TEO'S DURUMI, second queer-Korean-culture space opera in The Alliance duology

TEO'S DURUMI (The Alliance #2)
ELAINE U. CHO
Zando | Hillman Grad (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The dazzling sequel to Ocean’s Godori dives back into Elaine U. Cho’s cinematic space opera series, taking Ocean and her crew deep into the cloisters of the Moon and the conflicts of the heart.

Teo Anand, former ne’er-do-well second son of the Anand Tech empire and current solar fugitive, has just crash-landed on the Moon after escaping the latest attempt on his life. But if anyone can help exonerate him, it’s his best friend, bold Korean space pilot Ocean Yoon.

Falsely accused of murdering his family, Teo is running out of both time and options. But loyalties are uncertain in their group of steadfast comrades and tentative new allies, and it’s difficult to know who to trust in the tangled web that awaits them in Artemis, a city on the Moon rich in Korean history and haunted by ghosts from Teo’s and Ocean’s pasts. Further complicating matters are Haven—the pensive medic whose beliefs challenge Ocean’s—and the dashing Phoenix—a space raider who’s come blazing into Teo’s life in more ways than one.

All the while Corvus, the real culprit behind the slaying of the Anands, is sowing a path of destruction that threatens to swallow the solar whole. The crew will wrestle with clashing ideals, flying bullets, and undeniable feelings, as they race toward a stunning final stand.

Teo’s Durumi brings Cho’s space opera duology to an exhilarating close, one that contends with questions of identity and acceptance; grief and redemption; and loyalty and sacrifice, as Teo, Ocean, and the people they love will decide once and for all how to forge their paths into the future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The ending of Ocean’s Godori, both exciting and amusing, gets one's attention for sure and certain. I enjoyed it enough that I immediately upon receiving this DRC opened it and dove in.

Some of y'all are chuckling....

Literally minutes after the end of the previous book, we're into a new narrative regime. Teo's troubles are now preoccupying Ocean and Teo (and Haven, remember them?) with their awesome scoobygroup of really good people. Permaybehaps it's because I never had a family that included me that I've spent my life making family where I was and the stories I gravitate toward are those of made/found family.

Here's a very good example to follow...people who give their all to a goal they share, negotiate within the framework of making "it" work for all...and pulling for things in their orbit to end up better than they start. It doesn't hurt that their Big Bad, Corvus (really authors let the crow/raven clan alone now!), practically twirls mustachios like a silent-film caricature. Really, my one big eyerolly quibble in the books is Corvus' supervillainy being So Very Overplayed. (Well, that and the KDrama yearning between Ocean and Haven being protracted beyond slow-burn, though that does finally end.) I'm sure some of y'all will find the first third of the book being mostly sitting and talking, plotting and planning, kind of...overlong...but stick with it, or better yet read the books back-to-back with no interruption. That is my best suggestion to avoid any hint of a sense of sag in the story.

Phoenix (who, curiously, comes from a background like Corvus' but is somehow not a lunatic murderous sleaze, and I'm left to wonder why) and Teo are very effectively counterpointing our swoony-yearny-KDrama pair. I'm pleased that they have more than what Joseph Campbell called (in that memorable Bill Moyers series) "the zeal of the organs for each other," but equally pleased they're not shilly-shallying around. Lest I leave someone with the wrong impression, this story is not steamy. It's passionate, just not graphic, more the "fire flickered and died" way.

Multiple PoV storylines are often fraught with pacing issues and there's no exception here; I was expecting it so came into the read prepared. As a result the issues I outlined above emerge from this central one. Polyphonic novels do best when everyone in them heads for different places, where in this novel we are going to crash into the same place as is evident from the get-go. S why not use an omniscient narrator, or close third-person narration? I didn't *get* this choice.

Considered on a craft level, I'm at three stars; considered on an emotional satisfaction level, four-plus; considered on a delivery of what was promised from page on of book one level, four.

Elaine U. Cho can write well and frequently does. I hope she has many more opportunities to do it.

ROB GREENE'S PAGE: The First Planets series, perfect shut-out-the-world alt-hist space opera

MERUCRY RISING (First Planets #1)
RWW GREENE
Angry Robot Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Alternative history with aliens, an immortal misanthrope and SF tropes aplenty

Even in a technologically-advanced, Kennedy-Didn’t-Die alternate-history, Brooklyn Lamontagne is going nowhere fast. The year is 1975, thirty years after Robert Oppenheimer invented the Oppenheimer Nuclear Engine, twenty-five years after the first human walked on the moon, and eighteen years after Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven sacrificed their lives to stop the alien invaders.

Brooklyn just wants to keep his mother’s rent paid, earn a little scratch of his own, steer clear of the cops, and maybe get laid sometime in the near future. Simple pleasures, right? But a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes is about to make his life real complicated…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: 8-track tapes! How I hated them...annoying clunky things vastly overcomplicated and bad at their job. Cassettes were a boon and a blessing.

Still and all, I'd put up with the sodding things if it meant Moonbases and Mars colonies when I was sixteen.

Thanks, Rob...this world scratches my itch. This is a timeline I'd've loved living in, so this chance to visit it was really welcome.

This was a re-read in advance of reading book two, below. Here is my 2022 full review.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EARTH RETROGRADE (First Planets #2)
RWW GREENE
Angry Robot Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Becoming the planet's most (in)famous human has not changed Brooklyn Lamontagne one bit, but the time has come for him to choose where his allegiances really lie.

The United Nations is working to get everyone off Earth by the deadline—set by the planet’s true owners, the aliens known as the First. It’s a task made somewhat easier by a mysterious virus that rendered at least fifty percent of humanity unable to have children. Meanwhile, the USA and the USSR have set their sights on Mars, claiming half a planet each.

Brooklyn Lamontagne doesn’t remember saving the world eight years ago, but he’s been paying for it ever since. The conquered Earth governments don’t trust him, the Average Joe can’t make up their mind, but they all agree that Brooklyn should stay in space. Now, he’s just about covering his bills with junk-food runs to Venus and transporting horny honeymooners to Tycho aboard his aging spaceship, the Victory.

When a pal asks for a ride to Mars, Brooklyn lands in a solar system’s worth of espionage, backroom alliances, ancient treasures and secret plots while encountering a navigation system that just wants to be loved…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: "The mice will see you now" said Slartibartfast to Dentarthurdent.

The First and their prior claim to the Earth Humanity thinks it owns, and definitely dominates, left me uneasily aware that the religious nuts' worldview of a creator god who is the real owner of the place and the people is a very, very short step from most SF...at least the kind with superpowered aliens. I'm not a believer in either things (aliens or gods), so I was a bit more distanced from this book's essential worldview than the first one.

As soon as we get into alien territory I lose steam. I like the idea here more than it sounds like I do; alert readers will notice a 4.5* rating, which is no one's idea of a dissatisfied reader's opinion. I'm mostly responding to Brooklyn's kindness and unwillingness to leave anyone who needs help unhelped. I'm also deeply satisfied by the story's ending.

