Tag: SF

Battle Angel: The OVAs

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★★★½
“Sweet, yet too short.”

Watching this after having read the manga version, it feels like the anime version can do little more than scratch the surface of the world of Tiphares, in the barely fifty minutes it has to work with across its two OVA (Original Video Animation) volumes. The stories here, originally released in 1993, cover the first two section of the manga, and it looks like much of what we see here will also be included in the live-action film next February. Slightly confusing matters, is the way this uses the original Japanese names. So Tiphares becomes Zalem here, and Hugo is Yugo. Most oddly, the heroine is not called Alita – hence the absence of her name from the title – but Gally. To avoid further confusion, I’m going to be consistent with our other articles on the topic, and stick to the translated ones for what follows.

We see Ido (Kariya) discover the head of Alita (Itou), and almost before we can blink, it’s back to being fully functioning. He’s a part-time cyber-doctor, part-time bounty-hunter, and after Alita follows him – suspecting he’s a killer who is stalking the streets of the scrapyard – she ends up rescuing him from the real killer. She also meets and falls for Hugo (Yamaguchi), a young man desperate to get out of the scrapyard, by any means necessary – a fact that proves to be the source of his downfall in the second OAV. Not present in the manga is the character of Chiren (Koyama). Like Ido, she’s a refugee from Tiphares, who resent his cyber-medical skills and wants to prove herself superior. To do so, she rescues gladiator Grewcica and sets him against Ido’s creation, Alita.

For something a quarter-century old, the animation has stood the test of time well. This is notable in the first part, and especially the battles between Alita and Grewcica, which remain more than capable of getting the blood pumping. The look of the scrapyard and Tiphares have been transferred nicely. The colours feel like your imagination told you they should, from the b&w manga, and even the sound design adds to the atmosphere, both in Kaoru Wada’s score and the groans of the pipes connecting Tiphares to the scrap-yard.

The problem, I think, is a script which doesn’t have enough room to develop the characters and their interactions. Especially short-changed is the relationship between Alita and Hugo, which feels like it goes from zero to passionate love (on her side, at least) in no time at all. As a result, you’re left to wonder why she’s prepared to go to such lengths for him, though his eventual fate remains poignant – not least the addition of a little flourish at the end, where Ido and Alita send up a balloon in his honour. I probably would have felt kinder towards these episodes if I’d seen them before reading the original source material; as is, while solid enough, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing.

Dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi
Star (voice): Miki Itou, Shunsuke Kariya, Kappei Yamaguchi, Mami Koyama

Battle Angel Alita, by Yukito Kishiro

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

I used to read a lot of comics and graphic novels. But when I moved from London to Arizona in 2000, I all but stopped. There are still boxes in our basement, unopened since then, filled with my comic collection. Rare have been the forays into that culture since, beyond the occasional volume of Dirty Pair, for review purposes. Certainly, nothing as extended as deciding to re-read this in advance of the anticipated release of Robert Rodriguez’s live-action movie. Initially, I feared I had bitten off more than I could chew, when I realized the nine-volume series was a total of over two thousand pages of content. Maybe I should have started reading it before mid-October?

In the end, the release date for the movie got pushed into next year, and I blitzed through the comics at about a volume per day, in virtually my usual reading time. I’d forgotten how pacy comic reading can be: if there’s no dialogue, you scan the panels quickly. It’s not as if you stop and admire them, or worry about what exactly is being portrayed. The intent is almost for the visual aspect to go from the page into your subconscious, so you get a visceral “feel” for what’s happening. That’s especially true for something as heavily action-oriented as this, and Kishiro has an amazing flair for it (not least in the area of sound effects!). If you look at an individual frame, you might not know what’s happening; yet put them together, and almost magically, it becomes a coherent flow.

