improved over the last book. From what I can see Mr. Simpson and Ms. Perron do small scale tight battles a lot better then roaming gun battles. We also get to see Fismar as a killing machine. Which is pretty awesome. I'm gonna be honest here, I would totally read a story just about Fismar! Or Fismar and Viren doing wacky adventures bouncing from planet to planet!

All in all Wasteland Renegades averages out to a pretty good book. The writers deserve points for not shying away from the ugliness or logic results of that ugliness within the People's society but damn if that didn't make the book hard to read at points. I really like Ama and Seg despite their flaws which may have been part of the problem. As this book is pulls no punches towards them and almost delights in making them suffer for their mistakes. The later half of the book is where things really start clicking for me (nothing like a good riot to get things rolling am I right?) but all in all, I enjoyed this book, but slightly less then the first. But I am left looking forward to the 3rd book. After all the People need to be punched in their collective faces more and there's at least 2 more books in this series that I just know will deliver me justice. Wasteland Renegades gets a B, the first half dragged for me but I really liked the second half. I'd honestly rather reread the first book but I remain with high hopes for the third.

[Josh]

Excellent!

Honestly I enjoyed writing the second book more than the first, maybe because the People are my baby and so doing the story centered in their world was more my show.

Ama pissed me the fuck off multiple times during this story and I knew that'd happen with the readers, too. The key point is that while both Seg and Ama are survivors and have grown up hard, they are still in their early twenties and have that penchant for youthful stupidity and arrogance, which I had to remind myself about on a couple of occasions. So when characters do stupid things? They must suffer.

I've got to get to work now, but I'll try to respond a bit more in the next day or two as time allows. Thanks for the awesome review!

[Josh]

Also, Ama gets a much bigger bite of the apple in the next book. But also (SPOILER) terrible things happen.

[Cynical Cat]

I have to say "the spunky heroine doesn't listen and gets into trouble so she has to be bailed out" is one of my least favorite tropes in fiction.

[frigidmagi]

She doesn't get bailed out. It's heroine is an idiot and suffers.

[Cynical Cat]

She doesn't get bailed out. It's heroine is an idiot and suffers.

That she suffers before getting bailed out (she's still in the story so she got bailed out) doesn't mean she is "spunky heroine who doesn't listen and does stupid shit and need to get rescued". I still hate that shit.

[Lys]

Dredd had a refreshing take on the heroine gets captured thing. Yes she still gets captured, but not from not listening and doing something stupid so much as simply being in a shit situation. She then not only rescues herself without any help from the hero, but follows that up by finding the hero, who is himself in trouble for similar reasons, and rescues him too.

[Josh]

Circumstances are a bit different than that. There wasn't anything like a 'rescue', the suffering was the point of what happened, it happened, then life went on its unpleasant path.

More commentary probably tomorrow when I'm not wiped.

[Cynical Cat]

It's isn't about the suffering, it's about the STUPID. I've developed a low tolerance to stupid in my protagonists, perhaps due to over exposure in real life.

Off topic, frigid you need to add The Black Count by Tom Reiss to your to read list. It's fucking good and I say that only a quarter of the way into it.

[Josh]

I get ya.

On the review, let's see...

That said the longer you make a series the greater a need for discrete jumping in points where you can pick a book and not be completely lost in the sauce.

This is a tricky one because the books have a strong direct flow. However, the series has a hard stop at book 5, so we're not looking at thirty books feeding off each other. Back when we were first conceptualizing, we had already written the material that became the first two books.

(Funny part being that the material we had for the second book was almost entirely the run up to the battle of Julewa Keep and the battle itself.)

We had the concept in place for Ghost World but hadn't written it yet. Then we plotted it out, figured out what we needed for the next couple, and arrived at our hard stopping point. Now, while I concede the wisdom of never saying never, I have little enthusiasm or interest in picking up after the hard stop, which would involve an entirely new series. Maybe someday, but right now we're both ready to finish this series and move on to newer things.

We do have a prequel on the backburner that goes into more history of the World, revolving around the famous Theorist Lannit, who was mentioned briefly in the first book.

Seg wants to change his culture and save his people and for the live of I can't see what he thinks is worth saving in this psychopathic mess of a culture.