But I'll admit, I wanted to know more about the First than I learned; the book needed to be longer, or there needed to be another one. Read together, in quick sequence, the story moves quickly to its satisfying conclusion...which is why I re-read the first one. It's a long afternoon and evening taken at one stretch, but it worked well for me. Think of it aas one read and submerge into Brooklyn's forty-two degrees antisolar worldview.

Make this two-part story your escape-from-togetherness read this Yuletide if you batten on alternate history and/or space operas without pew-pew battles. Think Flash Gordon with sex clubs, or the Star Wars cantina with booze reviewer's notes sound like fun? Welcome, Soul Sibling, to your dream's fulfillment.

MERCURY RISING, alternate space-race history with waaay trippy nukes

MERCURY RISING
R.W.W. GREENE
Angry Robot (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five (the w-bombs! the w-bombs!)

The Publisher Says: Alternative history with aliens, an immortal misanthrope and SF tropes aplenty

Even in a technologically-advanced, Kennedy-Didn’t-Die alternate-history, Brooklyn Lamontagne is going nowhere fast. The year is 1975, thirty years after Robert Oppenheimer invented the Oppenheimer Nuclear Engine, twenty-five years after the first human walked on the moon, and eighteen years after Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven sacrificed their lives to stop the alien invaders.

Brooklyn just wants to keep his mother’s rent paid, earn a little scratch of his own, steer clear of the cops, and maybe get laid sometime in the near future. Simple pleasures, right? But a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes is about to make his life real complicated…

I PRACTICALLY HAD TO BEG THE AUTHOR FOR A DRC. I *THOUGHT* WE WERE FRIENDS. MY FEELINGS ARE STILL HURT.

My Review: No, really. Mortally wounded that this wingèd not my way until I groveled. *sniff* (And seriously NO MORE W-BOMBS. Cut that crap out, dirty-old-man-in-training!) I was calmly enjoying the mental soundtrack, the 1970s jukebox that's permanently cued up in my head, when *wham* another revolting w-bomb.

But about that jukebox...would we, in fact, have the precise same pop-cultural artifacts in a world that didn't slow down its climb to the stars? The 1968 Cougar, well, okay, that was already on course from 1958. The planning window of a car in those days was five years...so the 1958s wouldn't've been much altered from our world, as I understand the timeline, which diverges first in the middle 1940s and so those cars can be explained. Pop culture spins on a nailhead. Elvis electrifying the country is one example, the Beatles knocking off his cool-cat cap is another, but both of those came in response to specific cultural stimuli. Wouldn't the world be more law-and-order oriented when the Oppenheimer Nuclear Drives are dangling before the lust-drenched gaze of every young testosterone factory? Can't get in one of those unless your nose is clean.

Which, of course, our PoV character (Brooklyn Lemontagne) flouts. But the reason he's able to flout that social control mechanism is simple: Invaders from Outer Space! The ultimate Golden Age of SF trope. This time they're Mercurians, the patent absurdity of whose existence gives even the Hero of the piece (who apparently dies early on) some pause. Can't argue with the presence of stonking hostile warships and evaporated cities, can you.

This takes place among Americans! Of course you can! The whole planet pulls together to combat the Enemy from Beyond...and there are ignorant goofballs talking conspiracy theories, there are hemi-hippies rebelling against the controlling hand of the grown-ups. This is the world, and honestly I agree with Author Greene's take on it. I quibble with some details, but I believe he's exactly correct that even an existential threat with ample death and destruction to demonstrate its reality won't create more than a façade of unity among the irredeemable mass of humanity. (Look around, tell me, and him, we're wrong.)

So I buy the premise. So I consent to set aside my niggling nuh-uh generator. I'm in for the ride.

Part One: Mercury Rising is straight out of Astounding's *1956 volume. Brave Americans and honorable Soviets lay down their grievances and get on with the job of killin' them some Mercurians. (Mercurians!) The Ultimate Price? Paid. Now what? When and where are we going next? I'm almost sure my Kindle screen cracked under the thumping of my thumb.

Part Two: Bad Blood shifts gears, gives us the rest of the battle story very effectively, and sends Brooklyn, our new PoV man, into some nasty corners. And not one of 'em anything but his own idiot fault. Some gross and very personal violence perpetrated later in the section...it starts to feel like we're going to be in Peckinpah territory through the book...and, on schedule, the fecal matter impacts the rotary air circulation device at warp speed.

The thing about living your life outside is that you learn to watch simple things like a hawk. It takes Brooklyn about three times as long as it should to come up with his get-out-of-jail-free card. But he decides there's nothing else for it: Go to space, full decade enlistment, and get the whole shootin' match handled...crimes forgiven, mother fed, and future still neatly fucked, same as if he'd gone to jail without solving the problems he most cares about solving. Yay...?

Part Three: Squeeze Box details the adjustments of life in military training. It's not like I wasn't expecting it. But I also wasn't enjoying it much until I suddenly twigged: Brooklyn's assigned buddy, Tommy, is gay. And nothing at all fazes Brooklyn, or anyone else it seems, about it.

It seems that the Mercurians (!) destroying Cleveland and causing climate change as well as serious ashfall issues gave people something more interesting than who's zoomin' who to fret over. As well as feed innumerable conspiracy theories that, oddly prove to be correct but misaimed.

Part Four: Take the Money and Run did very little for me, but brightened up the contrast between Brooklyn's America and my 1976 US.

There's a goodly amount of interpersonal violence in this story, fisticuffs to donnybrooking (to use old-fashioned terms); appropriate for a dead-end life such as Brooklyn was living and (I hope) merely his own process of molting that no-longer-needed carapace. The end of the part was oddly assorted with its beginning if that isn't to be the case; our man Brooklyn gets out of his mind instead of out of his head, and does so in the place I think something like Coachella or Burning Man *should* take place: The mass grave of an entire city's populace.

Part Five: The Rubberband Man pretty much just cemented the crazy-shit-men-do-together trope for all time. It's an adventure story, that was an adventure, but...not quite the thing I'd've chosen to prove "once a scofflaw, always a scofflaw" to ye olde readere.

Part Six: Flight '76 was apparently meant to earworm me in the most appalling possible way, including a w-bomb in the first five seconds of the awful, terrible, well-below-mediocre tune that refuses to get out of my head. I think SOMEone owes me some sort of reparations.

Part Seven: Boogie Nights starts with a much better earworm, thank the Nine Goddesses. But it's more transition time treats, ABBA on the Moon (!), and some interesting-to-me alt-hist entertainment...Vice-President JACKSON...then off into the Wild Black Yonder. It goes by really fast.

We do see a good, solid character whose trajectory is geting more interesting, though it's a glancing blow. I'm mostly intrigued by this *McCartney singing political rock opera....

Part Eight: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood is an earworm I can live with, if without the good memories of Boogie Nights. It's also the best shorthand for the events of this part...there are so many mistakes and screwed-up connections to work out, the metaphor of upgrading the computer is especially apt.