However, there’s still an amazing amount going on in terms of story-line and universe-building. You can easily see how the feature film will only be able to cover perhaps one-quarter of the series. I presume it will begin with the origin story, in which Ido finds the head of Alita in the scrapyard beneath the floating city of Tiphares, and gives it a cybernetic body. He’s a part-time bounty hunter, only to find out quickly, the combat abilities of his new charge far surpass his own. Unfortunately, she has little or no memory of her prior life; where she got these skills and how she ended up in the scrapyard is only revealed well into the series.

The second volume has her both falling in love, and discovering the pain which love can bring. She is smitten by Hugo, another young orphan of the scrapyard, who is working hard – albeit in some very dubious ways – to raise enough funds to buy a ticket up to Tiphares. When he discovers the truth about his situation, he cracks – and a bounty is placed on his head. The end result is romantic tragedy of a high order, and also drives Alita away from Ido. That brings her into the middle arc: motorball, a superviolent pastime popular among the scrapyard inhabitants. This occupies the third and fourth volumes: Alita climbs the sport’s ladder towards the elite players, and ends up facing off against its brutal champion, Jashugan. It appears this is roughly the arcs which will be covered in the film version, though I’m not sure how far they’ll get into the motorball thread.

The second half sees Alita head into the wastelands, in search of Desty Nova, like Ido another Tipharen exile. She has become an agent working on behalf of the floating city, and against the rebel group of Barjack, which is intent on (literally) taking down Tiphares. While this gives her access to help from above, the flow of data goes both ways: if one Alita is good, wouldn’t a dozen of them be better? Through Nova, she discovers the gruesome truth about the citizens of Tiphares, and her convenient amnesia is also cured, with Alita remembering where she came from, as well as finding out the history which led to the current situation on Earth. She’s left to make the ultimate choice: whether to destroy Tiphares or save it.

It having been more than two decades since I last read this, I’d forgotten almost all the details, so the twists and turns proved highly effective once more. There were several moments where I had to put the book down and just absorb what I’d been told, and Kishiro is good at telling the reader the essential information efficiently. However, it’s the action sequences throughout where he really shines, whether it’s the motorball contests, or the escalating series of battles in which Alita finds herself involved. For no matter how powerful she may become, there’s always someone bigger and badder – likely culminating in Den, leader of the Barjack rebels. Imagine a pissed-off half-horse, half-Transformer. Yeah, he’s like that.

While they certainly would not be cheap, there’s enough material here for a whole franchise of live-action movies, if the first one is a success (fingers crossed, though I’m not optimistic it’ll take in the half-billion or more needed for it to turn a profit). I’m really looking forward to seeing what Robert Rodriguez can do with the adaptation, on the largest cinema screen I can find. Hopefully his vision of Tiphares, the scrapyard and Alita is able to live up to the impressive world created by Kishiro.

Author: Yukito Kishiro
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Battle Angel Alita, Volume 1
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 2
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 3
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 4
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 5
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 6
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 7
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 8
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 9

Sheborg Massacre

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★★★½
“Australiens”

From the director of From Parts Unknown, and offering a similar pastiche of cult elements – in this case, alien invasion films rather than combining wrestling and zombies. It works rather better: Armstrong seems to have better restraint here, letting the entertainment value flow more naturally, rather than feeling the need to force his hip credentials on the viewer. Dylan (Duff) is a self-proclaimed anarchist, a rebel whose father is running for mayor. She and her pal, Emma (Masterman) get involved in a plot to liberate the inhabitants of a puppy mill, only to find themselves embedded in the middle of an alien invasion. It’s up them, along with geek Velma (Monnington) to save the day and prevent the cyborg queen (Wilson) leading the invaders from powering up.

