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Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

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Augment Nation by Scott Overton

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Augment Nation is a science-fiction novel of the old school, portraying the collision of all-too-human characters with plausible new technology, along the way serving as a chilling cautionary tale.

Our story begins about a decade from now. David Leiter is a fourteen-year-old boy, critically injured in an automobile accident. He suffers serious brain injury, and develops a condition called visual agnosia, an inability to process or recognize visual stimuli. He can still see, but he has lost the ability to interpret what he sees, identifying objects or recognizing faces. Luckily, he is selected to receive a radically experimental treatment – a computerized implant to augment his brain’s natural functions.

At first the implant only operates to mitigate David’s agnosia, but over time he learns to use it for other purposes: logging into wireless networks, browsing the Internet, mastering computational skills, and so on. Unfortunately, these new abilities also come with a heaping dose of alienation. His peers notice his social awkwardness, missteps with young women earn him a poor reputation, and authority figures punish him for suspected unfair advantages.

Only once David graduates from high school – taking some revenge against the worst of his tormentors on the way out – is he able to start building a worthwhile life of his own. He moves to university, taking the new name of Damon and setting aside his miserable adolescence, and life begins to improve dramatically for him. His implants are upgraded with new hardware and software, providing him with still more new abilities. His skills turn out to be a boon in academia and employment, he becomes less socially inept, he even finds ways to build healthy relationships with women. For a few years, he moves from success to success.

Yet slowly, Damon realizes that the gift of his computer implants has not come without a price. Someone is watching his progress, even after he has taken steps to avoid being monitored. Technology that was tested on him is being deployed to more and more people . . . and it becomes plain that shadowy corporate and government interests do not have any individual’s best interests at heart.

Mr. Overton’s prose style is very clean; I noticed one or two formatting issues in my e-book copy, but nothing to pull me out of the story. He exercises very good viewpoint discipline. The story does need quite a lot of exposition, but none of it is clumsy or obtrusive, almost entirely arising through Damon’s understanding of the world. This is a very well-crafted novel as far as the mechanics are concerned.

David (Damon) has a compelling story with some very credible challenges. Augment Nation isn’t just an exploration of plausible future technology, it’s a story about individuals caught up in the machinations of unscrupulous power. There are those in the story who would gladly use the new technology to lie and manipulate the public, and Damon’s confrontations with them are downright frightening. In the end, the story isn’t just recounting a personal odyssey, it’s describing a potential failure mode for civilization itself. Once I finished this novel, I found myself much more skeptical about the prospect of brain-machine interface technology than I was before I began.

One minor advisory for the reader. Augment Nation is about, among other things, a teenage boy discovering the potentials of new technology. As we might expect, some of the applications he finds have to do with sex, with all the awkwardness any young man might experience! The story is often frank, although never explicit. I found none of this material offensive, although some of Damon’s experiences were mildly uncomfortable to read about; your mileage may vary.

I thoroughly enjoyed Augment Nation, and it left me wanting to read more of Mr. Overton’s work. Very highly recommended if you enjoy believable near-future science fiction with some rather disturbing implications.

2022 in Review

2022 in Review

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For all the chaos out in the world at large, 2022 was a decent year for me as a part-time creative and blogger. Traffic to this blog continues steady, although there wasn’t quite as much as during the previous year. I still have a couple dozen patrons who are supporting my work.

I also managed several major accomplishments this year. In particular, I finished writing the first full draft of Architect of Worlds in 2022 – not bad for a project I’ve been working on for over six years at this point. There’s a near-certain chance I’ll have that book ready for release sometime in 2023.

Meanwhile, I did some work on the Human Destiny setting, putting together early partial drafts of the core book and the Atlas of the Human Protectorate. These seem likely to be tabletop RPG releases at some point, most likely under the Cepheus Engine system. Once Architect of Worlds is released, this is likely to be a good candidate for more attention.

I also revived an old novel project, Twice-Crowned, and got perhaps 40% of the first draft of that written. That’s another good candidate for more progress in the coming year, especially since its alternate-historical fantasy setting has been growing on me at a rapid pace. I may start writing that up as another tabletop RPG setting in the coming year, most likely as a Cypher System RPG under Monte Cook Games’ creator program.

