THE CHAINS OF THEIR SINS, fourth Taking Shield space opera

THE CHAINS OF THEIR SINS
ANNA BUTLER
Glass Hat Press
$3.99 various ebook platforms, available now

Rating: As near 5 stars as dammit, so 5 out of five

The Publisher Says: Shield Captain Bennet arrives on the Gyrfalcon to take up his final year's posting before returning to the Shield Regiment after his rotation out.

On the Gyrfalcon he faces up to the fallout from Makepeace—ethical, political and above all, personal. Will he be able to accept necessity: that knowing what the Maess are up to outweighs the humanitarian issues surrounding the prisoners he rescued from Makepeace? Can he ride out the political furore that follows the loss of the dreadnought Caliban? How will he cope with an entire year of serving under his father, Caeden? And worst of all, how in the name of every god in the Pantheon can he stand to see Flynn every single day, with the Fraternisation Regs standing between them and keeping them apart?

It will be an interesting year. Bennet can hardly wait for it to be over. Of course, things never really do go to plan...

THE AUTHOR PROVIDED ME WITH DIGITAL ARCs FOR WHICH I THANK HER. I THINK.

My Review: Yes, yes, yes, I get it, you're tired of Noble Self-Sacrifice and Dutiful Self-Abnegation. Believe me so am I. I want Bennet to unbend his starchy spine, I want Flynn to throw his man onto the bed and have his way with him, I want this endless tease to end already and, need I say it?, with these wonderful men TOGETHER. So why the Full Five, since that sounds like a pretty big bitch? Because Author Butler made me care. I'm a cynical old man, and she made me invest actual energy in her world, her vision of humanity, and her still-struggling-with-society bisexual male leads.

But these men are showing us real, believable responses to having your back against the ultimate wall: Extinguishment. Erasure. End as final as it gets. Not your personal death, nothing so small as that; the end of your world and your culture, the death of untold numbers of your friends and family and lovers and all the strangers you can't hope to meet, know, love.

It's repression or catatonic dissociation, and there's way too much to do for such self-indulgence. And Bennet can't ever allow himself to forget the Holy Trinity of his entire life: Duty. Honor. Service. His inner life is a shambles, he's never ever again going to sleep a dreamless night after the horrors of Makepeace are burned on his brain, and he refuses to compromise his entire life's foundations to seek the comfort available to him in the love of his man, Flynn.

Or does he...?

Well, that dangling thread aside, this fourth excursion into the lives of Bennet and Flynn is deeply painful. Losses mount as the war being fought for humanity's survival drags on. The Maess, whose very appearance is unknown to humanity before Bennet's very brief sighting of what he presumes is an organic Maess back in Gyrfalcon, are clearly not going to give up their war of extermination. Their actions in this book are startling even to me. The tactics are obscure, the strategy cloudy. In the end, the danger to humanity makes the last scene of the book make all the sense in the world. But the fifth volume, Day of Wrath, had better bring some clarity to befuddled fans; and let's not forget that Happily Ever After for Flynn and Bennet, eh what, Author Butler?

England's smaller than the Texas county I grew up in, and I'm ready to go Full American Nutter to get what I want.

MAKEPEACE, third in the Taking Shield space opera series

MAKEPEACE
ANNA BUTLER (Taking Shield #3)
Glass Hat Press
$3.99 various ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.almost-...oh hell, make it five of five

The Publisher Says: Returning to duty following his long recovery from the injuries he sustained during the events recounted in Heart Scarab, Shield Captain Bennet accepts a tour of duty in Fleet as flight captain on a dreadnought. The one saving grace is that it isn’t his father’s ship—bad enough that he can’t yet return to the Shield Regiment, at least he doesn’t have the added stress of commanding former lover Fleet Lieutenant Flynn, knowing the Fraternisation Regulations will keep them apart.

Working on the material he collected himself on T18 three years before, Bennet decodes enough Maess data to send him behind the lines to Makepeace, once a human colony but under Maess control for more than a century. The mission goes belly up, costing Albion one of her precious, irreplaceable dreadnoughts and bringing political upheaval, acrimony and the threat of public unrest in its wake. But for Bennet, the real nightmare is discovering what the Maess have in store for humanity.

It’s not good. It’s not good at all.

THE AUTHOR PROVIDED ME WITH DIGITAL ARCs FOR WHICH I THANK HER. I THINK.

My Review: What makes a series work for me is the way the author handles the characters whose lives need to feel real enough to make me go with the unreality of fiction. A series of novels, stories, television episodes...all the same standard. Make me care, make me believe, or make your goodbyes as I move on to greener pastures.

Okay, I surrender. I am officially Author Butler's fanboy. The series has me by the eyelashes and I'm eager to dive into book four, The Chains of Their Sins.

A warning for those who follow me down this rabbit-hole: Do not buy the books one at a time. When you get to the ending of this book, you will be very frustrated if the next book isn't already queued up.