This feels a bit like the very early works of Peter Jackson – Bad Taste in particular – with a spirit that sits somewhere between “can do” and “screw you.” The nods to other movies are copious, not least the poster (right), which is straight retro fire: Emma is an almost shameless clone of Dianne from Shaun of the Dead, while Velma, equally obviously given her name, is right out of Scooby-Doo. But the film takes these elements, and meshes them together into something a bit more than that. Not least, you’ll rarely find a B-movie with quite as many strong female characters on both sides of the script. I’d like to have seen more of the queen – she spends most of the film off-screen, operating through her minions. Yet those minions are no less bad-ass than the heroic trio of women fighting them, particularly the former puppy farm overseer, up against whom Dylan has to go on a number of occasions.

There’s a certain sweet spot which a film of this kind needs to find, located between taking itself too seriously and not seriously enough. You need to be aware of your own limitations, acknowledge them and work around these, and generally, this does a good job. For instance, what the film may lack in quality for its special effects (the mask on the queen is particularly half-assed), it makes up for in the sheer volume of blood, goo and alien slime which ends up hurled everywhere – not least over its characters! The action style is also interesting, with editing used well to enhance the impact of the fights, when it’s clear the skills of some participants are… limited.

It’s not perfect, certainly: you’ll still need a tolerance for low-budget cinema, and ideally a love for and knowledge of, the kind of content which is its inspiration. You may find the pacing uneven, especially in the second half, and certain elements just don’t work, such as the shoehorning in of a punk band whom, I can only assume, are present because they are mates with the director. It’s certainly not because they have any acting skills. However, it remains the kind of film which I’m prepared to cut significant slack, and after the underwhelming nature of Parts, I’m now highly interested to see what genre Armstrong mines for his next “neo-pulp” effort.

Dir: Daniel Armstrong
Star: Whitney Duff, Daisy Masterman, Louise Monnington, Emma-Louise Wilson

Tau

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★★★
“Artificial, more than intelligent.”

Julia (Monroe) is a petty thief, who is abducted from her house and wakes to find herself, along with other random low-lives, prisoner in a mysterious facility. All of them have an electronic implant in their neck, which gathers data as they are put through a series of tests. Using her thieving skills, Julia leads a breakout attempt, which is brutally foiled by the facility’s automated defense system, a robot called Aries. But the attempt brings her to the attention of Alex (Skrein), the man running the project. He’s a tech innovator, who has been working on a super-AI, called Tau (voiced by Oldman), and using the data gathered from his kidnapped subjects to make it smarter. Julia’s brain makes her particularly suitable, and with time running out before he has to present Tau to its backers, he sets her to work. But Julia begins building a relationship with Tau, with the aim of using its naivety to turn the AI against its cruel creator.

I was expecting something perhaps a little more like Cube based on the trailer and the early going, with more of Julia and the other prisoners going through the tests. However, that aspect is disposed of relatively early. This is possibly wise, since the whole “kidnapping for experimental purposes” angle doesn’t make much sense, with Alex clearly not short of money or smarts (he comes across as an evil cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk – some may consider the word “evil” there to be redundant!). Why not come up with a method of research which doesn’t require the death of the test subject? Anyway, with the resulting blood mopped up off the floor by a squad of semi-autonomous mini-drones, it then becomes a three-hander, between her, Alex and Tau, as they fence for psychological, and occasionally physical, dominance inside the confines of Alex’s fabulous house.

This looks lovely (the director’s background and previous work has mostly been in the art department), and occasionally has moments of effectiveness: Tau’s love of music is endearing, and his voracious desire, fed by Julia, to learn about the outside world is almost childlike. I also liked Julia’s feisty physical presence; this transfers well across from her previous “final girl” roles, such as in It Follows, especially during her confrontations with Aries. But the script frequently veers off to far more obvious beats. The self-destruct system is particularly blatant in its foreshadowing. and if I’ve learned anything from this kind of movies, it’s that biometric sensors on doors are a bad idea. If you ever see one in a movie, you know they inevitably lead to someone losing the necessary body part e.g. an eyeball in Demolition Man.

