Head of Zeus, 2022, 509 p. Reviewed for ParSec 3.

While there are some scenes in this second instalment of Birmingham’s trilogy (for my review of the first see here) which feature Lucinda Hardy’s father Jonathyn, whose term in a debt defaulter’s prison on Batavia has been ended by the Sturm, the bulk of the text remains focused on the five main characters surviving from Book One, though four extra viewpoints also come into play: Sturm Captain Anders Revell, Sub-Commandant Domi Suprarto of the Imperial Javan Navy (whose organisation and command style seem to be modelled on that of the Japanese armed forces of the 1930s and 40s,) his superior, Imperial Volume Lord Juono Karna, plus Rinaldo Pac Yulin of the Yulin-Irrawaddy Combine. In the Natuna system the Javan and Combine ships of the latter three were running silent to weather a solar storm just as the Sturm attack on the Greater Volume’s zero point network occurred and so mostly avoided the fate of all those connected to it. Like Hardy, Suprarto finds himself unexpectedly in command after his officers’ brains were scrambled when they switched online again.

While the others, being adult, remain true to their earlier selves it is noticeable that Princess Alessia undergoes character development here in that she begins to blossom into her aristocratic heritage. Her tendency to use swear words does perhaps occur a mite quickly though. She drives most of the plot in this volume as, due to her revelation that her family maintained illegal and therefore secret engram vaults to restore their consciousnesses in case of the type of disaster which has just occurred, the occupants of the Defiant and Sephina’s new ship Arianne (named after her dead lover) set off to find such a cache at the space habitat called Lermontov in the Natuna system but first stop off at Descheneaux Station to rescue the few inhabitants and Armadalen Navy regulars who had not succumbed to the Sturm strike. Body strewn encounters ensue with the zombiefied but bloodthirsty remnants of humanity whose minds had been destroyed. (Why they do not turn on each other rather than seeking out “normal” humans is not explained. But then, of course, we would have had no gory battle scenes.) Hardy, though now a Commander, herself forms part of the rescue team, for which McLennan chides her as an unnecessary risk for a leader.

Hardy and McLennan put pressure on Princess Alessia to sign a declaration which would emancipate the many inhabitants of the Greater Volume who were de facto slaves. Despite the likelihood that if her family were to be revived they would declare it null and void she eventually agrees. This almost throwaway aspect of the book puts a gloss on our heroes’ determination to combat the Sturm. It smacks of a kind of desperation to show their cause is just. (Birmingham presumably intended this to stand comparison with another war during which an emancipation proclamation provided a higher purpose to its continuation. It doesn’t.) Alessia herself perceives later on that living conditions on Lermontov are harsher than she could have imagined. This is one more indication to the reader that the society for which her companions are fighting is probably not really worth defending.

As is common in second parts of trilogies there is a degree of marking time here. In particular the animosities the Javan Empire and the Combine have with the Armadalen Navy, even in the face of the advancing Sturm, take up most of the narrative.

Again we have an indicator of what may be Birmingham’s inspiration for the Sturm in that Pac Yulin (not the best example of a good guy it has to be said) says of them, “‘They do not just distrust the science. They despise and repress it.’”

In the climactic scene Birmingham plays a trick on his characters, and perhaps the inattentive reader. The logic of it was however implicit since early on in The Cruel Stars.

I suppose it is a defining feature of military SF but there is a degree of having and eating cake in describing scenes of mayhem and violence while insisting they are necessary. The Sturm are certainly monomaniacal and vindictively brutal to those with opposing views but Hardy, MacLennan, Sephina L’Trel and Booker are hardly less so.

There are nevertheless some pleasing grace notes. Intellect Herodotus’s interjection of, “‘I have no mouth and yet I must scream’” slightly misquotes Harlan Ellison, while the designation ‘SPY 7 sensor hooks’ may be an oblique reference to James Bond.

Again, the epilogue is a teaser for the next book in the trilogy. Despite the usual wallowing in carnage of the sub-genre and a tendency to overdo banter between his characters Birmingham has invested enough in them to make the reader persevere.

Pedant’s corner:- “he would have shook his head” (shaken,) “the conn” (always this spelling here. In The Cruel Stars it was spelled ‘conne’ but is usually given as ‘con’,) zero-point (elsewhere ‘zero point’.) “there were a couple of people like that” (there was a couple,) “less beatings” (fewer beatings,) “the hauler, which displaced less than one-quarter of the mass of Sephina’s luxury cruiser” (I am at a loss to see how a space-ship can displace any mass whatsoever. Unlike a boat, which displaces water, in space there is no material to displace. Why not just say ‘the hauler was only a quarter the size of Sephina’s luxury cruiser’,) sprung (x 2, sprang,) “‘We’re nae going to Earth’” (‘nae’ appeared like this several times. In the context of ‘not’ this should be, ‘We’re no’ going to Earth’ or more realistically, ‘We’re no’ goin’ tae Earth’,) “‘G’orn then, s’good for what ails you’” (That ‘r’ in ‘G’orn’ would not be there. He would have said, ‘Gaun, then’,) “H₃ mines” (He³ mines,) “the dark maws of a dozen smaller hangars” (not ‘maws,’ these were not stomachs; they were mouths,) “Zaitsev Corporation” (elsewhere always ‘Zaistev’,) “bachelor party” (McLennan would have said ‘stag do’,) “half a millenia” (half a millennium,) “Muntions Sub-Intellect Number Six” (Munitions Sub-Intellect Number Six?) “the plane of the elliptical” (x 3, ‘the plane of the ecliptic’. An error like this somewhat undermines trust in Birmingham’s other astronomical terminology,) wracked (racked,) “3X normal” (3 x normal; as in ‘3 times normal’,) “none of them were protected” (none of them was protected,) “the castle atria” (there was only one, ‘the castle atrium’,) nannite (nanite,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “‘They’ll puts boots on the deck to take them’” (put.)