Meanwhile, I got a round dozen book reviews done. I seem to be a success at that – I’ve been able to push out a review every month like clockwork for a couple of years now, and those reviews seem to be bringing at least a little attention to my other work too.

One thing I didn’t do much of this year is short fiction. I did push a couple of short items to this site as free stories, but those were mostly old writing being given a new venue. I’ve got several concepts for new short fiction that I want to work on soon, if I can get Architect moving toward release.

The top ten posts for 2022 turn out to be:

  1. Rethinking the Placement of Planets
  2. New Release for “Architect of Worlds”
  3. Architect of Worlds: The “Special Cases” Outline
  4. Breakaway!
  5. New Models for Gas Giant Formation
  6. New Models for Planetary Formation
  7. Review: Lurkers at the Threshold, by Jürgen Hubert
  8. Status Report (16 April 2022)
  9. Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell
  10. Status Report (29 March 2022)

Interesting that most of the high-traffic posts all had to do with Architect, although I’m not overly surprised at that. A couple of my book reviews, a couple of status reports, and a side project (the Space: 2049 setting that I’m playing with). Fairly typical.

My objectives for the coming year should be pretty straightforward. I want to get Architect ready for release, and that currently involves teaching myself Adobe InDesign and some basic book-design principles. I want to make progress with at least one novel-length project, and maybe write a few pieces of shorter fiction. And once some of that is well in hand, I may start looking at publishing one of my settings as a tabletop RPG book. Plenty to keep me busy, that’s for sure.

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

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Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget by Stant Litore

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

This is a rather different review than my usual. The book in question isn’t a work of fiction, it’s a coaching toolkit for would-be authors who want to write fiction.

I first came across Stant Litore when I read his book on Scriptural exegesis, Lives of Unforgetting. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was also a genre author, and that he has written a lengthy series of “toolkits” for writers. Many of these have titles of the form “Write [X] Your Readers Won’t Forget,” and for the most recent book in the series, the “X” is magic systems.

I’ll confess that when I write fantasy fiction, the notion of developing a “magic system” mildly repels me. I think of magic as wonder-working and miracle, not the kind of formal, rule-based endeavor that ought to be governed by a “system.” To my delight, this book addressed exactly that tension on the very first page, which was enough to pull me into the rest of the text.

The book is organized in a very workmanlike manner. Each section addresses a single question that the writer needs to think about when developing a magic-infused world. What is magic like, how do people in the world experience it? How do magicians experience it, and how is that different from everyone else’s understanding? How do magicians fit into the community, if they do at all? What are the personal and other costs of magic? And so on.

In each section, Stant Litore discusses the issue at hand, explaining why it’s crucial to the author’s vision for their fantasy world. He provides plenty of options and examples, quoting from well-known works of fantasy fiction. Then the section is closed out by one or more writing exercises, encouraging the reader to work through the details for their own fantasy setting. The book closes with a sample worksheet, collecting in one place all the considerations discussed throughout.

I don’t normally find books of this kind to be all that useful, but I suspect Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget is going to be an exception. I’m considering formally working through it to help flesh out the two fantasy settings in which I work. If I have any quarrel with the book in its current state, it might be that it’s too short. Just on first reading, I can see several ways to expand on what Stant Litore has done here.

Still, I suspect anyone interested in developing a fantasy setting, whether for gaming or literary purposes, will find this a useful resource. And if the quality of this book is any indication, I would seriously consider checking out the rest of the Litore Toolkits for Fiction Writers. Very highly recommended.

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

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Obelisks: Dust by Ari Marmell

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Obelisks: Dust is the first volume of what appears to be a planned duology, set after the world falls into a very unusual apocalypse.

At the beginning of this story, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are engaged in normal operations. Flight Engineer Cynthia Han, our protagonist, is a member of the current six-person crew. When we first meet Cynthia, she is helping to welcome several guests aboard the ISS, while also concealing a growing medical problem that she fears will end her spaceflight career.