The ship names are giving me little frissons. The (Marie-Madeleine) Fourcade is a woman-captained solo spy ship, the Baron von Steuben old-fashioned, obsolescent, and largely overlooked haven for the queer boys too useful to get rid of but not important enough to keep secure (much to the PTB's cost), each carrying its subtext like a homing beacon and not just one of the darn things. I mean, what did von Steuben do? And where (in Ohio) is Steubenville? And why is Carruthers so shifty?

Part Nine: Runnin' on Empty truly sets new stakes for literally everyone in this, our one wild and precious life. Titanically, existentially reorders whatever priorities you thought you'd formed by utterly altering the ground you plonk your trotters onto every time you think to move.

I do not know of an Odysseus I'd rather see handle this situation than the one who is.

Part Ten: Flash Light wafts its foully malodorously vapid earworm through the four-foot speaker towers in my mental disco.

But that is as nothing to the sudden but inevitable betrayal that This Land endures at the foul, gangrenous typing digits of Author Greene. I am too traumatized to say more.

Part Eleven: Boy from New York City introduces us to the real Jet...short for Jethro...Carson. And now the first part has closure. What we're doing I won't tell you, but I will say that there's a reason you'll want to read this and it's in this part.

Part Twelve: Take a Chance on Me is the first time I haven't wanted to claw my brain out to wash the earworm ichor off it.

There's a lot to cheer for, and a lot left to learn. This is a good solid familiar story arc and it's got lots of good gauds and gew-gaws bejazzling its basic curves. We're going to be offered another trip, right?

Rapture Right!

PERSEPHONE STATION, seven-eighths perfect noir space opera, one-eighth perfect lesbian SF

PERSEPHONE STATION
STINA LEICHT
Saga Press
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Hugo award-nominated author Stina Leicht has created a take on space opera for fans of The Mandalorian and Cowboy Bebop in this high-stakes adventure.

Persephone Station, a seemingly backwater planet that has largely been ignored by the United Republic of Worlds becomes the focus for the Serrao-Orlov Corporation as the planet has a few secrets the corporation tenaciously wants to exploit.

Rosie—owner of Monk’s Bar, in the corporate town of West Brynner—caters to wannabe criminals and rich Earther tourists, of a sort, at the front bar. However, exactly two types of people drank at Monk’s back bar: members of a rather exclusive criminal class and those who sought to employ them.

Angel—ex-marine and head of a semi-organized band of beneficent criminals, wayward assassins, and washed up mercenaries with a penchant for doing the honorable thing—is asked to perform a job for Rosie. What this job reveals will affect Persephone and put Angel and her squad up against an army. Despite the odds, they are rearing for a fight with the Serrao-Orlov Corporation. For Angel, she knows that once honor is lost, there is no regaining it. That doesn’t mean she can’t damned well try.

I RECIEVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Okay...see...the trouble I've had with publishing this review has been the fact that there are two books here. One, the one you've seen advertised, is a noir space opera with a lesbian/non-binary cast. That book is *fabulous* and I get all verklempt and must retire to the fainting couch when I realize just exactly how hungry I've been for this exact combination of storyteller and story told for my sixty-plus years on this planet.

Then there's a different book, a truly terrifying anti-capitalist cli-fic tocsin rung in your damned scatty ear, demanding that you pay fucking attention to the simple, selfish way you're making your decisions because the planet's just about had it with you and me and the guy behind the tree. It's giving itself a fever to burn out the goddamned infection that's harming it.

As inhospitable as Brynner was, the rest of the planet was far worse, with storms ranging across thousands of miles of landmass and winds of 135 knots or more. The areas not regularly engulfed in severe weather were plagued with hostile life-forms.

I like both books, but telling you about one without mentioning the other...and I've seen plenty of reviews either miss this crucial pont or simply decide to belt up about it...despite the fact I fear you'll now think this is another eat-your-kale book with long-faced Prognostications spoken by Archetypes and ending in DOOM! or worse, ending in Savior-Rescue-Sunshine-Lollipops-and-Rainbows!

Author Leicht has labored mightily practicing her craft for more than ten years, been Hugo-nom'd, and is of finer stuff than that. What is here is a story that will pound your pulse and sweat your brow without rolling your eyes.

Now. What's so hard about that, you're wondering? A lot, let me assure you. Author Leicht is not unknown to me, and I am lucky if I hear from her should I say something she finds stupid or offensive about her work...which, I hasten to add, isn't untrue even of authors to whom I am as unknown as dark matter...so what to do? Mention the apparently-stealth aspects of the read and suddenly find myself unfriended, or go along with the herd?

Well, you're readin' it, so here's to hoping I don't screw stuff up too terribly.

My major grouse is simple. What's feminist about this read? Why, in 2021, should I find it in any way remarkable that a woman is a warrior, a leader, a badass? My mother left her husband, took three jobs, and supported me in 1960s Texas. I am not unacquainted with double-X badassery. Anyone who's witnessed a birth knows how warrior spirit comes to children from the women who bore them. So...lesbians? Is that it? I grew up with lesbian grandma-equivalents, a couple who were Together for most of the twentieth century. Lived together, stayed together, were quietly but obviously together...in the South!

A thumping good read, this book; but feminist? How?

That said, let's look at the world. Persephone Station barely enters into the story, but the planet is...fascinating, yes, but also maddening because *I*WANT*MORE* around how the central surprise about the way it works is accomplished and sustained. I want more about the Emissaries, and I want more about the unusual health effects of the Serrao-Orlov Corporation's primary target. Wouldn't the quality of immortality-tied-to-place rather make the whole thing less attractive? But the sheer joy of Angel realizing she's been played but knowing *why* in the same moment, and entering the conspiracy of silence willingly, can't be overstated. It is an frequently fallen into trap for authors to forget that readers invest in the main character's world-view. Not so Author Leicht. Angel's betrayed, yes; but this betrayal she goes along with and therefore I felt comfortable doing so, too.

And space opera dudes? Your worries about this being all talktalktalkfeelingsfeelings are unfounded. The action scenes are...wait for it...killer good. Angel's a disgraced member of a warrior clan who takes nothing about her strategy, her tactics, or her weaponry for granted. That means you can't, either. And that is a good thing in a space opera. The downside of that is that there isn't room for smexytimes. Of the two things, I can find smexytimes in about a trillion places and I can find lesbian-led SF in under a dozen.

My last observation is about the AI in this book...the Forbidden Being. A woman's body inhabited by a rogue AI, one that's developed sentience and emotional intelligence of a sort, is possibly the most SFnal thing in the book. We've gone beyond Robot, readers. The entry of this character into the book is a turning point. Our space opera finally has an alien. (The Emissaries are cool...they aren't terribly alien, they want what people want.) The way the AGI (as it's known in the book) inserts itself into human affairs often made me think of the paranoid QAnon people who believe in the Deep State hoo-hah...they should love this, I smirked to myself more than once...but in point of fact, it's not far-fetched at all. That was a moment for pausing and reflecting....

Whatever else I can say is a development of the theme "whyever is anyone surprised that women write good, solid SF that centers women as leaders and warriors and do it with panache", so here endeth the lesson. Go buy the book.

