The Empire's Corps

I like military SF. And I liked the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov. Now imagine if John Christian Falkenberg were to hook up with Hari Seldon and instead of founding the Foundation accompanies him and a bunch of soldiers into exile.

The Empire's Corps tells the story of a bunch of elite soldiers, Marines led by Captain Ed Stalker, who get in some political trouble on a future Earth. The galaxy has been settled with human colonies far and wide, all of them under the rule of the Empire. The Empire projects its will through its Marines. Captain Stalker is given a promotion to Colonel, then sent into exile to a remote colony called Avalon.

Accompanying him into exile is an academic who made the mistake of looking into the Empire's political and economic underpinnings, and discovering the Empire is about to fall. He's had his cushy professorship taken away and his family is forced to live in a bad neighborhood.

Earth is over-populated with tens of billions of people and if you're rich, you live in a nice apartment, and if you're middle class you live in a not-nice apartment, and if you're poor you live in a hellish government housing project. Social control is maintained by threatening the middle class with moving into government housing where criminal gangs run free. Step out of line, get caught, and you're shipped off to a colony world as indentured labor.

This is the Earth that Stalker and his Marines are exiled from. They are exiled to a relatively new colony called Avalon. It has a corrupt central government, rebels in the hills, as well as bandits terrorizing the countryside.

When Stalker arrives he's got a job, restore order. Trouble is that the fall of the Empire is immanent and he knows it. Avalon will be his home and he has to come up with something more stable than the status quo, that won't survive the Empire's collapse.

Happily, the only bad guys are the oligarchs running the show and the bandits in the hills. It remains for the Marines to support the government just enough to let it fall of its own weight. Along the way there are lots of nifty space infantry firefights and bad guys defeated and good guys triumphant.

There is a pretty clear message through the whole book that paternalistic central government control is a Bad Thing and that individual initiative and self-improvement is a Good Thing. I liked the Empire Corps, because it handles the military SF well enough and it provides just enough galactic politics to keep things suspenseful.

All the good guys keep getting thrown into the deep end of the pool and they figure out how to swim fairly quickly.

And if you like it, there are several sequels available. I'll be reviewing them in a little while.

The fall of a galactic empire is a Big Deal and it is a story that gets told from multiple perspectives. One thing to keep in mind is Mr. Nuttall's odd-even scheme of telling the story. The first two novels follow events on or near Avalon. Subsequent novels alternate between the Marines on Avalon, and other parties acting on Earth, in the next sector over, and back on Earth. Clearly, Mr. Nuttall is setting up a climax where these disparate threads are pulled together.

Altogether a most enjoyable read: 5-stars.

Narrative Fusion

I just finished reading Sufficiently Advanced Technology by Christopher Nuttall. I loved it.

The story is set in the distant future and humanity is far advanced technologically. The author terms it a post-singuarlity society, but I disagree. And I disagree because I distinguish post-scarcity and post-singularity. The human empire depicted is definitely post-scarcity, but it is not transcendent. In fact the advanced technology on display is decidedly NOT transcendent. If you are expecting your aliens to be really alien, and your transhumans to be incomprehensibly advanced, be ready for disappointment. Mr. Nuttall shows us supermen like the Greek gods, and calls it transcendent. (If you want to see what I mean about mind-blowing superintelligent aliens, I recommend Michael McCloskey's stories.)

Nevertheless, the humans and their AIs realize that they're missing out on transcendence. And they're trying to get it by scouring the galaxy for anomalies left over by alien races that are either Ancients or Elder Races, I'm not sure whether they're the same or different. Here's a weakness in the novel: Mr. Nuttall doesn't seem to be sure either.

It seems that what distinguishes the advanced human race and the Elder races who have gone on is achieving the ability to manipulate the quantum foam. If you can control quantum foam, you can do rewrite reality. This is like magic. It turns out that a survey ship has run into a primitive world where magic works. And a team of boffins is sent to investigate.

The characters that make up this team include Elyria, a 150-year-old scientist whose rejuvenation treatments have left her looking like a hot 20-year-old, and Dacron an AI who has been jammed into a cloned human body. (Yes, Dacron is the name of a synthetic fabric.) On the magic planet we meet Joshua, a sorcerer's apprentice and his master. On the magic planet we see three kinds of magic users: Pillars who are local despots ruling each city state, Scions who are loners studying magic in the wilderness and getting ready to take over, and apprentices who are being groomed to take over somewhere. Rule is transferred from a Pillar to whoever can murder him with magic.

Eventually, the space people show up and they are quickly found out by the magic users. Elyria gets to know Joshua and Dacron's AI mind is extremely well suited to magic. In fact, when Dacron figures out how magic works, it is very procedural, like a programming language. And this reminded me of Rick Cook's Wizardry series.

I've said before that I generally see magic in stories as either being demonic or incantational, as exemplified by Aladdin (a djinn is a demon) and Harry Potter (incantational). But this novel fused the two categories in a way I never expected. Kudos, Mr. Nuttall. This is one time when I won't give a spoiler.

You see the stuff you expect where the indigenous apprentice regards high tech as magical, and the space boys & girls regarding the magic as sufficiently advanced technological. Happily, Mr. Nuttall has enough in this novel that he doesn't have to dwell on this.

The fight scenes could be fleshed out a little better. When the magic users go to war against the space people, I'd have liked to have seen some more creative use of magic and more integrated combined arms action with magic and Amish-level tech being deployed against the main villain.

Is this story Science Fiction or is it Fantasy? It's a bit of both, I suppose. That's why I called this post Narrative Fusion, because it fuses SF and Fantasy, and it fuses Demonic vs Incantational magic.

Mr. Nuttall has done a marvelous job of world-building. His Elder/Ancient races have left all kinds of things for the humans to trip over, and he just casually drops references to several of them.

This novel appears to be the first in a series and given the quality of world-building, I look forward to exploring it in depth. 5-stars.