I am an old-time fan of space opera. I like the sweep of a long story. I adore space battles (I'm a guy, shut up). Tech talk isn't up there with dirty flirty but it's close. I want to be told stories that make sense (not necessarily in a straight line you understand, just make sense please) and I like 'em set in space because SPACE my goddesses what could possibly be more interesting?! I mean in fact as well as fiction. And I'm also a big old mushball and want my heroes to find love because heroes have hearts too. Sexytimes are fine, but I *need* my men to fall in love as well as get 'em some or why not just watch porn. (For the sake of argument, you understand.)

So here I am telling you to buy the series, ye fans of SF and ye readers of love-novels but not expecting sex or romance-novel level involvement in our hero's world. He is the hero, the story isn't totally about him, and his world is rich and densely packed with great stuff.

It isn't perfect, of course, but I'll accept the flaws for the great parts.

I'm also really excited by the major development of this book's self-contained plot arc, regarding the military future of Albion.

HEART SCARAB, second entry in the Taking Shield space opera series

HEART SCARAB
ANNA BUTLER
Glass Hat Press
$3.99 various ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Shield Captain Bennet is on Telnos, a unpleasant little planet inhabited by religious fanatics and unregistered miners running illegal solactinium mines. It’s about to be about to be overrun by the Maess. Bennet’s job is to get out as many civilians as he can, but the enemy arrives before the evacuation is complete. Caught in a vicious fire fight, Bennet is left behind, presumed dead.

His family is grieving. Joss, his long-term partner, grieves with them; lost, unhappy, remorseful. First Lieutenant Flynn has no official ‘rights’ here. He isn’t family. He isn’t partner or lover.

All he is, is broken.

THE AUTHOR PROVIDED ME WITH DIGITAL ARCs FOR WHICH I THANK HER. I THINK.

My Review: Author Butler takes us deeper into the life of Shield Captain Bennet, eighteen months following the events on Maess-held planet T18 and on board the Gyrfalcon. As Bennet performs his duty to evacuate illegal religious-fanatic colonists on Telnos, soon to be behind Maess—the faceless, unknown aliens winning a war of annihilation against humanity's great-to-the-10th-power grandchildren—lines, he obsesses over his failing relationship with his elegant, worldly lover Joss; his burgeoning love for Pilot Flynn stationed on his father's ship the Gyrfalcon; and his patient, long-suffering Lieutenant Rosie listens to him and moons and pines for him completely unheeded, unnoticed, unconsidered for the position she (along with the rest of humanity, I'd guess) craves: Bennet's lover.

But that's just the beginning of Bennet's troubles at Author Butler's hands.

And that's why I read space opera: Pile the troubles on with the highest-possible stakes! Then make the stakes personal! Then by gawd create some scary aliens with a baseless grudge and an attitude, some super-advanced tech that is actually just like what we have now on steroids so I can get it without over-physics-ing my brain and thereby losing propulsive interest in the story.

Why I read this space opera is simple: gay guy. Bennet flies in the face of humanity's one apparently eternal character flaw, religious belief, to live his truth as a man who loves men. Add to that his father's strong religious convictions and his family's long tradition of the apparently eternally homophobic military service, his older lover's patrician disdain for exactly *how* his luxurious lifestyle is maintained, and military anti-fraternization rules that Bennet takes very seriously and that prevent him from pursuing his new love for Flynn, and you have a witches' brew of good drama.

Still very little sex. Very little indeed. And what there is is non-graphic by today's standards. More than in Gyrfalcon, I think, though I haven't done a statistical analysis. I can assure the eww-ick squeamish that no unpleasantly meaty words are used and with a small effort of intentional misunderstanding the import of the few sexual scenes can be contextualized as emotional intimacies that can't be expressed in any other way without falseness. Who here hasn't had what you *knew* was break-up sex while pretending the pleasures of a familiar touch were, after all, enough? Yeah, me too, and so does Bennet when the flypaper and prayers that've kept Joss in his life finally blow apart under the final assault: Death.

Bennet, you see, has the bad taste and rude vigor to return from the dead. It's just...unseemly. And after Joss, in the manner of their people, has made sacrifices of his and Bennet's treasures, some of the perfect and glorious antiquities Joss (archaeologist by training) offered up to the gods for Bennet (ancient historian by academic training) to use in the Field of Reeds, back comes Bennet hale and hearty and not in the Field of Reeds at all! The...the...joy? embarrassment? confusion? of it all.

And that "hale and hearty" is solely a valid description when matched against "dead and rotting on an alien-held planet." Bennet is in shards, physically and psychically and emotionally. His body will heal slowly, his psyche and emotions might or might not heal at all ever, and he might well never get to use his new bionic knee back in his deeply loved Shield role. A soldier who's too broken to soldier is by definition A Very Unhappy Man. Add to this soldier's woes the emotional mismatch between himself and his partner. The immense, irresistible force of falling in love with the right one. The awful reality of wartime military service meaning unavoidable separation from your lover.

