First published 2018. Titan, paperback, 2018, pp 411, c.120,000 words.
An entertaining space opera: big guns, faster-than-light travel and communications, weird aliens, disillusioned misfits. All the usual elements of the genre are here, so put your brain in neutral and enjoy the ride.
A prologue gives the set-up: a war that is ended by a horrific act of violence, which has echoes of the use of the atomic bomb to end WW2. The action takes place three years afterwards, where a set of disparate individuals are going about their business and we wonder how they are going to be brought together. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a named character, and many of the chapters are short. I found this difficult to follow and rather distracting to start with as I worked out who was who. It also meant that tension took quite a while to build as each character was introduced.
All the characters were pretty well from the stock of the genre: usually hard-boiled, damaged by their past, goodies and baddies, and as is the way with current SF, women take most of the commanding roles. There are some interesting aliens, although I wasn’t convinced that some of their body-plans were viable or sensible, but one was given a quite distinctive set of attributes and a non-human thought process which was interesting.
The faster-than-light travel is mostly well done, with a quasi-plausible explanation of moving into a higher dimension. There were a few instances of conversations between spaceships that were far apart which demands faster-than-light communications which lacked explanation. There is also, at one point, a ‘Tardis’ like interior that is much bigger than the exterior for which no explanation is given (in Part 2 perhaps?) On the whole though the planets and spaceships are interesting and thoughtfully presented. Spaceship battles are almost never credibly drawn. A missile would have to be accelerated almost instantaneously to the speed of light, and even then would take ages to cross the distances between ships. As everyone knows, even light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth.
One of the back-cover blurbs says ‘in the tradition of Ann Leckie and Iain M. Banks’, and one can see their influence: sentient spaceships, the scale of human and alien expansion across the galaxy and their interaction for example. This novel is well done but not ground-breaking, unlike those two authors’ work.
Powell undoubtedly writes well. Once I had passed the problem of so many points-of-view, I thoroughly enjoyed this romp. It’s a lot of fun, even if there are rather too many ‘my gun is bigger than yours ’ moments. Still, one should expect that from a book with ‘War’ in the title.
© William John Graham, July 2022