Science Fiction for your Kindle to beguile this #Booksgiving Eve

ESCAPING EXODUS
NICKY DRAYDEN (Escaping Exodus #1)
HarperVoyager
$10.99 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

Many thanks to the author and HarperVoyager for my ARC.

I know the author of this book for like fifteen years now. She's got a dry wit, a generous heart, and a deeply subversive soul. This is by way of explaining how I know that, in this twisty and turny story of siblings very much at odds with each other and very deeply enmeshed in each others' psyches, she's explained us to ourselves.

What happens when your intimate enemy, the charismatic and popular one to your quieter, more thorough self, challenges your position? As with all stories of intimate enemies, this is the beginning of the end, and the series of books that will follow depends on hooking you with this cataclysm. Like every blockbuster series in fantasy, Author Drayden sets the stakes high, limns the characters indelibly and economically, and gets you ready for an action-packed ride through a world you'd swear was real.

As book two, Symbiosis (non-affiliate Amazon link), expands the story of how love screws things up for everyone, becomes available on 23 February 2021, it's time to take advantage of this book's sale price to decide if you need to preorder the next. I'm pretty confident a lot of you will need to know how this plays out.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE END OF ORDINARY
EDWARD ASHTON
HarperVoyager
$8.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

Human beings hate people who don't look like themselves, don't pray like themselves, and don't eat like themselves. Imagine, then, what an *actual* difference, like a gene-manipulated extra strength or ability, would cause. You don't need to, Author Ashton has done the work for you. In this fast-paced book, I was eager to get to the next set-piece; but then realized that was what I was doing, waiting for the next Scene while being irked at the clueless-Dad-unworldly-Engineer interacting with people more generally capable than he is. Since it's a very good book to read at a moment in history when we need to take stock of how we cope with Otherness, I'd say any SF fan would do a lot worse than picking this up for #Booksgiving reading.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WHEN GRAVITY FAILS
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER (The Budayeen Cycle #1)
Open Road Media
$8.99 edbook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked awful, but I always look awful in the mirror. I keep myself going with the firm belief that my real face is much better looking.

That is a very trenchant sentence. That is exactly what you're signing up for when you get this book. A rarity now, in the 1980s this book was a unicorn for dealing with Muslim culture in any way, and using near-future SF to highlight the way whites are colonizing the world was still cutting-edge stuff. Digging deeper into themes of identity with transgender characters, refugees from dying Europe, and pharmacological solutions that become terrible problems, the book prefigures the 21st century's obsessions. Readers of transgressive fiction need to rediscover what amazed us in the 1980s because it will amaze and delight you, too.

STARLIGHT, third in Lisa Henry's DARK SPACE trilogy, ends Cam and Brady's outer space adventure in style

STARLIGHT
LISA HENRY (Dark Space #3)
Lisa Henry
$5.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Brady Garrett is back in space, this time as an unwilling member of a team of humans seeking to study the alien Faceless and their technology. It’s not the first time Brady’s life has been in the hands of the Faceless leader Kai-Ren, and if there’s one thing Brady hates it’s being reminded exactly how powerless he is. Although dealing with the enigmatic Faceless might actually be easier than trying to figure out where he stands with the other humans on board, particularly when one of them is his boyfriend’s ex.

Cameron Rushton loved the starlight once, but being back on board the Faceless ship forces him to confront the memories of the time he was captured by Kai-Ren, and exactly how much of what was done to him that he can no longer rationalize away. Cam is used to being Brady’s rock, but this time it might be him who needs Brady’s support.

This time Brady is surrounded by the people he loves most in the universe, but that only means their lives are in danger too. And when Kai-Ren’s fascination with humanity threatens the foundations of Faceless society, Brady and Cam and the rest of the team find themselves thrust into a battle that humans have very little hope of winning, let alone surviving.

•FIRST NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•SECOND NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•

My Review: It's time for the ride to end, it seems. The third and possibly final outing in the Dark Space series dropped on 1 December, and I was up all night devouring it. Author Henry, all is forgiven for the FOUR-YEAR WAIT you subjected us to.

Ahem.

The ride to Kai-Ren's homeworld, or so the men and the audience assume, is on the Faceless battle-regent's (heh; the joke makes sense after this book, promise)...vessel...that has an atmosphere shareable by humans if not particularly pleasant to them. It's also downright inimical to their tech. (A thing I'd think Cam, accustomed to the vessel as he must be, might've mentioned was a possibility, but we're never told such happened.) Luckily, Cam's ex and Brady's object of derisive jealousy Chris Varro thought ahead and brought pencil and paper notebooks! (Although how the paper stays inscribable is somewhat beyond my ready comprehension.) And he's prowling Kai-Ren's...vessel...making copious notes and poking around wherever he can find to go. All unmolested by the Faceless.

In fact, they appear to have no particular interest in the human passengers, not troubling themselves to provide food and water and sanitary arrangements. Of course, the men (and Lucy) brought some food and Doc and Brady brought cigarettes (ickptui and why hasn't the devastated Earth stopped growing the noxious resource-hogging tobacco plant?!), but no one knew how much they'd need. They're in the, um, third month? how does one accurately measure time in an alien environment? of a voyage without a set duration. Where they're going is unknown, how long it will take is unknown, how the...vessel...propels itself is unknown...lots to learn by Humanity, and Chris is the only one we actually see doing the work of figuring it out.

No wonder Brady hates him. He's like Cam: The omnicompetent hero-guy, only this one doesn't care about Brady so he must be a jerk. And why was it again that Cam left him, or he left Cam, or however that was?

And if it was weird for me to be sharing a room with my boyfriend’s ex, how fucking weird was it for him to see us together? At least he didn’t try to pull rank on me anymore, and I didn’t try to stab him in the throat with a screwdriver. We were a work in progress, Chris and me.

These thoughts are part of Brady's ruminating (in the psych-problem sense) about how much he's a waste of space on this trip while simultaneously, and redemptively in my eyes, worrying about the bright spark that is Lucy. Is she developing properly in this weird environment? Is her bright, inquisitive nature going to make her into a Cam instead of her rage-inducing reffo (refugee to us 21st-century Murrikinz) background making her into a Brady? It is a sign of Brady's growth as a person that he's worried about Lucy's personhood on this voyage into the utterly unknown:

Here, Lucy was with me. I was looking after her, just like our dad had wanted. I had Cam as well, and he was more than I’d ever dared to hope for. Cam saw better things in me than I ever saw in myself.

Knowing that someone else sees you differently from the way you see yourself, for better or worse, is a sign of increasing self-awareness and hope, and not a second too soon in Brady's case. His ragey adolescent acting out is touched on in this book but not seen in action. Thank goodness. I was way over that after Darker Space, I must say.