*happy sigh*

I will say my wish (expressed in my review of Gyrfalcon) to get to sympathize with poor overmatched Joss came true. I was sad for him as he was hollowed out by loss and the hideous, regret-charged acid bath that is grief. All the times one falls short, one is unkind impatient unwilling to understand or empathize...oh gods and goddesses those will keep a soul awake and agonized as they replay unchanging and unchangeable in the darkness! But far more painful is the way they play out like movies on a screen while living, breathing people are making noises meant to distract—console—reach you when you are in the locked projection booth of your failings as the movie of your life replays in an endless loop.

Yes, Joss, I know that one. Author Butler was cruel to you. Goodness knows you deserved it, but...well...don't we all.

And the ending of this story is fascinating. It is unusual within the genre of gay-male-centered fiction. I will read the next installment of Taking Shield, called Makepeace, as soon as I've caught my breath and begun to accept the changes wrought on my feelings already.

Which, if I need to say it, is the hallmark of a really good read.

GYRFALCON, first entry in the Taking Shield space opera series

GYRFALCON
ANNA BUTLER (Taking Shield #1)
Glass Hat Press
FREE!! various ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Earth’s a dead planet, dark for thousands of years; lost for so long no one even knows where the solar system is. Her last known colony, Albion, has grown to be regional galactic power in its own right. But its drive to expand and found colonies of its own has threatened an alien race, the Maess, against whom Albion is now fighting a last-ditch battle for survival in a war that’s dragged on for generations.

It’s not certain anyone has ever seen a true Maess. They have seen drones: cyborgs animated by a small neural node of organic cells. The first drones the humans met (more than a century previously) were not humanoid in shape but, as the war progresses, the Maess start to produce human-shaped drones.

Taking Shield charts the missions and adventures of Shield Captain Bennet, scion of a prominent military family. Bennet, also an analyst with the Military Strategy Unit, will uncover crucial data about the Maess to help with the war effort. Against the demands of his family’s ‘triple goddess’ of Duty, Honour and Service, is set Bennet’s relationships with lovers and family. When the series opens, Bennet is at odds with his long term partner, Joss, who wants him out of the military and back in an academic, archaeological career. He’s estranged from his father, Caeden, who is the commander of Fleet’s First Flotilla. Events of the first book, in which he is sent to his father’s ship to carry out an infiltration mission behind Maess lines, improve his relationship with Caeden, but bring with them the catalyst that will destroy the one with Joss: one Fleet Lieutenant Flynn, who, over the course of the series, develops into Bennet’s main love interest

Over the Taking Shield arc, Bennet will see the extremes to which humanity’s enemies and his own people, will go to win the war. Some days he isn’t able to tell friend from foe. Some days he doubts everything, including himself, as he strives to ensure Albion’s victory. And some days he isn’t sure, any longer, what victory looks like.

THE AUTHOR PROVIDED ME WITH DIGITAL ARCs FOR WHICH I THANK HER. I THINK.

My Review: A classic space opera with a father-and-son reunion that starts a healing process for both men, a crappy demanding spouse whose selfish demands are his undoing, and two worthy mates who, against every single probability in this or any other time, find each other.

This is how you can tell it's fiction.

The space opera part takes up ⅔ of the book. It's really a lot of fun, and any SF fan who loved/s Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 iteration) and The Expanse owes it to themselves to try the first one out. You'll make it if you squint through the sex scene. That's right: One (1) mild sex scene and a good deal of falling in love.

A quibble I have is that I'd like to like poor Joss, Bennet's husband, at least a little bit. As it stands he's a maelstrom of selfishness, shrieking at Bennet as soon as Bennet dares to be one little bit his authentic self. What would it cost to add a little appealing lovingkindness to appear? It's not clear to me, from the man I see on the page, why a muffin like Bennet would've fallen in love with Joss at all.

A minor, minor point when matched against the manifold pleasures of the Taking Shield universe's character developments, background developments, and involving overall arc of story. I am delighted that these second Kindle editions have addressed the earliest reviewers' concerns about some repetitive language etc etc. I found no evidence of such failings in this tale.

Of special interest to me as an old gay man is the relationship Bennet builds with his father, tentatively, in this book. The old man blew his stack when he found Bennet snogging the much older man he would end up married in all but law to; that human failing homophobia was not bred out of us as we went to the stars, depressingly enough. That set off a decade's coldness between father and son that Author Butler has the sense and grace to give Caeden a shot at redemption. He essentially forces the unwilling Bennet to listen to his side of that awful story: He was wrong, he admits he was wrong, and he apologizes.

A dream come true. Any of us who lived through such an event know that this is the emotional core of the series right there. A man coming to terms with his father's love, imperfectly expressed, bone deep, and all encompassing, is an evergreen story. Author Butler gives both father and son the opportunity to speak their piece, and affords her readers the chance to let out that deeply held breath. For many this point of catharsis would be enough value to make purchasing the entire series worthwhile.

But the satisfaction of reading about Bennet's struggles and problems, so personal, so universal, as a gay son of an unhappy parent, a loving spouse to a demanding partner, a starved lover with unmet needs who is surprised by the joy he never thought he was missing...these are the hooks that could, if you'll allow them around your defenses against thoughts that aren't easy for you to relate to, bind you to the series arc for a really satisfying read.

There is so much more to savor.