After a difficult day, Cynthia retires to her bunk. When she awakens, everything has changed. Even a quick glance out the ports shows that Earth has changed drastically. The planet’s surface is invisible, shrouded in a thick layer of airborne dust. Meanwhile, the ISS has lost contact with the ground; only a few radio stations are still on, and those are broadcasting nothing but noise.

The astronauts and their guests wait a while, to see if the situation changes, but eventually they are forced to make an emergency return to Earth. They soon find most of the human population missing, the environment harsh and hostile. Strangest of all, mysterious obelisks have appeared throughout the landscape . . . and to even glance at one of them from a distance is to risk madness and death.

Cynthia and her colleagues struggle to deal with conflicts among their own group, while surviving in the hostile landscape, searching for other survivors, and trying to figure out just what has happened to the world. The story that follows is bleak, with plenty of moments of horror, but it also promises a glimmer of hope.

Mr. Marmell’s world-building and plotting are well-done, with a fast-moving and suspenseful plot. He’s adept at ratcheting the tension upward; every time the audience thinks we’ve gotten a handle on the strangeness of the situation, another wild card gets dealt. The story is framed as “horror,” and there are certainly a lot of very ugly moments in the narrative. Yet the focus is always on Cynthia and her colleagues, using their wits and skills to survive. Despite their flaws, the characters are sympathetic and resourceful people, and I found myself rooting for them to resolve their differences and push forward.

The prose style here is very clean, with high-quality copy- and line-editing. I didn’t find myself being distracted by editing errors. Viewpoint discipline is good, with the story told almost entirely from Cynthia’s perspective. Exposition is subtle and clear. This is an accomplished writer working in good form.

If I found anything to quarrel with here, it’s that the book is a bit short – it was clearly written as the first half of a longer narrative. Nevertheless, this story does work as a stand-alone novel, with a number of subplots resolved as of the end of the book.

I found myself pushing through this story in a single sitting, unable to put Obelisks: Dust down, and I really do want to see the sequel. Very highly recommended.

Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

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The New Empire by Alison McBain

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The New Empire is a novel of alternate history, telling the story of a young man caught between worlds and struggling with the contradictions of his life.

In the prologue of The New Empire, we see what appears to be the final minutes of a young man named Jiangxi. He confronts an older man named Onas, with whom he clearly has a complicated relationship, but they share only a brief moment and have little to say to one another. Then Jiangxi goes out to meet the firing squad which is there to carry out his execution. The rest of the story is about who Jiangxi is, and how he got to be in such a fix.

When next we see Jiangxi, he is a young boy, a slave, being shipped across the ocean to a distant land. American readers may think they already recognize the narrative, but it turns out that Jiangxi is Chinese, and that the land to which he is being sent is somewhere in what we would call California.

This isn’t the world we know, but one in which the Ming Dynasty “treasure fleets” discovered the Americas in the early 15th century. Three centuries later, contact between China and the peoples of North America has led to the formation of a “new empire,” a loose confederation of peoples that spans the continent. Influenced by Chinese culture and technology, the confederation is putting up strong resistance against the encroachment of European colonialists. The story later mentions armed conflict against the Europeans, especially the Spanish, led by a real-world historical figure (the missionary Junípero Serra). Yet we never see any of them, and the only part they play in the story is as distant barbarians who threaten the order of the confederation.

Jiangxi is purchased by Onas, an influential religious leader and statesman among the Ohlone peoples of the California coast. At first it seems that Jiangxi is going to be treated as a common slave, assigned menial tasks and brutally punished when he disobeys. Soon, however, Onas begins to educate him, teaching him skills he might need to be more than a simple slave. It becomes clear that Onas has something specific in mind for Jiangxi . . . but the Chinese boy develops ideas of his own, which may wreck all of Onas’s plans for him.

The alternate-historical setting of The New Empire is extremely well done. Chinese and Native American history are not my specialties, but what little research I was able to do while reading this novel seemed to support what we see in the story. It’s a very plausible setting. In particular, alternate-history authors often make the mistake of idealizing the cultures they write about, but there is none of that here. These are slave-holding cultures, backed by ruthless violence, and even sympathetic characters seem reluctant to condemn this.

