2015 SF, second of its series. Damien Montgomery and Alaura Stealey,
two of the most powerful mages in human space, are sent to the planet
Ardennes to deal with its escalating rebellion…
It's not great. But it's fun. I still have a nostalgic fondness
for Jerry Pournelle's stories of planetary rebellion (in spite of the
political stereotyping), and I got some of the same feeling here: we
have smart people on all sides (though it's very clear where the
author's sympathy lies), and nobody takes events on face value,
because they all know that false flags are a possible thing.
All right, the story of heroism only works because Montgomery is a
hugely powerful mage and has practically limitless civil authority
over anyone who's still obeying laws at all and has a root key to
every computer… but he never feels as though he's cruising on those
abilities. Even a powerful mage can be stopped by a bullet through the
head, or have his transport shot out of the sky, so our hero has to be
at least a bit smart in selecting both his battles and his tactics
within them. I rather like this setting in which you can indeed have a
magician who can put up a wall of fire and walk through a hail of
bullets (for a while), but the magic doesn't take over the story;
people still use assault rifles and helicopter gunships.
It said many things about the life experience of Hands that Alaura
Stealey was intimately familiar with how it felt when an
electromagnetic pulse mine was used to disable an armored vehicle.
The writing is sometimes clunky and a copyediting pass to spot
malphrasings and repeated words would have helped (hey, I'm
available), but this is a decent story of action with multiple
plotlines and even some genuinely interesting people. It takes what
could be a stereotypical mil-SF tale and throws in disruptive elements
in a way that pretty reliably makes the sort of thing I enjoy. (My
experience is that things designed to appeal to me are usually
commercial failures, so I'm glad there are more books in this series.)
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