Book: Honour's Knight (Book 2 of the Paradox trilogy)
Author: Rachel Bach (Rachel Aaron in disguise! Also, @Rachel_Aaron on Twitter)
Okay, this is BOOK TWO. Are we clear on that? I've tried not to include spoilers for either book one or two, and though that's quite tricky I think we're all clear. I've checked through a couple of times. This is a long post though, so if you're short on time or interest you can scroll to the bottom. I've highlighted in bold the point at which I stop babbling excitedly and summarise basic book thoughts. Otherwise, here we go.
In the interests of not spoiling book one for any of my fellow spoilerphobes, the summary for Honour's Knight shall be merely the tag-lines, not the blurb:
Devi Morris has a lot of problems. And not the the fun easy-to-shoot kind either.
Like the sound of that? Here's a little more depth:
Deviana Morris is a kickass mercenary in the far-flung gloriously space-opera future, with enough burning ambition to set the whole universe on fire and a keen awareness that life as a mercenary means she probably doesn't have much time to fulfill those ambitions. So she'll take any chance she can to get herself boosted up the career ladder into the prestigious (and dangerous) job she's really after - joining the Devastators, the most elite fighting unit in all of the colony worlds.
So a year's contract on the Glorious Fool - a ship so dangerous it's said to be cursed - seems like the perfect way to get noticed.
The Fool's crew are all oddballs; aliens and psychics and mysterious men with deep dark secrets. Devi tries to be a dutiful security guard and not dig into what doesn't concern her, far more interested in her honour and ambition than with other people's secrets, but it's another matter when those secrets start putting the lives of everyone on the ship at risk. Then things really get rolling and it's more than just the ship at risk.
While all this is going on, Devi still manages to find time to fall in love. But even that isn't simple or safe.
So. That's how it all starts.
Book One, Fortune's Pawn, crackled through some rip-roaring action sequences and steadily ramped up through small scale character development to uncovering big mysteries and taking on huge conspiracies with very little chance to stop for breath. And then it ended on a cliffhanger.
Honour's Knight opens with a prologue which is frankly horrifying, and then steps straight back in where we left off in Fortune's Pawn.
There's a helpful recap of what happened in the climax of book one, which essentially adds up to "spot the bullet holes". Reading through it elicited a lot of, "Oh, yeah, that got shot too, didn't it?" but worked very well to orientate me again, since it had been a couple of months since I read the first. Throughout the book there are a few neat recaps like this one, which is very useful, because there's a lot going on. Fortunately for us, Rachel Bach can handle the doling out of information very well, so we're never truly at sea even in flurries of double crosses, backstabbings, ulterior motives, and huge, epic, universe-sized long-term goals.
The stakes are raised again and again - every time you think things can't get more overwhelming, they do, and with a whole book left to go I have the feeling it's not even maxed out yet. This isn't done arbitrarily, though, but in keeping with everything we know, and everything we find out with Devi. The background and the worldbuilding (although worldbuilding seems too small a word for the whole universe and multiple alien species and cultures) are consistent throughout, and gain depth as we go along. All this information gets filtered through Devi's first-person narration, and while she is very intelligent she's also not a scientist, so things are translated through her understanding, without jargon or too much dwelling on intricacies for an action adventure. Generally we get everything we need to know delivered to us in a quick, clear way, so we can move on to the plot and the fight scenes.
If you do get lost, there are still those regular, crisp updates on the current situation. Devi, after all, is a soldier, so it makes perfect sense for her to be evaluating her position and considering her options and counting up her advantages whenever the ground shifts under her feet yet again. A helpful writing tactic and a nice bit of characterisation, solidly defining Devi as capable and resourceful, all in one.
And the ground shifts under Devi a lot in this one. Everybody around her (not excluding Devi, either) has their own motivation and plans, which means alliances shift and unlikely teams crop up as everybody tries to get what they want and different people's methods and aims temporarily align. This certainly keeps you on your toes when reading - as soon as you start thinking you know who are "the good guys" or "the bad guys" everything switches up again, someone else's backstory and primary motivations are revealed, and you'll find yourself on their side too.
All the major characters, then - and it's an expanding cast - are more complex than they first appear, and they all stay true to their driving forces. None of them conveniently forget what they're after to hurry the plot along. Most everyone gets pushed to their limits in this book, and it's their deepest beliefs and varying moralities that come into play, usually in completely unexpected ways.
For anyone who's read Rachel Bach's previous series (The Legend of Eli Monpress, written as Rachel Aaron - and delightful they are too) this moral murk is quite different to Eli's much clearer-cut villains. In those there was a definitive Great Evil to be fought, and some pretty clear, uncompromising definitions of what was right and wrong, usually from the dutiful Miranda. There were still characters and situations set up to explore the limits of what could be done "for the greater good", but they were resolved quite clearly one way or another.