So the routine, set largely by the Doc and his analog clock, abetted by Chris-the-eternal-officer, ticks along until after about three months of relatively unchanging conditions Something Happens. Kai-Ren's...vessel...has finally revealed its true nature to the men's combined observational powers. It is a spoiler to mention it, so I won't, but suffice it to say that the entire purpose of this trip has been to take the humans with the Faceless to a place in the galaxy where the Faceless can begin a new generation. Kai-Ren's position in the inscrutable hierarchy of the Faceless is bolstered and enhanced by the presence of the humans and he shows them off to the lower-ranking Faceless in some humiliating ways. The humans aren't in any position to fight against this, or back after things happen; the Faceless are simply not killable in any ordinary way.

Extraordinary ways have a way of happening quite extraordinarily often in fiction, have you noticed?

As we're entirely in Brady's head during this trilogy of books, we don't see anything from Kai-Ren's PoV and we don't get any non-Brady-level views of Faceless society. But the events that form the climax of the book are all Brady all the time, from the shocking and unexpected moment that disaster strikes, to the intense and exciting ways that disaster gets amplified, and thence to the cause and the resolution meeting in a scene that left me slightly weakened from clenching and sweating. Faceless society has been dealt a major surprise, and Kai-Ren is the vector of and the victim of it. Humanity's role? Casualties, of course, because whether elephants fight or fuck, the grass suffers. Not entirely powerless at last, possessed of a secret weapon that absolutely no one could've predicted would exist, Brady (especially), Chris, and Cam all unite in purpose to get themselves to safety...possibly at long last not illusory!

Thus does Author Henry leave us after around six hundred pages of Brady and Cam's life together. It's barely the beginning of the journey, that much we're sure of:

And after that he kissed me, and told me that he loved me, and the universe shrunk to just the two of us.
***
I would never understand where Cam found his faith, not if we were together for an eternity.
***
...Cam’s freaky prescience...I think that was all him. Or I was as easy to read as book. The sort with pictures that popped up.

Brady's learning how to conceptualize a future that has Cam in it. He's even admitted out loud that he needs to get psychological help when they get home. He's growing up at last, and he's lucky enough to have someone to grow with who is willing and able to grow along side him.

The surprises in this book are too spoilery to go into. But I very, very much want you to know that they make the future for Humanity a lot more interesting, and I hope very strongly we get more views of that world.

He hinted broadly.

DARKER SPACE, second Brady-Cam-and-Faceless space opera, good gay SF

DARKER SPACE
LISA HENRY (Dark Space #2)
Lisa Henry
$4.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Brady Garrett is back on Earth. He’s living with his partner Cam and they’re raising his sister Lucy together. Life is better than some feral reffo from Kopa has any right to hope, and Brady knows it. He’s even grateful for it, most of the time. He loves Cam, even though he’s afraid that he’s not good enough for him, and he’s still having nightmares about the alien Faceless.

Cameron Rushton loved being a pilot once, and he still feels the pull of the starlight. He’s building a life with Brady now, and with Lucy. Life is good, even if it’s not without its complications. Both Brady and Cam are dealing with the endless cycle of interviews, tests, and questions that the military hierarchy hopes will reveal the secrets of the aliens who could very easily destroy humanity. They have each other though, and together they’re making it work.

But from out in the black, Kai-Ren is still watching and everything Brady and Cam think they’ve won, they stand to lose all over again.

•FIRST NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•THIRD NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•

My Review: Pretty much all four stars are for the last 50% of the book. It isn't necessary to grind us into Brady's deeply boring late-adolescent angst for an entire half of the book. At least Brady and Cam are hilarious together. Cam's so patient with Brady's annoying-as-fuck oppositional disorder! What he has to put up with...

“Crewman Garrett,” Stockade Sam said when the MPs dumped me in his custody again. “Your usual room?”

It's hilarious, spot-on, and deeply telling. But I guess when a man has kept you alive by sharing his literal heartbeat with you, allowances get made.

The story's heartbeat, you should forgive the wordplay, is the love shared by Brady the fuck-up and Cam the saintly patient grown-up. He's there, steady and solid and accepting, as Brady acts out again and again and again. As Brady's the one telling us the story again, it's not all that surprising that he's giving us his own slant on the action...but what a jerky kid he is. I know we're all jerky when young, but good lord Author Henry please give us surcease from Brady's solipsism in the next book!

Cam, because of their indelible link established when he needed saving in the first book, knows Brady's past as intimately as if it was his own. He seems to be able to make that work in their love's favor, where Brady is not quite so self-aware or so well-adjusted or something. He knows as intimately as Cam does what was done to the returned...prisoner? captive? plaything?...that Kai-Ren the Faceless battle-regent, um, modified shall we say in his own image.

Don't try to tell me that won't come back to bite him in the ass. (And yes, the antecedent is vague there, by design I assure you.)

So we get a chance to see what life is like for the new family, which now includes the resilient and plucky Lucy. Cam, in his saintly way, makes no objection to Lucy entering his new pair-bond with Brady. I can't help wondering if it had been Cam's sister, how Brady the bratty would've reacted.... Anyway, the couple is tentatively thriving, the world is still spinning, and then *BAM*

Kai-Ren and the Faceless are back.

Suddenly the mentally linked men in Humanity's midst are a Threat to Security. Suddenly the hands-off approach the authorities took to the people wearing the identities of Returnee and Mate is revoked and the fact that they share a mental bond that also includes Kai-Ren and the Faceless is too much risk of exposure to ignore. Let's not forget that this is an Earth whole population was literally decimated by the Faceless not so very long ago. Their caution, well...I'll never really get it, this Security State mindset, but I recognize its reality. What exactly can be done against the Faceless is what is never clear. Their weapons are simply too far advanced for Humanity to defend itself against, so what sense does it make to try?

Well, anyway, there we are and there Brady and Cam are in prison and there Lucy is with Cam's also-saintly parents and the story becomes a seriously exciting ride. I was breathless as Kai-Ren came back back to Earth to invite, for want of a better term, Brady and Cam to see his culture. It is just about lethally frustrating that we don't get to go there as soon as the ship arrives. Kai-Ren's essential alienness is a thing we're allowed to hope, by the end of this story, will be a bridgeable gap. Brady is scared to go back into space, as who wouldn't be when only bad things have happened to him there. Cam is...ambivalent, but honorable, and desperate to stop the extermination of his species. The military men who clutter up this installment in the series include Cam's first love, Chris Varro. Who, for a wonder, Brady falls in love with via his shared memory with Cam...until Chris (unsurprisingly) simply doesn't see Brady.

Ouch! Your beloved doesn't even see you! But wait...how can he...he doesn't know you from a hole in the ground. He was in love with your lover, they were first-loves, not you.

Ouch!!

So of course, this being a Lisa Henry novel, Varro is on Kai-Ren's vessel with Brady and Cam. And Lucy, who simply will not be left. Not that Brady wants to leave her; nor does he want to take her into the unknown, the blackness of space; but he can't, in the end, feel like he's depriving her of Family (a thing he treasures as only one who's never had it can) potentially forever. Along for the ride comes Doc, whose caretaking of Brady while he was a raggedy conscript on Defender Three no doubt saved his life and most certainly enabled him to save and enter Cam's life.

The gang's all here. How long until Darkest Space comes out?!?