Writing the People has given me a bit of Stockholm in that regard. I mean, there are the clear baddy bad bads, the assholes like the trio of maintenance techs or Akbas, but for the quasi-sympathetic People I tend to see them as what they could've been had they not be raised in an uber-asshole society.

I'm curious, being as how you're my actual combat anthropologist source, do they ring true to you in terms of development?

I'm less enthralled with Elarn, the People medic but he grows on you through the book, much like Seg did in the last one.

It worked! It worked! That was exactly the progression we wanted most readers go to through with him.

Elarn and Shan the pilot are meant to be stand ins for the normal members of the People, so at first you really dislike them but as they remove the sticks from their rears and drop the constant refrain of unearned superiority they become people you can bare, maybe even like.

Shan and Elarn are epitomes of Fismar's line about some people being caj. They're both social cast-offs, Shan due to being an average pilot with test anxiety issues that leave her doing shit jobs with shit outfits, and Elarn due to his bout of medical malpractice. Shan's relationship with Ama gives her an opportunity to drop her blinders, as Fismar does for Elarn.

Lissil, the Welf women becomes a character of interest here as well. She frankly disturbs me a lot mainly because I can understand exactly how she became the way she did. Growing up as a member of a permanent underclass, her only means of advancement was the fact that she was pretty and knew how to play men like violins so she did so. Whenever we get a peek into her head it's a cold, rather emotionally barren place, not because Lissil is a bad person but because she was never given a chance to be anything but a cold calculating women who sees men as a tools and playthings. Why wouldn't she? That's all every person in her life ever treated her as...

The constant challenge with writing Lissil is to follow her progression as a character without making her twirl a mustache. She's a negative and malicious force, but as you've noted for totally logical and understandable reasons. Kris and I had the "Is she twirling her mustache here?" conversation over and over from this book on into the current one we're working on.

Whether we succeeded with that or not is entirely up to the reader.

Additionally Seg takes his crew of half trained manics and decides to give the folks at home a full blown demonstration of why he's a genius and they're lucky he lets them breath on his planet.

Quoting mostly because I love the line, and because you have actually helped me appreciate Seg more. Bear in mind, as originally written he was even more of an asshole, and his progression was slower and he was more oblivious to it. When we were working with our Writer's House agent, he suggested we lighten Seg up and make him more likable, which I resisted. We didn't ever tilt him over to being something like a teddy bear or action hero good guy, but we did speed him up down the road toward abolitionism a full book sooner as a result. In the original drafts, he had a big Oskar Schindler moment in the fourth book, as in the scene at the end when Schindler realizes how many more people he could've saved. But this time around, Seg's already in the game a lot sooner.

Storming (heh) a fortress held by a group of people descendant from a band of exiles who have degenerated into a society straight out of Colorado City, complete with lost boys. Frankly I enjoy seeing people like that getting shot, so it was rather good for me.

I wasn't entirely satisfied that we'd made the Etiphars loathsome enough for the readers to be happy with their conquest, nice to see that it worked for you at least.

Then again I'd just spent a couple hundred pages writing really loathsome shit so maybe I was a bit jaded by that point.

Just wait until you meet the As Dead in the third book.

We also get to see Fismar as a killing machine. Which is pretty awesome.

One of my favorites to write. The mystery of Fismar is unveiled in the third book.

I'm gonna be honest here, I would totally read a story just about Fismar!

Just for you I will take this under advisement. Seriously.

As this book is pulls no punches towards them and almost delights in making them suffer for their mistakes.

That's Kris. She's always like "How can we shit on these characters? Okay, now that shit is raining down from the sky, can we set the ground beneath their feet on fire and maybe give them ebola?"

Thanks again for the awesome review, brother.

[frigidmagi]

Writing the People has given me a bit of Stockholm in that regard. I mean, there are the clear baddy bad bads, the assholes like the trio of maintenance techs or Akbas, but for the quasi-sympathetic People I tend to see them as what they could've been had they not be raised in an uber-asshole society.

I'm curious, being as how you're my actual combat anthropologist source, do they ring true to you in terms of development?

