Lucas Blogs About Embers of War

Wow, name bigger than title status, nicely done, Powell.

So, what's this book's deal?

Embers of War is the start of a new series by Gareth L. Powell, the British Science Fiction Award-winning author of Ack-Ack Macaque.

Oh, you liked those books didn't you?

I did.

Did you like this one?

I couldn't get into it. Sadly, this joins the "books that I didn't finish" club with Bloody Rose and Into the Drowning Deep.

So, it's not good?

I wouldn't go that far. Look, I've never thought that Powell was an amazing prose writer. His style is proficient enough, but I was definitely more into Ack-Ack Macaque and its sequels because of the story and characters than because of the writing. But let's get an idea of the book's deal.

Yes, let's.

So it begins with a space battle over the planet Pelapatarn where Captain Annelida Deal gives an order that will simultaneously do two things: 1) end the immediate conflict and possibly the war as a whole, and B) kill the entirety of the planet's sentient forests.

So it starts with genocide.

It starts with genocide. The next chapter picks up three years later, where the crew of the sentient ship Trouble Dog are on a rescue mission for the House of Reclamation. Unfortunately, things go sideways when a tentacle monster kills their medic and one of the people they're there to rescue. This won't look good on Captain Sal Konstanz's record. Meanwhile, poet Ona Sudak, best known for an epic about the previous war, finds herself trapped on a spaceliner being attacked for unknown reasons during a tour of the Gallery.

Wait, the Gallery?

Oh, it's a collection of planet sized objects carved into odd shapes, presumably by a highly advanced but vanished civilization. Also meanwhile, intelligence agent Ashton Childe is called away from his job trafficking weapons in a proxy war to find Ona Sudak once word gets out that her ship was attacked.

So, Sudak is Deal, right?

Yeah, but Powell doesn't make a big deal about hiding it, so we won't count that as a SPOILER. Anyhow, let's talk about why I just barely made it past the halfway point.

Yes, let's.

One thing that didn't work for me was the point of view. See, each chapter is in first person, but because the book follows a rotating cast, the effect is somewhat jarring, especially since the chapters are short. So you get a few pages to get used to one character's voice being "I" and then you turn the page and "I" is someone else entirely. And, in some ways, I think this speaks well for Powell as a writer, since the point of view characters are distinctive enough to recognize. But overall, it made it hard to get invested in the story. Speaking of which.

Oh?

Another reason that I didn't feel invested in the story is that the stakes were kind of lackluster. Something I liked in the Macaque Trilogy was that the characters mostly had personal stakes in the story: Valerie wanted to avenge her husband, Ack-Ack wanted to be treated like a person, Prince Merovech wanted to not be used as a political puppet of his industrialist mother following her assassination of his father. You get the idea. Even with the first person POV, Embers of War struggles to communicate the stakes to the reader, and sometimes they're less than compelling: like Sal and Ashton's career woes. Sudak/Deal's predicament is a good deal more immediate, but it's hard to feel bad for her since she's callous both about the deaths around her and the genocide she ordered years earlier. The most interesting character is the Trouble Dog herself which has an organic brain that mixes human and canine brain chemistry. Also, she was one of the ships involved in carrying out the genocide which is what lead her to resign her commission and work as a rescue ship in the first place. But one compelling character wasn't quite enough to keep me going.

Was there anything else you liked?

Well, in addition to the way he distinguished the human characters from each other, Powell also showed creativity in the one alien that plays a major role. Nod, the Trouble Dog's mechanic, comes from a species that's sort of like a starfish, but each limb can grasp and function as a face due to their sensory organs.  Nod is also convincingly alien in his thought processes and habits. However, he's more inscrutable than interesting.

So it's safe to say that this one wasn't your jam?

It wasn't my jam. If you're looking for an entry point to the works of Gareth L. Powell, I still recommend Ack-Ack Macaque.

What if you want something less silly.

Then you're on your own.

Links:

Here's the author's website, if you're into that kinda thing.