Only Jiangxi is an eternal rebel against the injustices of his setting, and this is a key to understanding his character. He’s a mass of contradictions – originating from the very highest family in China, sold into slavery, forced to adapt to an alien civilization, eventually granted a position of privilege there. He lives in several different worlds and is at home in none of them, and the contradiction eventually drives his tragedy to its conclusion.

If there’s one aspect of The New Empire that didn’t quite work for me on first reading, it was the ending. Jiangxi’s story comes to a conclusion that feels very abrupt at first, and it’s not at all a happy one. On further reflection, I suspect that was intentional. It’s Jiangxi’s well-established character traits that lead him to his fate – this is a tragedy very much in the classical mode.

The prose style here is very clean, and the copy- and line-editing is quite good. One or two errors did catch my eye, but these never quite pulled me out of the story. Viewpoint discipline is good; the story is told very strictly from Jiangxi’s perspective. Exposition is done almost entirely through character action and dialogue, with no big clumsy blocks in authorial voice, and the reader is trusted to figure out the details of the setting on their own.

I very much enjoyed immersing myself in the world of The New Empire, and I would be interested in seeing what else Ms. McBain might attempt in this genre. Very highly recommended.

Review: The Welsh Dragon, by K. M. Butler

Review: The Welsh Dragon, by K. M. Butler

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The Welsh Dragon by K. M. Butler

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Welsh Dragon is a historical novel with a dash of romance, telling the tale of one of England’s most remarkable monarchs in the days before he came to rule.

When our tale begins, Henry Tudor is a very young man, still in his teens, in the midst of that English civil conflict that we call the Wars of the Roses. His uncle – King Henry VI of England – has just been deposed and imprisoned by the House of York. The Lancastrian cause seems all but lost, and Henry is forced to flee England or face arrest and possible execution. He sails with his protector, his uncle Jasper Tudor, hoping to reach France. Unfortunately, an untimely storm washes the Tudors up in independent Brittany, where Henry is forced to live in exile.

At first, Henry has little ambition for his own sake. He has lost lands and title in England, but he is safe under the protection of the powerful Duke of Brittany, and he finds happiness in the arms of a wealthy widow. His tenuous claim to the English throne seems almost irrelevant. The House of York is firmly in command back home, and there are several other men with better claims. Yet Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, is striving to regain a position in England for her son. Meanwhile, the Yorkists refuse to let him live quietly in exile, constantly scheming to seize him or have him killed.

In the end, Henry is forced to give up the woman and the peaceful life he has come to love, and contend for the English throne in his own right.

Unlike Mr. Butler’s previous novel, The Raven and the Dove, this one is set in a much better-documented period. It’s a foregone conclusion that Henry Tudor will return to England, establish one of the most brilliant royal dynasties that country ever knew, and begin leading his kingdom into the modern era.

Mr. Butler’s gift is bringing historical figures to vivid life while he tells the well-known story. Henry himself is a conflicted man, torn between his happy life in Brittany and the ambition he feels compelled to pursue. He matures considerably in the course of the story, growing from an awkward youth to an admirable contender for the crown. Some of Mr. Butler’s more speculative elements – especially Henry’s fictional love interest, the Breton merchant Jehana de Rousson – offer an interesting perspective into how one of England’s more unusual kings might have been shaped.

Mr. Butler has a very clean prose style, and the editing here is very good; I saw only a few copy- or line-editing issues, and these never pulled me out of the story. Action scenes are easy to follow and very exciting. The story alternates among several viewpoint characters, but each section is labeled, and the story is strict in its close third-person perspective.

Mr. Butler is deft in the art of dropping needed exposition into character dialogue or internal reflection, and that’s very useful here. The reader gets to watch characters as they engage in very sophisticated political intrigue, but it’s always clear why they act as they do. The mindset of late-medieval English aristocracy is often alien to us, but the author makes it very compelling.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Welsh Dragon, and I’m definitely looking forward to Mr. Butler’s next venture into historical fiction. Very highly recommended.

