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.

I So Wanted To Love Crimson Worlds

My politics are apparent to anyone with access to NSA intercepts. So, I read a comment about a series of Military Science Fiction novels by Jay Allan that led me to believe him to be a fellow-traveler. No, he's not a Whig, but he loves freedom like I do and he believes in TANSTAAFL, which is close enough to make traditional publishers dismiss his prose out of hand.

So, sight unseen, I bought a prequel (Tombstone) and Marines, The Cost of Victory, A Little Rebellion, The First Imperium, and The Line Must Hold. Are these bad novels? Not really. Are they badly written? Not really. Are the stories bad? Not really. Should I have purchased books so indiscriminately? Not really.

It's not that these books are full of typos and misspellings. Really, they're quite clean for self-published work. Mr. Allan should be happy with his copy editor(s) who have done a good job. And it's not as if Mr. Allan is a bad writer. I think he displays several rookie mistakes, but they're not as bad as some others I've complained about here.

I'm not happy with these novels because I wanted to love them, but they let me down. They let me down by peeving me.

Do you write with an Omniscient POV? You shouldn't. Do you tease the reader with what you know and what the reader does not? You shouldn't overdo it. Do you repeat things you already disclosed to the reader previously? You shouldn't overdo it. Do you write scenes wherein the antagonist and his cabal explain to the reader what insidious plans they have in mind for the protagonist? You shouldn't overdo it. Does Mr. Allan do all these things? Yup.

In short, I was repeatedly peeved with Mr. Allan's novels. But I kept on hoping my peevishness would go away by the end of the series. Ultimately, I ran out of patience.

Should you read Jay Allan's novels? Yes. Should you stop at A Little Rebellion? Yes. Should you stop at  First Imperium and read Perry Rhodan translations instead? Yes.

Specifically, what disappointed me with First Imperium was the physics of anti-matter. I'm pretty good at handwavium and I can tell when someone is faking it. In the case of Mr. Allan, I could tell that he was just taking big numbers and multiplying them by 10x or 1000x depending upon whether he's talking about g-loads or about megaton-yields.

And I'm disappointed with his vision of technological advancement. Consider if you will, the difference between the technology of today with the technology of a thousand years ago. The stuff we're doing today is completely incomprehensible to William the Conqueror. We have things like arrows, shields and cavalry, but they're not just quantitatively scaled-up versions, but qualitative improvements and categories of warfare inconceivable and unimaginable to him.

Further, consider the rate of technological change that has dramatically accelerated over the last few decades. The some stuff we're doing today is completely incomprehensible to William Tecumseh Sherman or William Westmorland.

Should humanity encounter advanced aliens who are above our level of technological development, the difference won't be that they have antimatter and we don't. They are far less likely to be deploying robotic infantry, but making our sun go nova or opening big-bang-style white-holes near our space fleets. At least that's what I have my advanced aliens intending to do.

I like the idea of a young human race encountering an old alien race in decline, but I am peeved by the way that Mr. Allan handles it.

For these reasons, I want to give these novels more than 4 stars, but am so peeved at them that I think this unduly generous.

Little Did I Suspect

This isn't as much a deep or profound observation on writing as much as an annoyed gripe about a pet peeve.

I'm amidst of reading some military SF and the narrative is first-person. I just read these words: "I would get an answer to that question, but not until years later."

First, let me tell you how good it feels for the writer to tip his hand like this. It is like exulting in one's godhood.

Second, it tells the reader too much. Sure the narrator is in space armor on an alien world with lots of hostile forces arrayed agains him. We fully expect him to go into battle and face insuperable odds. And we fully expect him to have to face and conquer his inner fears. Most likely, things that should work will break, and expected allies will betray him. All at the worst times imaginable.

But we know this guy is going to survive for years to come. Moreover, he'll survive in a manner that he'll be in a position to know the answer to his question. He's immortal. Though he may be wounded, he won't be killed. Though he may be captured, he'll escape with his mind intact. And we know the timetable for resolution of the matter is years in the future.

The writer is tipping his hand on what's coming and the reader need never fear for the narrator's safety.

I think this damages the relationship between reader and writer. OK, if we know our hero is going to make it, cut to the chase and take us to something we don't know. This isn't fair of me, because the reader ultimately wants to know HOW the hero wins the day. But I think this is a poor transaction on the writer's part. S/He gets an ego-boost. The reader gets an quantum of reduced suspense.