It does work, the underclass of such societies is usually way more into the whole "we're superior to everyone!" ideology then the upper class. Partly because the upper class doesn't really need it and partly because it's pushed on the lower classes as a means of keeping them content.

The fact that the trio are utter losers expect for their membership in the People also helps explain their conduct. Because deep down? In the back of their skulls? They know they're utter wastes of space. People like that are often the most savage excluding the truly desperate. I'd still rather deal with the desperate because they can be moved to pity.

[frigidmagi]

Rat Queens: Sass and Sorcery
Written by Kurtis J Wiebe
Art by Roc Upchurch

“Orcs only know one language, blood. I'm the fucking alphabet.” Braga half orc barbarian

So first graphic novel, I decided to avoid a superhero novel. Not because I dislike superheroes, I love them but because I wanted to give an example of a graphic novel not based on a superhero comic. Just to kinda remind people that there is more to graphic novels then superheroes. I saw Rat Queens after a rather frustrating hour tutoring a very nice lady at Barnes and Noble, mainly because I was explaining things badly. I paged through it and started chuckling. That's when I realized, this was it. Then I did some research for this comic and realized I would be walking into a complicated situation... I've decided to resolve this in the approved Marine manner, attacking it head on.

Written by Kurtis Wiebe, a Canadian from Vancouver who started writing comics professionally in 2009, this is actually the first series of his I've read. In 2012 he won the Joe Shuster Award (named for the Canadian born creator of Superman) for writing. Honestly from what I'm reading here... He's earned it. I hope to see more from him in the future and I honestly hope this is the beginning of a long and awesome career for him. The art of the first issues were created by Roc Upchurch... Who in 2014 was arrested for domesticate violence. He was removed from the comic soon after by Wiebe. I bring it up now because my experience is if I don't bring it up and discuss it, someone else will and then it dominates the conversation. Upchurch claims that his ex-wife hit him first. If she did (there is no independent evidence for that) then she did terrible thing, to suggest otherwise because of her gender is frankly a sexist argument (I won't get into this, this is a comic review). But that doesn't excuse his own hitting his ex-wife. Let me be blunt here, don't hit your loved ones, I know we all get emotional, but we're adults learning to control yourself is part of that. Let me repeat that, don't hit your loved ones. Mr. Upchurch is from what I can find in counseling to learn better, all I'm going to say on the matter is I hope for the best for his ex-wife, his kids and for him. Let's move on.

The Rat Queens is a fantasy comic series about 4 murder hobos who are embarking on the process of growing up... While killing monsters for money and loot. It's the best kind of growing up! But you ask, frigid, what's a murder hobo? Well reader, a murder hobo is a slang term that came out of the D&D tables to describe what it was that our characters were actually doing. See, while most of us start off wanting to do our own version of Lord of the Rings, you know a band of good and stalwart men and women coming together despite their differences to confront a great evil and stop it once and for all. We quickly move on to becoming rowdy mercenaries who fight and kill things for wealth and power. Your average adventurer group has a lot more in common with Robert E Howard's Conan then with JRR Tolkien Aragorn. Most GM's would settle for us deciding to act like John Carter of Barsoom. Not entirely moral, very greedy, hedonistic and perhaps enjoying violence a little to much to be acceptable to wider society (this is actually the main conflict of the book). Rat Queens doesn't feel like an epic fantasy story, it feels like the running in character journal of a really cool tabletop game and honestly I really love it.

While the setting is mostly medievalish, the characters are unrelentingly modern. From our four main characters (Hannah the elf wizard, Violet the dwarf warrior, Dee the human cleric and Betty the halfing thief) to the various supporting and side characters (“old woman” Bernadette the 39 year old elf shop keeper for example) are people who would fit entirely into Phoenix, Arizona in the year of our Lord 2015. As long as we ignore the point ears and so forth. Hannah is a rockabilly girl who is constantly being called by her mother and says things just to piss off her father. Violet is a hipster who turned her back on her traditionalist family to live a lifestyle they don't approve of. Betty is an utter hedonists whose favorite things are sex, drugs, booze and candy, not necessarily in that order. Dee is a woman from an intensely religious family who left due to having a crisis of faith and is currently an atheist. As a side note, Dee's family is the only one we get a glimpse of here and I really like how they are portrayed. Most writers would have been happy to write this as story of a confused young woman run out of house and home for her doubt (does this happen? All to often, but you would be amazed how often it doesn't). Instead it's Dee who decides she have to leave and her mother telling her that her family and her god (who is a blood drinking alien squid... Because of course) still love and believe in her and she can come back whenever. Stuff like that makes Dee and the others feel more like people then stock characters, their backgrounds have humanizing touches and shades of gray all over them.