Here, though, allies and organisations are clashing over pretty much every single issue that comes up, and even Devi with her high concepts of honour and duty has trouble arguing for moral absolutes. And there are consequences when everyone takes too long fighting over what to do next, and often worse consequences when they don't, and simply take the course of action that seems best at first, but naturally has hidden problems and unpredictable results. There's a pretty impressive body count as a result, even for books focusing on a mercenary in a high tech weaponised suit of armour dealing with forces so powerful the Death Star starts to look tame in comparison.
This also means virtually nobody comes out of this squeaky clean. Even the people trying to do the right thing don't always know what the right thing is, and most of those who think they do are happy to overlook a little collateral damage to get their way. Sometimes a lot of collateral damage. It makes for interesting reading, and it's intriguing to consider all the current options open to the characters and try to work out where things are going for book three. My money, actually, is on an entirely different option to everything that's been considered or put forward already. Something that will make readers and characters alike slap their foreheads and wonder how they managed to miss that idea when everything we needed to come up with it was laid out in all the laws of the setting and the characters' own ideals and moral codes.
That does seem to be a recurring feature of Rachel Aaron/Bach's writing, after all. There's always one more twist that she manages to keep very well masked in the build up. I was delighted with that in her Eli books, and it's come up already by the end of Honour's Knight, so I have high hopes. I like surprises.
A couple of asides, from personal interest:
One of the aspects of sci-fi and fantasy I'm particularly interested in at the moment is the portrayal of gender and LGBT+ elements. In the universe Rachel Bach has created in these books, humanity has colonised so many worlds that separate human cultures have a lot of differing technology as well as values, and there's a certain amount of culture clash and xenophobia among "Terrans" and "Paradoxians" and their various colony worlds.
And then there are multiple alien species: lizard-like xith'cal (purported to enslave and eat humans), an avian, peaceful species called aeons, and the lelgis, who generally keep to themselves and don't interact with humanity. These are introduced and explored through Devi, bringing up her preconceptions and contrasting those with other viewpoints and clearer facts about each species.
I found it intriguing that in exploring both xith'cal and aeons, gender came up as an issue. Both species are presented with a defined gender binary (clear cut male/female) and resulting roles and customs within the (fairly homogenous, it would seem) flock/hive cultures, but this fact is brought up by encountering members of each race who are gender nonconforming. This comes along with some issues about individuality and personal choices and freedom to be yourself, which ties in with... well, with everything.
Focusing on Devi herself for that, she is a soldier, trained and honour-bound to follow orders, not to think too much for herself, who now has to figure out where she stands and take the lead. She's also a tough-as-nails fighter, boiling with anger and aggression and a habit of shooting her problems. She sleeps with whoever she wants, and drinks and works out for fun. These stereotypically male character traits bring up gender nonconformity for her too - although most of the human civilisations seem to be fairly equal, there are clearly still prejudices and assumptions all over the place, cropping up in her interactions with anyone off the ship, especially if she's not wearing her armour, and even insidiously slipping into her own thoughts. When she makes an assumption about the gender of aeons she encounters based on their appearance and behaviour, a whole background of cultural norms has to lie behind that. This far-future still has issues of sexism and gender bias. Which is a little sad.
(As a small note, I was slightly sad that there isn't more outright gender equality or diversity visible among the human colonies, considering it comes up so clearly as a problem in the alien cultures. But we can't have everything, and I will gladly and gleefully settle (oh, the hardship) for a capable, rounded, intelligent, powerful female lead for now.)
Anyway, yes. The individuality idea. Devi's clearly had to fight (and fight, and fight, and fight) to carve out her own niche, to be more than just a cog in a machine. At the start of book one, we find she's willing to take a lot of risks to be who she wants to be - she's already quit, abruptly, a job everybody else thinks she should stick with, because she can't see how staying there any longer will let her be the person she should. Personal choice is raised again and again within the plot, and reinforced in so many of the characters' backgrounds that it does seem to be a running theme. The clustering and hive-mind examples cropping up are extremely plot-relevant, too, so I won't say too much more, though there's a lot of nice mirroring going on, where a major large scaled plot point is similar to a small issue raised and dealt with already. I can see a few ways this could pan out in book three, so I'm looking forward to seeing if I'm right there.
Okay, that got quite long and involved. Here's your TL;DR:
Basically, I really enjoyed this. It develops everything from the first book, without lagging or slowing the pace at all. In fact it speeds up. One problem is solved and another three are piled on. There's potential peril, mild peril, extreme peril, then oh-dear-heavens-everybody's-going-to-die-in-the-next-thirty-seconds-and-the-universe-is-doomed peril too, just when you thought you'd got extreme enough.
There are sci-fi in-jokes and references slipped sneakily in without in any way harming the plot or characters. The characters themselves are so well defined that sometimes they have a line that's just so perfect for them it's a delight to read - and wonderful to realise that we've been led to know these people well enough to spot that.
I am (clearly, she says, looking back up at the length of this rambling post) thoroughly invested in this universe and these characters, truly intrigued by the plot and eager to see where it's going, and very much looking forward to the finale in Heaven's Queen later this month.
There are still plenty of problems for Devi to shoot.
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