TL;DR Review: Rainbow Six-level action with a delightful Suicide Squad flavor. Military sci-fi with all the science you could ask for.
Synopsis:
From the author of Gunpowder Moon—a Library Journal Best Debut Novel—comes The Never Wars, a mind-bending mix of Interstellar and The Expanse in which a group of disgraced Special Forces are given one chance to redeem themselves. The question is whether they’ll survive long enough for it to matter.
Special Forces are accustomed to crazy ops, but orbiting a black hole to slow down time and fight Earth’s dirty wars in the future? That’s new, even for them. But that’s the mission for Owen Quarry, Anaya Pretorius, and the rest of COG, a company of elite, disgraced, soldiers from around the globe.
They join a defrocked company commander, an AI warship with self-confidence issues, and a crew of misfit troopers on a dizzying time-quest: prove the concept of stationing armies in space-time.
If they complete ten missions, they’ll be redeemed as citizens in good standing.
But the cost will be heavy—in time and in souls. And as one of their own hunts them down and another rises from the past with a key to freedom, Quarry and Pretorius find that redemption and survival are two very different things.
Full Review:
From the first page, The Never Wars sets the tone: this not going to be a book filled with heroes doing heroic things. Instead, it’s a story for dark, dirty, gritty people doing dark, dirty, gritty things ex-umbra.
We’re quickly introduced to our mission (use a black hole to travel through time to fight enemies in the future) as well as our crew (a bunch of psychopaths, a**holes, and killers, all of whom have blood on their hands and black marks on their records).
And then…things get messy!
Every single battle is hard-hitting and filled with all the tension, trauma, blood, and guts you’d want from a military sci-fi series. Instead of long, drawn-out battles, it’s quick and ugly, fast-paced and so frenetic you can hardly breathe until it’s over. Then, you’ve no choice but to sit back and take in the pain, loss, grief, and misery of soldiers who have just lost more of their buddies and fellow operators. Love them or hate them, you will be right there and feel alongside them.
And, as is expected from a military thriller, the mission is guaranteed to be FUBAR. High casualty rates are just the beginning of the problems to face—you also get to experience first-hand time dilation sickness, mechanical and human operating failure, and corruption and greed among the higher-ups turning everything on its head. Inevitably, it’s the meat-eaters in the line of fire that pay the price. Again, and again, and again.
There is a delightful sense of rawness to the story. Everything is told from the perspective of the special operators—the disgraced captain leading the mission, the bloodthirsty former child soldier heading up the long-range recon team, and the isolation-craving survivalist joining the team to get out of a prison sentence. The ultra-competence and razor-sharp edges of each operator bleeds into their narrative and gives a fascinating insight into their worldview.
It’s not written in the epic style of a David Weber novel, or the grimdark tone of a Warhammer novel. Instead, it reads more like an action-packed thriller (a la Dick Marcinko or Tom Clancy) that just happens to be set in space and involves time travel.
An immense amount of fun with a compelling story that will keep you reading to the last page and craving more.
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