The main conflicts in this book are also very gray and human. The story starts In Media Res (which is a fancy way to say in the middle of things). The town of palisade was once beset by danger and monsters and looked to a half dozen semi-organized groups of mercenaries and adventurers to fix this. The parties stepped right up and did their jobs, getting very rich in the process. Now the monsters give Palisade space and life is peaceful. Problem you still have a dozens of people whose skills can be summed up as “kill everything in a 20 meter radius” hanging around with nothing to do and money to burn. So they tend to get drunk and wreck the place in running bar battles. This upsets the good people of Palisade who want the adventures to behave themselves in public and not break their shit. This is complicated by the fact that the Captain of the Guard Sawyer (who got his job by being death on two legs) is Hannah's ex who is still carrying a torch (she ain't over him either). This leads people to believe that Sawyer takes it easy on Hannah's group (the Rat Queens) due to his squishy feelings... There's also the fact that Sawyer is taking it easy on the Rat Queens and a number of other groups because of his squishy feelings (and other spoilerish reasons).

Since they can't solve things the legal way, they attempt an illegal way, mainly hiring assassins and luring the adventurer groups out on false quests to kill them. I got a chuckle at adventurer groups on display, we have our ladies the Rat Queens, their main rivals the Peaches (Braga is a member, she is awesome and hardcore) the brony-awful Brothers Pony (in one panel and gone forever, no offense to the pony fans but I'm thankful for that), the 2edgy4me Obsidian Darkness (admit it, you played this group either in Jr. High or High School, it's okay most of us try it out at least once) and frankly my favorites The Daves (because everyone in the group is named Dave!). The Peaches lose half their number killing their assassin, the Rat Queens not only kill their assassin but the random encounter troll. We get to see the Obsidian Darkness (look... there's a lot about 15/16 year old me I don't like okay?) get wiped out. The Daves just kinda show up to the tavern intact like it was no biggie. It's during their rather hamfisted investigation that the Rat Queens start realizing that... The townfolks don't really like them all that much and see them as a problem on par with the monsters. Which for some of them is rather sobering.

One of the things I really like in this story is their actions have consequences both good and bad, finding Braga filled full of arrows and deciding to spend the last of their magical healing on her leads to the Peaches more or less burying the hatchet with them (the snarking remains of course). Killing the Troll leads to negative consequences that almost gets everyone in the town killed. Sharing information with the Daves leads to them running out into the teeth of an Orc horde to back up the Rat Queens. Violet is the one to voice the realization that they've become a very destructive force in their society and not to it's benefit and that maybe they should do better. That doesn't mean giving up on their wild parties or killing the shit out of monsters just maybe every now and again they should think some things through before wrecking the shit out of everyone in front of them. I really liked that and I can frankly see this as the reaction of a GM who has had enough of his players wrecking the shit out of his campaign so by God he is going to rub their noses in their mess ups until they get the picture.

That said the world feels rather tabletop generic. I'm hoping as time goes on and it gets more fleshed out that it'll start to take on it's own character and such. But for the moment I'm being carried along completely on the strength of the characters, the storytelling and if we're going to be frank the violence. They're really good, interesting characters in an good story though so it's not like this story has weak legs. That said, this is not an incredibly deep story, it's fairly basic about a group of young women learning to deal with themselves and other people... While killing monsters, but like I said it's well told and that's frankly enough.