DARK SPACE, first in a series of gay SF space operas: Humanity vs the Faceless

DARK SPACE
LISA HENRY (Dark Space #1)
Lisa Henry
$4.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Brady Garrett needs to go home. Brady’s a conscripted recruit on Defender Three, one of a network of stations designed to protect the Earth from alien attack. Brady is angry, homesick, and afraid. If he doesn’t get home he’ll lose his family, but there’s no way back except in a body bag.

Cameron Rushton needs a heartbeat. Four years ago Cam was taken by the Faceless — the alien race that almost destroyed Earth. Now he’s back, and when the doctors make a mess of getting him out of stasis, Brady becomes his temporary human pacemaker. Except they’re sharing more than a heartbeat: they’re sharing thoughts, memories, and some very vivid dreams.

Not that Brady’s got time to worry about his growing attraction to another guy, especially the one guy in the universe who can read his mind. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just biochemistry and electrical impulses. It doesn’t change the truth: Brady’s alone in the universe.

Now the Faceless are coming and there’s nothing anyone can do. You can’t stop your nightmares. Cam says everyone will live, but Cam’s probably a traitor and a liar like the military thinks. But that’s okay. Guys like Brady don’t expect happy endings.

•SECOND NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•THIRD NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•

TRIGGER WARNING FOR NON-CONSENSUAL SEX

My Review: Grimdark story of Humanity with its back against the wall. It's set on a rustbucket improvised and patched-together space station where the only thing for its conscripted grunt crew to do to wile away their mandatory ten-year hitch is wait for the Faceless to decide to kill them and everyone else on every other station then destroy earth's population.

The Faceless have already attacked Earth, destroyed our large cities, and left a bare billion alive on the whole planet...so more like the mid-19th century in population terms...and although it's not stated, the planet's horrifying losses came after global warming was biting. I infer this from the altered climate of Australia, where Brady Garrett is a reffo, that's refugee to us 21st century Amerikinz. He's living a life of near-slavery in a camp where his father mines unstated minerals and is dying from the un-labor-lawed nightmare conditions. Then he's conscripted to serve aboard a space station laughingly called "Defender Three." His ten-year stint starts when he's sixteen...child soldiery is not new nor will it be eradicated from the face of the Earth in any future I can see...and also just as his twelve-years-younger sister Lucy is about to be orphaned by his father's inevitable death. So he's facing a lot.

Add in some rape, some torture, oh yeah and the aliens have one of us they've held for four years! But now he's back! Cameron Rushton arrives on Defender Three in a weird alien...thing, a pod of some sort, and it falls to Brady as the station doc's chosen assistant-cum-trainee to decant him from it.

Hijinks ensue.

Cam damn near dies because no one understood how to operate the Faceless tech that brought him "home." In fact, he's dying in front of Brady, who uses the empathy he'd vigorously deny possessing to reach out and comfort Cam in his last moments. Strangely enough this is enough to establish a psychic connection between the men, and allows Cam to live...with wildling Brady as his literal, soon metaphorical, heartbeat. It's quite a turn-up, poster boy Cam the Captive returning from the tender mercies of the Faceless (awkward!) and then getting hitched to a low-class lowlife reffo as his sole means of staying alive (embarrassing!), as well as bearing word from the Faceless battle-regent Kai-Ren that the enemy is calling off their insect-extermination level "war" with Humanity. Funny thing how he's less popular now than when he was enduring...whatever it was he was enduring at the hands of an enemy so little understood our name for them is "the Faceless."

Humanity is, as always, irredeemable. The Faceless are right to exterminate us.

The world-building is excellent, but the sex scenes...*serious* non-con, very explicit rough play...will send the straight boys screaming. Too bad, too, because there's good space opera in here. I'll read the second one for sure, especially after the ending of this one.

This was a group read in the Goodreads Gay SF group. Thanks y'all for bringing this book to my attention.

DAY OF WRATH, fifth and final Taking Shield story to feature Shield Captain Bennet

DAY OF WRATH
ANNA BUTLER (Taking Shield #5)
Glass Hat Publishing
$3.99 Kindle, $14.50 trade paper, available now

DECEMBER 2019 UPDATE THIS BOOK WON *TWO* RAINBOW BOOK AWARDS! LGBTA Sci Fi/Futuristic and LGBTA Book! The Rainbow Book Awards have been given since 2009. Congratulations, Author Butler!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In less than a week, Bennet will finally return to the Shield Regiment, leaving behind the Gyrfalcon, his father, his friends… and Flynn. Promotion to Shield Major and being given command of a battle group despite the political fallout from Makepeace the year before is everything he thought he wanted. Everything he’s worked towards for the last three years. Except for leaving Flynn. He really doesn’t want to leave Flynn.

There’s time for one last flight together. A routine mission. Nothing too taxing, just savouring every moment with the best wingman, the best friend, he’s ever had. That’s the plan.

Bennet should know better than to trust to routine because what waits for them out there will change their lives forever.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW DRC. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is it. The last time we'll see Bennet and Flynn in a Taking Shield story.

I pause here for sad and lonely reflection. ETA This bonus scene will ease the pain somewhat.

The journey of the series has been a good, satisfying one, and I am deeply glad that I followed it. Bennet's growth as a man and an officer has been steady. He's gained enormous insight into his past and uses it, as one should, to guide his steps into the future. He's been separated from his true love by circumstances beyond his control...any military family will recognize this reality...and has fought his hardest to return to his heart's home.

It is to Author Butler's great credit that she doesn't make the fight trivial by making it easy. She doesn't allow for any la-di-da fantasy of victorious sweetness, either. The Bennet who comes out of this book is a man who has lost and struggled and lost some more, so he's got his feet in the one place we all need to place them in the end: on rock bottom. Bennet has finally found his ground and he plants himself on the first really firm footing he's ever had.

He is not alone. All the characters we've come to love end up with their feet firmly planted. Some of them plant a lot more than their feet...Author Butler isn't afraid to swing the Grim Reaper's scythe. I was most vocally disgruntled about this, and was told by the lady herself that stories make demands that must be met so belt up and quit bellyaching. (I paraphrase. Barely.)

Bennet's life aboard the Gyrfalcon wasn't ever easy, and the return to the ship he's required to make by political events he can barely bring himself to tolerate is really a precisely calculated torture. Flynn is still there...his rigid, judgmental younger sister and his freewheeling younger brother are there...his starchy, duty-loving father is Captain. Not one of these things is calculated to make the uneasy political reality of Bennet's return comfy. Add in Flynn's whopper of a fuck-up of not-Bennet relationship partners and, well, this short reunion the two lovebirds are due to enjoy might just be more trouble than it's worth.

No. Never that for either man. They are each other's lobster, as Phoebe Buffay called Ross and Rachel on Friends all those decades ago. They're the true loves whose path seems never to be smooth, but Flynn really plants his size-13s in his mouth this time. When you get there, you'll know. So the problems ratchet up, the resolutions aren't obvious, and the politics that Flynn doesn't understand while Bennet plays them become orders of magnitude more difficult to navigate.