Review: Out of Time, by Chris Adams Ward

Review: Out of Time, by Chris Adams Ward

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Out of Time by Chris Adams Ward

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Out of Time presents itself as a speculative fiction story, but at its heart it’s a novelistic appreciation for some of the greatest American music.

Henry “Slim” Tucker is a young African-American journalist, working in Chicago in the early 1920s. Although he is no musician, he loves the vibrant music, the jazz and blues, being played in the city’s bars and clubs. He writes about singers and performers for the Chicago newspapers. Once in a while, he also gets indisputable premonitions about what some of those artists must do, to further their careers and shape the musical world.

Brian Saxon is a successful British businessman, living in the modern day. After suffering a serious head injury in an auto accident, Brian awakens to find the world terribly changed. His beloved wife is now a stranger, and a completely different woman claims to have been his partner. Even worse, the American music Brian has loved all his life – the jazz, blues, swing, and rock-and-roll that he has listened to since childhood – has somehow vanished. The situation is intolerable . . . but soon, against all odds, Brian discovers that there may be something he can do about it.

Out of Time is outwardly the story of these two men, each unaware of the other’s existence, each struggling to survive and find happiness against an ever-changing background of great music. Neither of them understands their relationship, but over time they come to terms with it, and along the way they play a critical part in the evolution of American music. The true leading character in the novel, though, is the music itself, growing and changing, eventually becoming the global cultural phenomenon that it is today.

It’s clear that Mr. Adams, like his British protagonist, loves the music about which he writes. The book is well-researched, and although there are more than a few expository passages, the author uses some clever techniques to keep them from dragging down the story. Meanwhile, meeting so many of the great artists in the pages of this novel never got stale.

The mechanics of the novel work reasonably well. Mr. Adams has a clean prose style, although this novel needed at least one more careful copy-editing pass.

Out of Time spends most of its plot with African-American characters, during a time when casual bigotry and racism were commonplace. The characters constantly deal with and remark on the effects of that racism as they go about their lives. They don’t get to forget about it, and neither does the reader. Mr. Adams works hard to capture the experience of living in those times, but I’m not in a position to say whether he was entirely successful.

The story also gives a 21st century White British character an essential role in the evolution of African-American music throughout the 20th century, an implication some readers may struggle with. To be fair, neither of the story’s protagonists ever become aware of what’s truly happening to them – the story itself leaves much of this a mystery – and the African-American characters are never robbed of agency. In the end, is Brian Saxon causing changes in the history of music? Or is he simply voyaging, by force of will, across multiple alternate worlds until he finds his way home? The reader can never be sure, right up to the ambiguous ending.

I found the story in Out of Time very engaging, the characters sympathetic and easy to like. Possibly more important, the novel inspired me with a great deal of curiosity about a period of musical history, a set of musical genres, that I’ve never before spent much time with. I found myself wanting to go out and find recordings of the performances Mr. Adams refers to throughout the novel. In fact, I understand he’s compiled a list of real-world recordings to go with the narrative!

Recommended as an appealing story about two men’s relationship with some of the greatest music of the past century.

Review: The Dark Earth, by Gordon Doherty

Review: The Dark Earth, by Gordon Doherty

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The Dark Earth (Book Six of Empires of Bronze) by Gordon Doherty

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

The Dark Earth is the sixth and final volume of Empires of Bronze, Gordon Doherty’s historical fiction series set in the ancient Hittite Empire. In the last volume (The Shadow of Troy) Mr. Doherty gave us his version of the Trojan War. This tale goes one better (or one worse): it’s set amid the Bronze Age Collapse itself.

The Dark Earth breaks with earlier books in the series, most obviously in that the central character is no longer King Hattu, but his son and heir, King Tudha of the Hittites. Climate change, civil war, and foreign invasion have whittled the once-mighty Hittite Empire down to a pale shadow of its former self. When Tudha rose to the throne, it was foretold that he would revive the kingdom’s fortunes. Unfortunately, darker prophecies dating back to his father’s youth are also in play. Tudha has very little left with which to face the challenges of his time: murder, betrayal, and a massive invasion of the so-called “Sea Peoples.”