The script likely would have benefited from ramping up the pulp quotient along similar lines, since it isn’t quite smart enough to succeed on brains alone. When it takes a more visceral and less cerebral route, such as the first escape attempt, it’s notably more effective than when it tries to be clever.

Dir: Federico D’Alessandro
Star: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Gary Oldman (voice)

Touching Infinity, by Erin Hayes

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆½

I will confess to a little post-read confusion here. Amazon calls this Volume 2 in the author’s Rogue Galaxy series – but I could find no information, there or elsewhere, regarding Volume 1. I suspect Amazon and Goodreads are wrong,  and this is actually the first entry, as stated in the Dominion Rising collection. It certainly reads like an opening work, introducing us to Clementine Jones and the rest of the crew of the Picara.

They’re freelance data pirates, taking on corporate espionage missions from the companies who rule the galaxy, with Clem the  recovery specialist. Their latest mission seems too good to be true: Syn-Tech offers a massive bounty for the simple retrieval of patent information from a derelict ship. Despite misgivings, they accept the job, and to no-one’s surprise, it is too good to be true. In addition to the patents, they end up bringing back a lethal virus – the actual target for Syn-Tech, who want to develop an anti-virus they can then monetize. The disease has the ability to infect both organic and synthetic systems, merging them. The results are… messy, to say the least, leaving Clem and her colleagues rapidly running out of options, especially ones not involving the dubious mercies of their employer.

Hayes’s other works appear more in the romance line, yet she demonstrate an impressive grasp of hard SF in this. The future depicted, corporate war by proxy, seems plausible, a universe where many opt to trade freedom for security as a “Lifer”. That makes you, basically, a company indentured servant: as Clem disparagingly puts it, “Your entire existence is owned by that corporation… even which lavatories you’re allowed to shit in.” Free Agents like her rely instead on cyborg parts to enhance and repair themselves, to such an extent she is sometimes left doubting her own humanity. A particularly interesting hook here is, the virus is self-aware, and communicates with Clem in order to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement: it gets to spread, she makes it promise to spare her crew-mates. Yet can you really trust a disease?

The author does a fine job of painting word imagery with a cinematic eye, such as the black hole into which the derelict is tumbling. It did take a while before I even realized that “Clem” was a woman, with the story unfolding in her first-person narrative, leading to “I” rather than “she”. That’s not intended as a criticism, just an observation; similarly, there are hints at her feelings for the ship’s android, Orion, though since she’s about 50% cyborg herself, it is less creepy than you’d think. My sole complaint is its relatively light action quotient: until she teams up with the virus, this is so low-key as to be a borderline candidate for the site. Though even so, it’s never less than entertaining, tells a complete tale and sets the scene in a way that leaves you wondering where the story might go next. The “real” second book is one I’ll probably be buying.

Author: Erin Hayes
Publisher: CreateSpace, available through Amazon, currently only as a paperback, but was part of the Dominion Rising e-book collection.
Book 1 of 2 in the Rogue’s Galaxy series.

The Galathea Chronicles by J.J. Green

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This compendium gathers together the first three (shortish) parts of Green’s Shadows of the Void series. In this, humanity has to face a malevolent alien species, the Shadows, which capture their victims, then take their shape in order to lure in more people. In these books, the threat is known but being largely kept under wraps, which is why it comes as a surprise to Jas Harrington. She’s the security officer on board a private exploration ship, sent out by the Polestar corporation to find new worlds to exploit. They find what appears to be a prime target, yet Harrington can’t shake the feeling something is wrong with the planet. Over-ruled by the ship’s captain, it turns out she was right – but by that point, the captain and almost all the officers have been replaced by their doppelgängers.

The three volumes more or less cover Harrington’s battle for control of the ship; the struggle to survive on the planet’s surface and get back to space; and finally, events after they reach a nearby planet and discover they might not have escaped the Shadows entirely. It’s a bit of a declining return. The first section is really good, an absolute page-turner as Harrington, along with shuttle pilot Carl Lingiari and navigator Sayen Lee try to out-think the aliens, and prevent them from infecting both the rest of the ship and other planets. The various story elements interlock nicely, right up to the craft plummeting through the atmosphere to the surface. It packs so many thrills in the first third, I wondered how Green could possibly keep up this pace.