And then the real fun begins.

Trouble doesn't get bigger than this. Battlestar Galactica-sized big. It's in this moment of pure hell that Bennet crystallizes his priorities and acts on them for the first time in his life. It's a perfect moment, a small and intimate moment, and it's got huge implications for the future.

I don't know how else to say this except "this series deserves your attention and eyeblinks." Wait...yes I do:

BUY THE BOOKS AND READ THEM.

Wonderfully Inclusive Space Opera Series completed in time for #Booksgiving!

This is an overview of the fate of Planet Albion, the setting of all five novels in Author Anna Butler's space opera series, Taking Shield. It set in a 10,000-year-future Earth colony, mother planet to other colonies and in a war for survival with the alien race they've named the Maess. Yep, "Albion" like the old-fashioned personification of England (not Britain, Americans, ENGLAND and yes, there's a big difference). The series tells the tale of Shield Captain Bennet's growth while his world changes out of all recognition around him. His relationships change, his lovers change, his sense of himself changes...but most of all, his destiny is challenged and changed in the most profound possible ways.

It is all too rare to discover bisexual male representation in fiction. It's damned close to unheard-of in speculative fiction. Author Anna Butler has written the series as the space opera it is, and hasn't done the most common thing I see in today's marketplace: Romanced the story. Made it about the kissy-face and sexytimes. While that's great and I won't front about not enjoying those stories, this series isn't about the zeal of the organs for each other (to quote Joseph Campbell from The Power of Myth). It is a space opera first and last, its heroes just happen to be bisexual men, and the entire direction of the story would be different if they were not. The destiny of Albion and thus of our protagonists wouldn't change, but the emotional arc would be very different.

There are some world-building details to discuss. I found them all to my liking, and your personal response to them is likely to be a reliable index to your eventual enjoyment of the stories:

The Albionese have only one name, used in conjunction with a title where appropriate (eg, titled aristocrats, military personnel). I was a little bumfuzzled by this at first. There are bound to be billions of humans on Albion and its colonies, after all. But then it occurred to me that, in a society as advanced as this one, there are multiple biometric forms of identification available, so identifying yourself officially isn't necessarily name-dependent and, socially, how many of us are known by our full names now? There would be significant social pressure not to use names too freely. I can dig it.

The Albionese worship a Pantheon of Gods derived from Egyptian models, settled in Albion's landmasses with Hellenistic province names, and have a Parlialimentary (not a typo) democracy that very closely resembles the debased and disgusting kakistocracy (get it now?) of today. Author Butler starts us out with the following teaser on her website:

Taking Shield started out as a simple ‘what if’ set of questions. What if in some AU universe Earth’s been a burnt out dustball for the last ten thousand years? What if we do a riff on the Exodus and have remnants of humanity escape, but led by Pharaohs? What if the new world they found, Albion, is at war with an enemy no one has ever seen? What if the hero is a member of Albion’s special forces *and* the Military Strategy Unit? What if he finds something that seriously threatens Albion? What if he falls in love with a Fleet pilot and has his life turned upside down?

And somehow that grew into a serial of four books so far with more to come.

My issues with the Albionverse are few, really, the biggest having to do with the improbability of feet, miles, a.m./p.m. and other specific-to-earth measurements surviving more than 10,000 years when meters, kilometers, light-years, and military time-keeping are so much better suited for the Universe as we know it. Author Butler saw my bleat of dissatisfaction, recognized it for what it is...a fan's grumble not a detractor's brickbat...and gave me the following explanation, which I present to you with her consent:

Albion's days, months and years are not the same as Earth's but the words used for those measurements of time on Earth have translated across with different values*. Similarly other earth measurements have translated. Some - like parsec or lightyear remain constants because immutable physical law demands they do. Others have new, Albion-specific values. My reasoning was that having lost Earth to catastrophe (see Passing Shadows, the prequel, for what happened), the survivors clung very hard to whatever of Earth they could take with them. I'm English. We have the most mixed system here of decimalised coinage and weights and measures, but still measure our distances and things like car speeds in terms of miles. Nostalgia has the people of Albion clinging to the terms their ancestors knew best. From which you may gather that despite the Egyptian overtones, Albion (and Bennet) is most definitely British!
* Albion has a normal year of 412 days:
ten months of forty days each divided into four equal ten-day weeks plus an extra week at the end of each year, Yule week, to absorb the outstanding 12 days.
each day has 25 hours, each hour has 100 minutes.
Those minutes, hours, days are not the same as Earth's. I worked out to my own satisfaction that each Albion day of 25 hours is equivalent to around 29 Earth hours, 35 minutes . So each Albion minute = 42.6 Earth seconds.

Albion's actual rotation is 412 and some 8 hours so in every third year, Yule week is 13 days long, with an extra day to compensate and to align the calendar with the sun's apparent position—pretty much like our leap years. Albion's leap day is actually a few extra minutes longer than normal, for real accuracy, but I don't trouble my head about that level of detail!

There are truly arbitrary figures that doesn't at all *matter* in terms of the story, but were created for my own amusement and which I now share, for yours.

These are the sorts of details that vastly increase my personal pleasure in a series of books set on a made-up planet. I figure that, since you're reading my blog, you're at least slightly more likely than the Normals to want some sort of satisfaction regarding seeming inconsistencies that are actually designed-in landscape features. Just think of Author Butler as a literary Capability Brown.

I'd love to see more of the Egyptian roots of the world, for an example of an area of dissatisfaction; the series is clearly populated by people of England-English descent, based on the culture's stratification and its Parliamentary democracy in place. How'd we get to Egypt? I'm not against it, or bitching about it, just curious. What would lead a bunch Brits to mummify their dead, for example? I get the whole art style revival since they've done it twice before (the 1790s and the 1970s), but this is a deep cleavage from British norms and bears some 'splainin'. And Bennet *is* an historian....

The website has a handy-dandy obsessive fanboy's guide to the rich background of Albion and its institutions as they are at the time of the stories herein told. It's a really interesting way to get your obsessive series-reader's feet wet. Try the first book risk-free, for free, freeing you up to decide whether Bennet and Flynn and Albion and the Maess are your cuppa joe. (I hate tea.)

PASSING SHADOWS, prequel of the Taking Shield series of space operas

PASSING SHADOWS
ANNA BUTLER (Taking Shield #0.5)
Glass Hat Press
$2.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Li Liang has found a berth to suit her: chief pilot and first officer of the all-female crew of an old space freighter, the Sappho. Then one ordinary, unremarkable morning, Liang retunes the Sappho’s communications systems just in time to catch the breathless, terrible accounts from Mars of the total destruction of Earth.

Earth’s a cinder. The unknown alien race that destroyed it has left Mars, too, in flames and is ravening outward from the solar system, devouring every human colony on the way. Liang’s one of the few survivors, racing ahead of the Devourers, rescuing as many frightened, shocked people as she can. Will Liang and the pitiful remnants of humanity find a new haven, somewhere to start again? Or will she, too, echo the dreadful last message coming out of their dead home?