If you know the history of this period, the end of the story will be a foregone conclusion: Tudha’s struggle will be in vain, and the Hittite Empire will fall at last. The Dark Earth works best as a story about fighting against impossible odds, and yet refusing to give up hope for the future.

Mr. Doherty continues to work well with the historical sources. This story uses a number of odd details from the final years of the Hittite kingdom – most notably, the one time that we hear of the inland-centered empire having a navy and campaigning at sea. Some elements of the story did strike me as being a little implausible, most notably the sheer size of the Sea People armies. I suspect Mr. Doherty is engaging in some exaggeration there, in order to tell a rousing blood-and-guts adventure story of almost mythical proportions.

The story has a genuinely surprising conclusion, one which escapes from the strict historical narrative to give the reader a sense of hope at the end of the journey.

Mechanically, the novel works reasonably well, although the formula of the earlier books begins to feel a little worn here. Unfortunately, Mr. Doherty got a bit careless with copy-editing in this final volume of the series. Flaws in the prose style weren’t quite enough to pull me out of the story, but after the good editorial work of the last few volumes they were a little disappointing. Workmanlike, but not remarkably so.

Readers should be aware, as always, that the story is set in a brutal and violent time. Descriptions of human cruelty and violence are common and very explicit.

I enjoyed The Dark Earth, and although there don’t appear to be any more stories planned for this series, I’m certainly likely to go looking for more of Mr. Doherty’s work. Recommended as a dark, but in the end hopeful, recounting of one of history’s worst disasters.

Review: The Lazarus Taxa, by Lindsey Kinsella

Review: The Lazarus Taxa, by Lindsey Kinsella

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The Lazarus Taxa by Lindsey Kinsella

Overall Rating: *** (3 stars)

The Lazarus Taxa is a readable and entertaining, but rather predictable, story of time travel and dinosaurs.

Sidney “Sid” Starley is a daredevil, constantly in search of experiences that no one else has ever had, the riskier and more dangerous the better. When we first meet him, he is climbing a Himalayan peak that no human has ever conquered before – partly because the local government has forbidden mountaineers from making the attempt.

After his expedition fails, Sid is bailed out of prison and recruited by the British billionaire Richard Mansa for a new venture. Mansa’s firm has developed the world’s first working time machine. He now plans to prove the new technology with an expedition back to the late Cretaceous era, the time of the dinosaurs.

Sid jumps at the opportunity, and soon finds himself with three teammates in central North America, sixty-eight million years into the past. After six months on station, the time machine will have recharged sufficiently to bring them home to the present. The plan is for them to survey the countryside, examining the flora and fauna, gathering photos and scientific data. They are well-armed, they have plenty of supplies, and their transit vehicle is something of a fortress. They have every confidence that they will be able to survive their sojourn in the Cretaceous. At least at first.

Unfortunately, it soon becomes obvious that Mansa has misled Sid and his colleagues in several respects. They find evidence that their expedition was not the first to venture into the distant past . . . and there may be other humans already there, with an agenda of their own. It soon becomes a race to see if they can solve a few mysteries and still survive the experience.

As far as basic mechanics are concerned, The Lazarus Taxa is at least workmanlike. The copy-editing was a little rough in spots. Characters and plot are unfortunately rather flat and predictable – the story reads like a treatment for a film script, with all the anticipated beats and plot twists. I saw the solution to the mystery well in advance, with the remaining suspense coming almost entirely from wondering which of the characters was going to reach the denouement.

It’s clear that Mr. Kinsella is well-versed in paleontology, and it’s in the passages where he describes a long-ago and alien Earth that the book relaxes enough to shine. He makes a move which I found rather odd at first: every few chapters he breaks up the dramatic action with a short essay in authorial voice, giving the reader some paleontological detail. The technique grew on me after a few iterations. Many inexperienced genre novelists make the mistake of larding their narrative with exposition-dumping and telling-not-showing passages, pulling the reader out of the story every time they succumb to the temptation to show off all their research. By loading most of that into these well-marked interstitial chapters, Mr. Kinsella avoids crippling his dramatic narrative with it. The result reads a little like a “docu-drama,” and it works well once the reader is used to it.