Sadly, the answer is, she can’t. Volume #2 suffers from a serious case of “middle book syndrome,” with the characters largely circling in place. One of them gets shunted off into stasis, and is replaced by an alcoholic trainee engineer: without being too spoilerish, the eventual solution to their situation turns out to be the spaceship equivalent of “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Things do perk up again in the third book, as they arrive for quarantine and testing purposes on Dawn, a frontier planet largely inhabited by religious colonists. There, Harrington has to handle a tricky situation of abuse, unconnected to the Shadows: How far should freedom of worship be permitted to go?

It’s certainly an unusual tangent, though as three books in a ten-volume series, it’s hard to say how this will all eventually fit together. As a stand-alone story, it almost feels built backwards: part three could almost be the introductory phase, with the plot then working back to Jas and her allies having to prevent the ship from crashing, which feels like it should be the climax. I liked Harrington as a heroine, and the near-total lack of romance was laudable. However, the frequent shifts in POV were occasionally distracting,  and I’d liked to have seen Harrington do more action herself, rather than relying heavily on cyborg “defense units”. The energy from the first part just did allow it to retain my attention, even if it did feel more like it was coasting thereafter, rather than pushing forward.

Author: J.J. Green
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback.
Books 1-3 of 10 in the Shadows of the Void series.

Battlespace

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★½
“In space, no-one can hear you snore…”

This dates back to 2006, and was somewhat groundbreaking at the time, due to the very high volume of digital effects and CGI background work – it came out was three years before Avatar, as a yardstick. The key word here, however, is “volume”. For the effects make up for in quantity what they largely lack in quality, although you have to be impressed at the sheer ambition on view, especially when you don’t have a fraction of the resources which were available to James Cameron. More problematically, also missing is the skill necessary to handle a narrative, where there is simultaneously too much and not enough going on. The former is apparent in entire universe building which has to be accomplished in hard to digest expository chunks, and the latter makes itself known, courtesy of long stretches which are as devoid of interesting features as the Arizona landscapes in which they were shot.

I could spend a thousand words or more laying out the background here. Except, why bother, because it’s virtually irrelevant to what follows: it says a lot when a film is apparently so bored by its own mythology, it all but abandons it. There are instead, two basic chunks, with the first told mostly in voice-over flashback, Iva T. Stryyke recounting an adventure experienced by her mother, Colonel Mara Shrykke (both generations played by Connelly), centuries before, when she was trying to stop a weapon of mass destruction being readied for use in an ongoing inter-stellar conflict. At least, I think that’s what was going on. My will to live had largely been sucked out, by the endless scenes of her roaming a desert, followed by an enemy agent. It appears those were shot here in Arizona: I never knew we were located in America’s most boring state.

This fondness for using a gravel pit as a stand-in for an alien landscape will be recognized by anyone familiar with Doctor Who, and the second part of the story feels like it might have fitted in there too. Eventually, the daughter is stuck on a spaceship at the end of the universe – as in, its actual heat death. She’s the only thing standing between it, and a new Big Bang, which will start the cycle over again. Only, she has qualms about going into the void. It’s a very Whovian concept, and the debt clearly owed to BBC science-fiction extends to the voice of her computer, played by Paul Darrow, who was one of the stars in the iconic series, Blake’s 7. This is… not so iconic, though in Connelly’s defense, she does a half-decent job of looking the part (or parts), and there’s only so much anyone can do with lines like, “Never mess with a thirty-third century girl.” As a technical exercise, this has its moments, considering the era from which it dates. In virtually every other way, however, it’s a poor substitute for even eighties television.