They’re coming. Oh God, they’re coming.

My Review: Oh my. Yes, Author Butler has done it, she's done my poor old man's heart muscle permanent injury this time.

Remember how much I liked the first four books? If not, refresh yourself by reading up on the pleasures of Bennet and Finn's world coming crashing down around their ears as they, fine fighting men that they are, do their dead-level best to mitigate or even prevent it from happening. That was Author Butler's first assault on me.

The second was making Bennet and Finn fall head-over-heels in love with each other. Despite Bennet's long-term relationship with Joss, Finn's love-'em-and-leave-'em history, Bennet's career in the spy corps, Finn's posting to Bennet's anti-gay father's ship....

And now, with this lovely tale of Liang and Alice and Matt and his loves...well...the damage, she is irretrievable. Because now we find out what happened to Earth, what this has done to the survivors, how the men and women of Humanity's diaspora likely lost their belief in the monotheistic gawd I so ridicule them for bothering themselves to believe in in the first place. I mean really, how could one take seriously a gawd that allowed the original home of your species to get utterly blown into ash and smithereens?

Of course the question of how they found and resurrected the Egyptian pantheon will niggle at me until Author Butler gets sick of my emails alternately demanding and supplying ideas for that lacuna's filling-upping. My current favorite: Bennet, retired from Shield, takes Finn, retired from Fleet, on a honeymoon to an archaeological dig on a newly relocated planet where Humanity stopped for a while and left behind clues about the Egyptian pantheon's recrudescence.

Hijinks ensue.

Hmm? Well, whadda y'all think?

Yeah, Author Butler's quiet about it too. *sigh*

Anyway. This novella is an afternoon's read, it sets the stakes for Bennet and Finn's world, and it contains this author's trademark homophile characters complete with real-life reasons to do what the plot tells them to. I like the series. I like the prequel. I suspect the Devourers have not vanished from Taking Shield. And I am eager to get the next full novel.

Like, REAL SOON. *glowers Blightyward*

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.

The TAKING SHIELD series, the first four of five (plus a prequel novella) planned I've read and loved

**REVIEWS ARE HERE: #1 GYRFALCON ; #2 HEART SCARAB ; #3 MAKEPEACE ; #4 THE CHAINS OF THEIR SINS ; #5 DAY OF WRATH

This is an overview of the Planet Albion, the setting of all four novels currently available in Author Anna Butler's space opera series, Taking Shield. It set in a 10,000-year-future Earth colony, mother planet to other colonies and in a war for survival with the alien race they've named the Maess. Yep, "Albion" like the old-fashioned personification of England (not Britain, Americans, ENGLAND and yes, there's a big difference).

Albion, as envisioned (literally!) by William Blake (Wikimedia image)

The Albionese have only one name, used in conjunction with a title where appropriate (eg, titled aristocrats, military personnel). I was a little bumfuzzled by this at first. There are bound to be billions of humans on Albion and its colonies, after all. But then it occurred to me that, in a society as advanced as this one, there are multiple biometric forms of identification available, so identifying yourself officially isn't name-dependent and socially how many of us are known by our full names now? There would be significant social pressure not to use names too freely. I can dig it.

The Albionese worship a Pantheon of Gods derived from Egyptian models, settled in Albion's landmasses with Hellenistic province names, and have a Parlialimentary (not a typo) democracy that very closely resembles the debased and disgusting kakistocracy (get it now?) of today. Author Butler starts us out with the following teaser on her website:

Taking Shield started out as a simple ‘what if’ set of questions. What if in some AU universe Earth’s been a burnt out dustball for the last ten thousand years? What if we do a riff on the Exodus and have remnants of humanity escape, but led by Pharaohs? What if the new world they found, Albion, is at war with an enemy no one has ever seen? What if the hero is a member of Albion’s special forces *and* the Military Strategy Unit? What if he finds something that seriously threatens Albion? What if he falls in love with a Fleet pilot and has his life turned upside down?

And somehow that grew into a serial of four books so far with more to come.

My issues with the Albionverse are few, really, the biggest having to do with the improbability of feet, miles, a.m. and other specific-to-earth measurements surviving more than 10,000 years when meters, kilometers, light-years, and military time-keeping are so much better suited for the Universe as we know it. Author Butler saw my bleat of dissatisfaction, recognized it for what it is...a fan's grumble not a detractor's brickbat...and gave me the following explanation, which I present to you with her consent:

Albion's days, months and years are not the same as Earth's but the words used for those measurements of time on Earth have translated across with different values*. Similarly other earth measurements have translated. Some - like parsec or lightyear remain constants because immutable physical law demands they do. Others have new, Albion-specific values. My reasoning was that having lost Earth to catastrophe (see Passing Shadows, the prequel, for what happened), the survivors clung very hard to whatever of Earth they could take with them. I'm English. We have the most mixed system here of decimalised coinage and weights and measures, but still measure our distances and things like car speeds in terms of miles. Nostalgia has the people of Albion clinging to the terms their ancestors knew best. From which you may gather that despite the Egyptian overtones, Albion (and Bennet) is most definitely British!
* Albion has a normal year of 412 days:
ten months of forty days each divided into four equal ten-day weeks plus an extra week at the end of each year, Yule week, to absorb the outstanding 12 days.
each day has 25 hours, each hour has 100 minutes.
Those minutes, hours, days are not the same as Earth's. I worked out to my own satisfaction that each Albion day of 25 hours is equivalent to around 29 Earth hours, 35 minutes . So each Albion minute = 42.6 Earth seconds.

Albion's actual rotation is 412 and some 8 hours so in every third year, Yule week is 13 days long, with an extra day to compensate and to align the calendar with the sun's apparent position—pretty much like our leap years. Albion's leap day is actually a few extra minutes longer than normal, for real accuracy, but I don't trouble my head about that level of detail!

There are truly arbitrary figures that doesn't at all *matter* in terms of the story, but were created for my own amusement and which I now share, for yours.

These are the sorts of details that vastly increase my personal pleasure in a series of books set on a made-up planet. I figure that, since you're reading my blog, you're at least slightly more likely than the Normals to want some sort of satisfaction regarding seeming inconsistencies that are actually designed-in landscape features. Just think of Author Butler as a literary Capability Brown.

I'd love to see more of the Egyptian roots of the world, for an example of an area of dissatisfaction; the series is clearly populated by people of England-English descent, based on the culture's stratification and its Parliamentary democracy in place. How'd we get to Egypt? I'm not against it, or bitching about it, just curious. What would lead a bunch Brits to mummify their dead, for example? I get the whole art style revival since they've done it twice before (the 1790s and the 1970s), but this is a deep cleavage from British norms and bears some 'splainin'. And Bennet *is* an historian....

The website has a handy-dandy obsessive fanboy's guide to the rich background of Albion and its institutions as they are at the time of the stories herein told. It's a really interesting way to get your obsessive series-reader's feet wet. Try the first book risk-free, for free, freeing you up to decide whether Bennet and Flynn and Albion and the Maess are your cuppa joe. (I hate tea.)