Reviews and Comments

"What an idiot", the protagonists in Vatta's War keep exclaiming, and with good reason. It really feels that everyone in this series who is not either a main character, or super impressed by one, is well and truly an idiot. This results in a novel series that's on the surface about interstellar war, but is in reality about a war against an unceasing parade of criminally stupid obstructive bureaucrats.

This gets really tedious for the reader, as there seems to be no bigger point to be made here: everyone but the protagonists is just blindingly stupid and stubborn, constantly doing The Wrong Thing in order to provide yet another convoluted twist for a plot that would be engaging and interesting, if it wasn't for all the Idiot Ballgames that keep interrupting it. That's the tragedy here: there's an actual gripping war story to be told here, but it keeps getting lost in the weeds.

Vatta's War series was interesting enough to keep me reading, but at the same time it was also so very annoying. The subplots are silly and rely on one contrived coincidence after another. Characterisation is predictable and monochrome. The 'verse is a Wild West of armed and trigger-happy private individuals and inefficient, corrupt public services. You can't even pass it off as serious society building, since there's not a single society, there's a bunch, it's just all of them seem to be caricatures of civilisations populated by fools, who can only be saved from their own idiocy by gung-ho loose cannons.

(I gave all the other books in the series three stars; this one got two stars just because it got saddled with my final annoyances. It's not actually any worse than the others.)

A rather uneven experience. As a long-time Traveller RPG player, I liked the setting and the story even more than they possibly deserved, and the writing was definitely not bad. However I got constantly annoyed by some dodgy political undertones the author seemed to be totally unaware of having, and those happened to rub me exactly the wrong way.

Life is cheap and murder by thugs with clean uniforms is basically shrugged off by a character whose post-teenage anguish we are then supposed to emphasise with. Might makes right and this is not questioned. Powerful private organisations are presented as competent, capable and heroic, governments are foolish, petty and inefficient. If everybody would just understand the of guns and capitalism, the universe would be a better place, etc. The story seems to lack several kinds of self-awareness.

Still, Trading in Danger must be doing something right, because despite my grinding my teeth at the middle parts of the book, I cannot honestly say that they were bad, just very much not for me. And I find myself wishing I had more of Captain Vatta's adventures to read right now, so hm.

I dislike fantasy, I thought. Actually what I dislike is tired fantasy tropes rooted in colonialism, superstition and other values that are better off buried.

Enter Graydon Saunders and his egalitarian epic fantasy.

I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into when started this, except that I understood it was going to be difficult and pitiless. Hoo boy, was it ever. The March North does not do handholding or exposition, it trusts the reader to be able to deal with difficult concepts. In a way, I was reminded of Ninefox Gambit, except that The March North predates it by two years, and somehow seemed to make more sense for me.

Essentially, what we have is a war story, a clash of two very magical armies, described more in the vein of science-fictiony techno thriller than heroic fantasy. This extends to the characterisation - after a couple of months, I cannot remember any of the characters. However, I do remember what they did and how the conflict was resolved.

Very much not for everyone, but definitely for me.