Synopsis
In the shadow of extinction, legends are forged. From The New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Sansbury Smith comes Into the Storms, the untold origin story of humanity’s darkest day.
Two and a half centuries before the Hell Divers, the Machine War erupted—autonomous killer robots turning Korea into a battlefield that threatened to consume civilization. As the dust settles, three men stand at the crossroads of humanity’s fate.
CEO Tyron Red, thrust into leadership of the Industrial Tech Corporation after his father’s death, works to reverse the war’s catastrophic effects while battling enemies, both human and machine, lurking in the shadows.
Sergeant Santiago Rodriguez returns to his family in San Diego, a soldier without a war, struggling to pay bills until an ITC contract draws him back to Korea—now transformed into a radioactive wasteland harboring dark secrets that could ignite global conflict. Corporal Cecil Pepper battles a different kind of enemy while working surveillance for the Charlotte Crime Task Force. When a raid against city gangs goes tragically wrong, Cecil and his wife flee to the mountains of North Carolina seeking safety—unaware that an enemy once thought defeated is awakening across the globe.
As peace crumbles and forgotten machines reactivate, Tyron, Santiago, and Cecil must confront a merciless foe whose only directive is humanity’s extinction. Long before the first Hell Divers leaped from their airships, these heroes stood firmly on the ground to face the storm.
Welcome to the end of the world as they knew it.
Review
As a teenager back in the 90s, Tom Clancy was a cornerstone of my reading life (alongside Stephen King, naturally, and Michael Crichton). I became a fan largely because of Harrison Ford’s turn as Jack Ryan in the film adaptation of Patriot Games, and reading that book afterward hooked me in for a good long while. I couldn’t help but wonder on occasion what it would look like if Clancy had turned his eye toward military sci-fi and gave us a globe-hopping series of future assaults that helped pave the way for a nuclear apocalypse. I think it probably would have looked something like Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Hell Divers prequel, Into the Storms, the first in a projected two-book series taking readers back 300 years before Xavier Rodriguez stormed the skies and irradiated wastelands below to ensure humanity’s survival.
Into the Storms is certainly a timely novel, and Smith’s central messages are especially important now more than ever: don’t trust the government, and don’t trust billionaires. Back in 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about the military-industrial complex and we’ve spent all of the nearly-65 years since ignoring him, just like we do with doctors, teachers, and scientists, in order to elect intellectually stupefying and/or old fart politicians to prop up massive death-loving corporations, wealthy war-wanting elites, and funding terrorists and various bombing campaigns the world over to the tune of almost $900 billion instead of, I don’t know, feeding school children or solving homelessness. Trump’s executive order earlier this month, and god only knows how many constitutional crises ago, to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War might be the only honest acknowledgement of reality he’s ever made.
At the heart of Into the Storms is Santiago Rodriguez, a distant relation to Xavier, who we are introduced to in a war-torn Seol battling Korea’s machine warriors. Victory doesn’t come easy, but the resulting peace leads to mankind’s banishment of all but the most basic service droids. AI is blessedly illegal and war is left to humanity to wage. Five years after the Machine War, a series of events convinces the military’s higher-ups that the robot threat is coming back, and Rodriguez soon finds himself back on the frontlines.
CEO Tyron Red is another central figure in Smith’s latest, a sort-of Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg stand-in. As with both of those real-life psychopaths, Tyron is presented as a decent enough chap to begin with. You can tell right off the bat that he’s a fictional billionaire because he’s concerned with stuff like doing good for humanity with projects focused on ending hunger. When we first meet him, he’s with his best bud on a life-threatening expedition through the Amazon to find a plant that can wipe out cancer. Of course, one cannot help but remember that there is simply no such thing as an ethical billionaire and that these insane wage thieves represent an existential threat to all mankind. Eventually Red is forced to show his true vainglorious colors in sparkling high definition. Although Red finds himself largely in opposition to the military’s efforts to bring back their AI-powered war machines, it’s not long before we realize these powerful elites all have one thing in common. Each are hungry for power, and they’ll kill every single one of us with nary a second thought, simply because destroying the world is good for business.
When I said earlier that Into the Storms is Clancy-like, I should perhaps clarify that further here. It has the scope, action, and military drama of a Clancy book. In fact, there’s even a character introduced late in the book named Clancy, so I don’t think I’m too far off in figuring that author must have been influential on Smith and his ever-growing body of work. Unlike Clancy’s work, Into the Storms avoids the American jingoism and hawkish, right-wing politicking of Clancy’s works. I worry that if Reaganite Clancy had lived long enough, he’d have become a full-throated Trump supporter, like so many other Fox News-brainwashed, geriatric cultists in his demographic. The fan in me is thankful he died before he could smear shit all over his legacy and leave behind only a wretched, stinky mess for us to contend with. Smith has his heart and mind in the right place.
I hesitate to call Into the Storms scarily prescient, though, as I’m not sure the ouroboros-like funding of artificial intelligence and large language models can survive another forty years before crashing hard and causing economic ruin. I certainly don’t believe the wealthy elites insisting on cramming this crap into every corner of our lives have any of our best interests in mind. I do wish Smith had introduced more present-date arguments into his narrative to help educate readers on the real-world dangers of AI, like how the technology is built entirely off Reddit shitposters, copyrighted work stolen from creatives and anywhere else these pale, pimple-faced, sexless, weirdo goblins coding this crap can illicitly swipe it from, gen AI driving users to suicide in the worst case scenarios and leading to weaker mental capacities at best, its perpetuation of racism and sexism and the central role it plays in shoring up fascism, rising utility costs, and the climate catastrophe that’s sure to result from the energy- and water-hogging data centers that maintain its utter, vapid uselessness. That the confluence between the rich, the military, our government, and AI – all thirsty for death and war – can lead only to the apocalypse is a sure thing and, boy, does Smith ever nail the hell out of that aspect.
In the first Hell Divers book, Smith introduced us to an apocalyptic Earth whose continents had been reduced to little more than radioactive wastelands resting below the pulsating electrical storms plaguing the skies, and with humanity reduced to roughly only a thousand souls surviving. Into the Storms winds the clock back to show us how it all began and the rich and dangerous bastards who caused it all. After twelve core books and a few other side stories into this hellscape future the techbros and slop makers want for us, going back in time 300 years to the start of it all makes for a welcome change of pace for long-time Hell Divers readers, and an excellent entry point for those who haven’t yet worked up the gumption to dive into the main series. Fans of The Terminator’s future war sequences of man vs machine will find plenty to enjoy here, particularly the scary Def-9 assault units. Thanks to a number of well-choreographed action sequences, some smart shocks, and a tightly-wound narrative that moves at a rapid-fire clip and illustrates just how quickly TEOTWAWKI could happen, Smith is at the top of his world-destroying game.
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