Now I do want to say that this is a very adult story, there are graphic depictions of violence and gore here and the girls aren't virginal choir girls either. They remind me in many ways of a good number of my platoon mates in the Marines, which makes perfect sense to me as they're doing much of the same job and facing many of the same issues. The tone of the story despite the subject manner is actually fairly upbeat and happy and I found myself chuckling a lot. I also can't stress how very happy I was that the characters are for the most part fairly likable as a lot of fantasy stories in this vein tend to be about protagonists that I often find myself hoping die at the end of the story. Don't get me wrong, there's a space in fiction for loathsome protagonist (I completely adore hating Cugel from Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels, oh that is some good hate!) but after awhile it gets wearing and tiresome... Especially if the asshole is always winning and he's got no redeeming character traits (Seg from the Warpworld reviews is an example of an asshole you can root for example). The girls are rough around the edges but in general are decent people which I can live with.

If you're a tabletop gamer like me, or you like fantasy and have a sense of humor (and enjoy watching massive slaughter lovingly drawn and inked). I would very much encourage you to pick up Rat Queens and give it a spin. That said, I would say this is an adult comic book so people under the age of 14/15 should maybe wait a few years (and if you're under 18 ask your folks first, do me a solid and don't get me in trouble here alright?). Rat Queens gets an B.

Announcement! So we're going to try something new folks! After a lot of encouragement I am going to try posting these on a schedule and frankly I think the inclusion of graphic novels might allow me to go weekly so I'm aiming for weekly releases on Friday. So this week is Rat Queens I, next week is Rat Queens II and after that at long last Ancillary Justice! Stay frosty.

[rhoenix]

That was great to read. You enjoyed reading Rat Queens, and it shows - and now I'm kinda curious about it.

[frigidmagi]

Rat Queens II: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N'rygoth
Written by Kurtis J Wiebe
Art by Stejepan Sejic

Here we are with my second graphic novel review, we're still on the Rat Queen train. Rat Queens was and is written by Kurtis J Wiebe with a new artist for this novel Stjepan Sejic. Stjepan is a professional comic artist from Croatia partly know for being the longest running artist on Witch blade. He has many varied projects in addition to that, he writes and draws the Death Vigil comic (which is an amazing urban fantasy comic story about people working for death to fight necromancers trying to destroy life as we know it) and Sunstone which is an adult webcome romance featuring two woman getting into BDSM (I figured this out when I found Sjtepan's DA page). As you might have guessed, Death Vigil will likely show up here, Sunstone won't. Nothing against that, just not comfortable reviewing it... Or reading it honestly.

Rat Queens continues following the adventures of our four main characters, Hannah, Dee, Violet and Betty. Starting the morning after the first graphic novel ends our girls are fairly sure they have solved their problems and that everything will be smooth sailing from here. They are of course completely and utterly wrong because we got a comic series to continue here. But the Rat Queens are blissfully unaware of this, instead embarking on a job for the mayor for 50 gold a pop (this is likely a slightly more realistic treatment of gold then your average table top but 50 gold? Kinda cheap...). While they're out on the job glorifying in their new found respectability and civic responsibility (they had a party and no one got... Seriously hurt! They only dinged one statue!). Other people are catching it in the neck.

I stated last review that one of the themes was that actions have consequences and this graphic novel continues it. This time it's not the Queen's actions that catch up to them, it's Sawyer's. The Captain of the Guard past isn't all that clean and it turns out that some folks aren't about to forgive or forget (not telling you the details, read the book!). This happens as Sawyer investigates the disappearance of one of the supporting characters (who was kidnapped last book). We also get introduced to Sawyer's second in command of the guard, Sgt Lola, who is a bad ass. That said I am gonna nitpick a little here. Writers, would it kill you to go over to Wikipedia and look up a rank chart or two? I mean the rank structure goes Captain-->Sgt---> Trooper? Seriously? What if they have to operate in more then 2 groups? What if Sgt Lola and Captain Sawyer are both taken down, I mean granted they are both pretty fucking hardcore (we see Lola rip apart 7 armed men with her bare hands) but demons and shit happen you know? Would it be that terrible if she was Lt. Lola and had 3 or 4 Sgts under her command? I can get some understanding of how paramilitary organizations work beyond what you saw in a Saturday morning cartoon? I mean really. Good news, this is really my only complaint and it's fairly minor.