It's my opinion that the reader should get maximal suspense as most story questions are answered after a chapter or two except for The Big Story Question being raised in the opening pages and answered in the novel's climax. Something like the "little did I suspect" passage throws this pattern into a cocked hat. Is it a major infraction? Probably not.

It is just a pet peeve
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Knox's Irregulars

I've been watching a lot of Bollywood and they have no problem talking about God or gods or Allah whatsoever. They seem a lot more free about such things.

I have a friend who is a Christian. When he saw the Avengers movie, he remarked about the line when Captain America says there's only one God. And when he saw Prometheus he remarked about the cross that the girl who played Elizabeth Shaw wore. He claimed the character was a Christian and I remain skeptical. Yes, the girl wore a cross and this is the symbol of Christianity.

But I want to see something more in the depiction of a Christian or what it means to be one. Something more like this. Why, yes, that is almost the picture of a cracked pot.

In both cases, my friend made me a little sad. He's so used to any kind of faith being deprecated on the Hollywood screen and he seems like a starving man grasping at crumbs.

Now, you can find movies where faith is not just mentioned in passing, but a central part of the narrative. I don't like them much. They are often heavy handed.

I like my religion kept between the lines like they did in the Lord of the Rings or the Narnia movies. The narrative doesn't tell you about deity or our moral obligations as much as show you Frodo and Samwise doing rightly.

The word Evangelical implies some overt sharing of one's faith, and commonly Evangelicals are exhorted to witness. But this is all too rare, because Evangelicals too often preach instead. Witness means to relate one's own experiences. E.g. I witnessed the bank hold up and I saw three men wearing masks, et cetera. Preaching means to assert propositions generally on the basis of authority.

In writing, we're told "show don't tell" and that's like the Evangelicals' exhortation to witness, not preach. Thus I prefer Lord of the Rings because Tolkien is showing Christian living instead of telling it to us.

Recently, I read a novel, Knox's Irregulars. It is a military Science Fiction novel about a resistance effort against foreign invaders on another planet.

The story begins with a setup. A bunch of communist atheists with Islamic-sounding names from somewhere-i-stan in the former Soviet Union colonized a planet a few generations back and they do what socialists generally do: make a hash of it and run out of other people's money.

Meanwhile back on Earth there's a second Reformation and a bunch of Calvinists want to start a colony, but all the planets are already taken. They can get a deal on buying an undeveloped hunk of land on the planet of the communist-atheist-space-nazis. They call their colony New Geneva.

Things go well for a couple of generations as the Calvinists' work ethic creates a ton of wealth while the communist-atheist-space-nazis creates envy. As you'd expect, after a purge of the moderates in the bad guys' government, and some ethnic cleaning in their own country, they decide to invade New Geneva.

All of the place-names in New Geneva will be familiar to the student of the Reformation. Many of the characters surnames are those of old-school Princeton divines.

The hero is a young man in a mechanized suit of armor named Knox and his dad happens to be the governor of New Geneva. So, after everyone in the regular army is overrun, Knox starts a resistance movement behind enemy lines.

Now, if this were David Drake writing the story, the good guys would be Satanists and the bad guys would be Baptist Brethren. Everything is turned upside down and the Calvinists are the good guys for a change. I liked to see that change. The story even makes reference to Thermopile. The pattern of the war follows that of the ancient Greeks vs Persians: free Greeks using their wits and initiative to defeat a much larger force of enslaved Persians. So far, so good.

I liked the setup, but around midway through the story, the author had to start preaching. Not in a heavy-handed way, but it wasn't as graceful as C. S. Lewis in Narnia. His heroes are good, and his villains are evil, and we get a nice redemption story. But the preaching to witnessing ratio was off.

The story's end was suitably dramatic, but it lacked the almost pornographic aspect of good guys you really love just putting it to the bad guys you really hate. There's a pattern I've grown to expect in military science fiction that was missing here. The good guys need to have an ace in the hole, a plot device that visits wholesale destruction and mayhem upon the bad guys. In this story, the good guys and bad guys just punched each other to exhaustion. Maybe this is more realistic, but I missed the amazing technological gizmos that laid waste to massively overwhelming numbers of bad guys.

I so wanted to love this novel, but I have to admit that I only liked it a lot. 4 of 5 stars.