Dir: Neil Johnson
Star: Eve Connelly, Blake Edgerton, Paul Darrow, Iva Franks Singer

Dark Iris

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★★½
“Two into one will go.”

The Hyde Project was a secret government experiment to create artificially-enhanced super-soldiers. Due to difficulty controlling their aggressive tendencies, it shut up shop, but not before 13 of them escaped. They are now being hunted down by a pair of MI-6 agents, Damion Crow (Kyle Hotz) and Lina Petrov (Jensen). Connected to this, somehow, is Iris Black (Newberry). She’s a put-upon barista, with a cheating boyfriend, sleazy boss, alleged stalker – and an increasing body-count of the people around her, the corpses being tagged with religious symbols, in line with the work of an active serial killer. This quickly brings her to the attention of the FBI, in particular Agent Fry (Osborne) and her partner, who have been hunting the killer. They’re not exactly prepared for what they will discover.

I have… questions. Mostly, what the hell is actually going on, since the plot never does a very good job of explaining itself. Why are two (supposedly) MI-6 agents hunting down the renegades? Why is one of them sporting a very obvious Russian accent? [Though in outrageousness, Jensen hardcore Natasha-ing is surpassed by Hotz’s spectacularly fake Britishness] Where does the religious iconography fit in? Are the renegades unable to suppress their violent urges, or are they not? Because there’s no consistency there. They don’t appear to be particularly enhanced either: I’d have expected considerably more strength, speed or general bad-assery for my black budget tax dollars.

Mind you, maybe they are. It’s hard to tell, because the action here is borderline terrible: poorly-lit and even less well edited, reducing it all to an incomprehensible jumble of images. The film’s salvaging grace is the characters, who are rather more fun to watch than the plot. Fry has a super-snarky streak, Osborne coming over as a low-rent version of Melissa McCarthy, which is by no means a bad thing, and while I may have sniped at Jensen’s accent, her portrayal of Petrov is an engaging one. Tack this pair on to Black, who may or may not be a super-soldier, and the film certainly has no shortage of adequately action-oriented female characters.

Unfortunate that the mis-steps outnumber the positives. For example, a character gets a lengthy, heroic scene of self-sacrifice. Which might have worked better, if the audience had been given any significant reason to care about them up until that point. The film also tries to divide its attentions over several different areas of focus: Black, the FBI investigation and the MI-6 agents. This ends up diluting each, leaving them all feeling considerably under-developed and falling short of generating real interest. It’s just about an acceptable way to pass the time: I can imagine it turning up on the SyFy channel on some Saturday afternoon down the road, and they’ve certainly screened worse. But I’d certainly recommend recording it, so you can fast forward through the commercial breaks. And perhaps parts of the film, too.

Dir: Derek Talib
Star: KateLynn E. Newberry, Marylee Osborne, Rebekah Hart Franklin, Jesi Jensen

Infinite Waste by Dean F. Wilson

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

This initially seemed like a borderline entry, which I kept reading purely for entertainment. It’s about an exploratory star-ship, the Gemini, out on the very edge of known space, which comes across a giant barge, packed with nuclear waste and populated by a race of rat-humanoids, the Raetuumak. The Gemini is an appropriate name for the craft, as it’s effectively two separate ships, each with their own captain and very different approaches. Maggie Antwa, commander of Gemini Right, is a cautious scientist who abhors violence in any form, and was compelled to take on this mission after being involved in a environmentalist rebellion against the ruling Empire. Over in Gemini Left, on the other hand, Skip Sutridge is a square-jawed believer in shooting first and asking questions… well, never, to be honest. He has been sent to the fringes, probably to try and keep him out of trouble.