Sawyer's kidnapper has a heavy grudge and to prove it, he's willing to summon abominations from the Abyss to end all of reality. This is where things get interesting, because attacking said abominations causes people to black out and relive their memories. Which means a string of revelations for various characters! We get to see more of Hannah's and Violet's back stories which is good, but not the whole thing (Wiebe seems to really enjoy teasing it out). Hannah's back story appears to be rather tragic, we learn that the leader of the Peaches (a group that's more of a duo then a team now) Tizzie, was Hannah's friend in college and for some reason things went south. To be fair, things going south seems to be Hannah's back story. Which honestly explains a lot of Hannah's character. She is easily the most abrasive, defensive and outright angry of the Rat Queens. This novels suggests very strongly that the reason she's so angry and hostile is... Everyone treated her like shit with few exceptions (We see like two) until she got into the Rat Queens.

We also see Violet being profoundly unhappy with the traditions of her family and once she's aware the telling those traditions to go hit the bricks is an options... She does it a bit... huh violently. Interestingly enough, we also see that her Mother is actually very supportive of her choices and decisions. Again it's these touches that make the back stories feel more human and less black and white. We also see hints of why they call themselves the Rat Queens. Hannah is mocked by prissier elves calling her a rat elf and Violet learns from a role model that rats are harbingers of destruction in Dwarf mythology. I really like these little touches. We also get more scenes of her and Orc Dave together and frankly... I love them as a couple. I really hope they stick together and make a go at it. We also get some glimpses of Orc Dave's past and realize, he might not always have been the nice laid back bluebird of healing that we see today. I am kinda intrigued at both his and Braga's back stories and hope to see more. Who am I kidding, I want to see more of all the Daves!

We also learn a lot more about Dee... See those abominations from the Abyss? Well our bad guy stole a bunch of stuff from Dee's... Cult? Sect? Hidden Priesthood worshiping a mind wrecking elder god? That enabled him to summon these things, he of course does it wrong which means now the world is at risk of ending (wait summoning these things could end the planet? WHY DO YOU EVEN HAVE THESE THINGS?). We're told this by someone from Dee's past, her husband. He's actually pretty cool, he shows him as fairly supportive of Dee's choice. Telling her that he wouldn't have bothered her on her journey but a lot of important stuff has been stolen so things gotta be done. He clearly cares for Dee and wants her to come home but he's not going to put personal stuff in front of the end of the world and he's trying hard not to be jerk about his wife wondering around the world without him. Despite being a worshiper of some sort of demon squid... I kinda like the guy. His appearance and the abominations from the Abyss (AfA? AftA?) really push Dee along on her journey of faith. How that picks up in the 3rd book will be interesting.

Interestingly enough Betty remains completely untouched so far in terms of her history or taking a look inside her mind. Sure she's the most cheerful of the Rat Queens and seems the most well balanced. She's also the most sensitive and insightful often displaying empathy for people around her whether they be members of the party or not. I do find myself wondering if she gets depressed easy, which would explain the constant concentration on candy, sex and drugs, but she could also just be a hedonist. I'm hoping for more information to come later.

The tone in this book is more serious than the last one but still rather lighthearted in the end. While dark and bloody things happen, people don't get grim and angst is left in a ditch in favor of snark and battleshiploads of murder. The violence is still graphic and very well done I think. The art in this book does get more sexual. We have full frontal male nudity along with female toplessness. There is a sort of sex scene in the book, but it's fairly soft core with a nude Hannah sitting on a nude Sawyer. The language is of course utterly filthy. This book is not child or work safe and you should get a parents okay before handing this to a teenager (although frankly I assume by the age of 15 they will have seen worse on the internet).

The world gets a little deeper, as we learn more about it. Although it still remains feeling somewhat generic. The characters and the storytelling itself however are more then enough to keep me coming back. Weibe's insistence on dribbling out revelations in bite sizes keeps me wanting more and often the revelations answer a question and raise 3 more in their place. We also still have no idea how these women meet, why Sawyer did a complete 180 in his life, what the deal with Hannah's parents is and so on. But there are more books coming, so I will trust to hope in the future here.

Rat Queens II gets a B, yeah I know just like the last book. It's fun, it's well done and if you're into the whole tabletop feel you'll have a blast. Long as you don't mind sex, cursing, violence, drugs and of course... Rock and Roll.