Readers should be aware that the story ends up rather violent and gory in places. It’s a story about dinosaurs meeting humans – of course there will be some scary beats in the plot!

I found The Lazarus Taxa readable and entertaining. Recommended if you’re interested in stories about dinosaurs, or time travel into Earth’s distant past, with a dash of corporate intrigue.

Review: The Shadow of Troy, by Gordon Doherty

Review: The Shadow of Troy, by Gordon Doherty

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The Shadow of Troy (Book Five of Empires of Bronze) by Gordon Doherty

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Shadow of Troy is the fifth volume of Empires of Bronze, Gordon Doherty’s ongoing historical fiction series set in the ancient Hittite Empire. This volume is a watershed for the series. Everything that has gone before now collides with one of the world’s great narratives: the story of the Trojan War.

The Shadow of Troy continues to follow Hattu, now king of the Hittites. In the previous novel, The Crimson Throne, we learned how Hattu defeated his wicked nephew and seized the Hittite throne, as a divine prophecy had long predicted he would. Unfortunately, the struggle decimated the Hittite army, and the once-powerful kingdom is barely able to defend its own borders. Worse, climate change and the movements of barbarians beyond the edges of civilization are beginning to threaten every great kingdom in the Bronze Age world.

It is at this moment that King Hattu receives a desperate cry for aid from an ancient Hittite vassal, the city of Troy. A Trojan prince has offended the powerful kings of the Ahhiyawans across the sea, abducting one of their wives and bringing her back to Troy. Long greedy for Troy’s wealth, the Ahhiyawans have come across the sea with a thousand ships, and the Trojans have called for their Hittite overlords to defend them.

Hattu has no army to spare, but he is honor-bound to answer . . . so he comes alone, with no one to support him but his son and heir Tudha, along with a few of his veteran comrades-in-arms. He may not have an army, he may not have much hope left, but he has decades of experience as a warrior and captain in one bitter struggle after another. The Ahhiyawans will not be wise to take him lightly!

Throughout this series, Mr. Doherty has consistently done a good job of working with what few original sources are available to us. In this story, he has nothing less than the Iliad to work with, along with the other works of the so-called Trojan Cycle. In The Shadow of Troy he does masterful work, weaving together familiar bits of myth and heroic narrative while telling the story from a foreign (that is, Hittite) perspective. For example, if you’re familiar with the Iliad, you’ll recognize a lot of very specific bits of action in the battle scenes.

The novel does interesting things with the mysteries of the narrative. Why did the Achaeans come to attack Troy – was it truly over something as simple as an unfaithful wife? Troy was almost certainly a Hittite vassal state, and in this story the Hittite king comes to support Troy in the war . . . so why does the Iliad say absolutely nothing about the Hittites? What was really going on with the Trojan Horse, and the final fall of the city?

Most of all, Mr. Doherty does something remarkable with the preordained conclusion of the story. Throughout the series King Hattu has never lost a war, even if his victories have come at terrible cost. He is clearly the hero of this story . . . and yet it’s a foregone conclusion that Troy will fall in the end. How The Shadow of Troy ties up all these threads is a treat to watch, even (or especially) if you’re already familiar with the Greek sources.

Mechanically, the novel works on several levels. The plot is tight, even though it has a few more twists and reversals than usual. There’s more moral ambiguity in this story than in the previous volumes – there are brave heroes and foul villains, but for once it’s not always clear which is which. There’s a superb subplot involving Hattu and his son, in which both characters get plenty of development as sympathetic protagonists. The prose style is very clean, with no copy-editing or other errors to pull me out of the narrative. In all, a very workmanlike job.

Readers should be aware, as always, that the story is set in a brutal and violent time. Descriptions of human cruelty and violence are common and very explicit.

I very much enjoyed The Shadow of Troy. I understand there will be one more book in the series, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Mr. Doherty does to wrap this story up. Very strongly recommended – an action-packed and bloody retelling of the Trojan cycle and what comes afterward.