Head of Zeus, 2020, 489 p. Reviewed for ParSec 3.

Centuries ago a hardline segment of humanity, the Sturm, implacably opposed to genomic interventions, implants and bioware, was defeated and took itself off to far-flung reaches of space. In the interim the majority of humanity – at least its wealthier portions – has become used to relifes, their consciousnesses at intervals being decanted into younger cloned bodies, with neural backups held in case of accidents. Robotic artificial intelligences known as Intellects, each “an impossibly dense tear-drop of exotic matter and nanoscale wormhole processing matrices” perform many tasks. The human domain of the Greater Volume sprawls over the galaxy but even the quickest interstellar travel – carried out by folding space – takes subjective months to span it, though communications, through a zero point wormhole network, are much faster.

Birmingham’s story is told from five main viewpoints. Lieutenant Lucinda Hardy of the Royal Armadalen Navy, newly posted to a spaceship named the Defiant, is a first lifer with a pronounced case of impostor syndrome despite being decorated in her first military action during the Javan War; Frazer McLennan, of Scottish descent, is a veteran of the Terran Defence Force, on his seventh body and lately a prizewinning astroarchaeologist spending his time on the otherwise obscure planet Batavia where the Sturm had once crash-landed a ship; Sephina L’Trel is a kind of pirate whom we first meet in a firefight when her attempt to doublecross a group of Yakuza failed to go to plan; Princess Alessia Szu Suri sur Montanblanc ul Haq is a scion of a powerful family, much resentful of the apparently useless education to which she has been subjected; Corporal Booker 3-212162-930-Infantry is on death row, with a sadist as jailer. Occasional chapters are seen through the mind of Sturm Archon-Admiral Wenbo Strom.

This abundance of viewpoints is a little unwieldy at first as the shifts from one to the other tend to interrupt the flow and invites the question as to how they are all going to come together in the space of one book. The action soon kicks in though as a Sturm attack scrambles the minds of anything and anyone linked to the zero point network while their ships materialise in force.

Only the instant action of the Defiant’s Intellect to isolate itself from the ship’s systems to fight the intrusion saves its company but the commanding officers have been turned into ravening beasts and Lucinda has to take command. She gives orders for everyone to dump their neural mesh, without which the crew are left unconnected and face the risk of truly dying. The dumping involves expelling the mesh into the intestinal tract for removal in the usual way. Sephina barely escapes the Sturm attack with her life but her lover Arianne dies. Princess Alessia’s family is executed. She is captured and forced to cooperate with the Sturm but bravely uses eye-blinks to signal her resistance to the oral message she has to read. McLennan is also taken prisoner. But he and the Sturm have history. Booker brokers his life in return for helping his companions get away from the Sturm but only by having his consciousness decanted into a mechanical war rig. This moving of his consciousness from one machine to another neatly allows Birmingham to sideline the character for a while in an emergency external storage unit (a black box) but it is instrumental in the finale, wherein our heroes attempt to rescue the Princess.

Like the military characters here McLennan’s speech can tend to the earthy but personally it was delightful to see in an SF novel those less extreme but still expressive Scottish words numptie, walloper, dobber, skuddy and munter, (with jobbies perhaps a bit less relishable) but for true verisimilitude McLennan’s, “aren’t I?” really ought to have been, “amn’t I?”

Birmingham’s awareness of SF’s past is alluded to by his employment of the word soylent as a term for basic sustenance, and his alertness to present day concerns by a Sturm soldier’s assertion to McLennan, “But you will not replace us.”

Yet while the Sturm are frequently referred to as Nazis by our heroes, The Cruel Stars suffers from the flaw of most military SF in that the good guys are all but indistinguishable from their opponents in their willingness to resort to violence.

The Cruel Stars is incident packed, well plotted and has some relatable characters but the Sturm have not been beaten and the epilogue seems a bit too crudely designed to draw the reader towards the second of Birmingham’s trilogy.

Pedant’s corner:- a mixture of USian and “gaping maw” (it’s a stomach, not a mouth,) behooves (behoves,) “the chances …. was vanishingly small” (either ‘the chance … was’ or ‘the chances …were’ vanishingly small,) “the conne” (usually spelled ‘con’.) “Sirens and Klaxons sounded” (there’s no need for that capital ‘K’,) skuddy (usually spelled scuddy,) “the series of booms that followed were louder” (the series …was louder,) “that none of the deaed were about to reanimate” (none … was about to,) spit (spat.) “None of them were there by choice” (none of them was there by choice.) “There were a number of personal items” (there was a number.) “With that one convulsive leap he was free” (I couldn’t quite make up my mind if this cliché was exactly that or an ironic nod to the past of periodical fiction.) “Darkly complected” (is complected a proper word? ‘With a dark complexion’ would work fine,) “one ship, broken and venting flames” (venting flames in space? I don’t think so; flames require an oxygen supply to sustain themselves,) “if they try to scuttle the ship” (I would submit you can not scuttle a space ship. Destroy it, yes; scuttle it, no,) “but nae” (this was McLennan; that negative should be ‘but naw’,) “the Cub Scouts” (known in the UK as simply ‘the Cubs’,) “but we dinnae get them all” (didnae.)

ParSec 3 has become available.

I’ve made lead review!

That’s for my take on Adam Oyebanji’s Braking Day.

Also in ParSec 3’s pages are my reviews of:-

The Last Adventure of Constance Verity by A Lee Martinez

Absynthe by Brendan P Bellecourt,

Only This Once Are You Immaculate by Blessing Murariri

and the first two books of a trilogy by John Birmingham, The Cruel Stars and The Shattered Skies