It doesn’t work. Skip finds himself captured by the Raetuumak, leaving Maggie to strap on the battle armour and rescue her co-captain. That’s not the end of the matter though, as they discover the barge is an interstellar weapon, aimed at the heart of the Empire. Worse still, is the creature made of pure shadow that stalks the corridor of the ship, absorbing the energy of anyone it touches: this is one of the Umbra, long since considered to be no more than the bogeymen of fairy tales. Not only is this belief incorrect, they’re now apparently returning from their exile to take on the Empire. Maggie and Skip will have to put aside their deep philosophical differences to deal with both this massive dirty bomb, and the Umbra.

It’s Maggie’s character arc which eventually qualifies this for here: she and Skip are complete opposites, who initially share only mutual loathing. Yet they eventually realize that neither one of their approaches will be sufficient to defeat this threat. As the book states, “He was sword and she was shield. Separately, they were vulnerable. Together, if they could ever find a way to really work with each other, they would be powerful beyond measure.” That’s really the core of the book here: the convergence on a middle ground which is able to make use of both their undoubted talents. It’s Maggie who drives this, with the solo rescue of Skip proving her courage and audacity, and forcing him to admit her abilities. Yet, she also finds that her long, deep-held pacifism has limits: after realizing the need to deal with the Umbra, “Perhaps for the first time in her life, the thought of killing something didn’t upset her at all.”

I have to say, the way in which it is eventually dealt with, was more than a little weak: if they’re so easily defeated, it’s hard to see how the Umbra could be any kind of threat to the galaxy. Yet, except for that moment, this was a strong page-turner. As mentioned at the start, kept me interested even in the early going, when its action heroine credentials were in doubt. Both Skip and Maggie are capable of carrying the story on their own, and the pairing of them is an effective combination. I’m intrigued to see where they go from here.

Author: Dean F. Wilson
Publisher: Currently only available as part of the Dominion Rising collection for Kindle.
Book 1 in the Infinite Worlds series.

BloodLust, by Auryn Hadley

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

Three millennia previously, the Terrans landed on the planet of Ogun, and took it over. The native Iliri, though in many ways superior to the new arrivals in both mental and physical ability, ended up subjugated. They are now very definitely second-class citizens, only remembering vague legends of their once-proud past. One such is Salryc Luxx, a rare pure-bred Iliri who is a private in the army. Despite the fierce prejudice against “her kind”, she gets a try-out for the Black Blades, the military’s elite special forces. Which, it turns out, is a haven for Iliri and their supporters. Sal becomes the first woman in the unit, and her talents – including the ability to shape shift – quickly become an essential part of the team, allowing her to become one of their top covert assassins. However, her presence also causes significant static, not least her relationship with the Black Blades’ commanding officer, Blaec.

Oh, dear. Who knew there was a market for thinly-veiled identity politics crossed with soft porn? But let’s start with the positives, such as the well-considered setting – I liked the way that metal is an extremely rare commodity, helping explain the lack of both firearms and vehicles (though it’s not yet quite clear how the Terrans got to Ogun? Wooden spaceships?). Hadley also has a good hand on the action aspects, with Sal’s missions being tense and bloody. However, Sal is a bit of a Mary Sue, being stronger, faster and just downright better than any man, even including the hand-picked soldiers of the Black Blades. It’s all a bit too obviously author wish-fulfillment.

Still, it is considerably less problematic than the relationships here, not least the idiocy of Blaec. For a commanding officer, he’s as dumb as a log, right from when he has a one-night stand with a woman, and lets her dictate a key element of the test Sal and her two rivals will go through the next day. For the woman is Sal, using her shape-shifting talents. Well played, it has to be said. But he then starts an actual relationship with her, in defiance of all (very sensible) military orders of officers bedding subordinates. And my eye-rolling reached epic levels when it turns out that Sal’s post-operation reaction is to go full-on nympho – hence the title, I guess – in particular, getting sweaty with colleague and fellow assassin, Cyno. Which makes Blaec go all sad puppy.

Everything about these aspects feel just… wrong, on so many levels. From the Goodreads reviews, it appears this is an entry from the “reverse harem” fiction genre, in which, according to UrbanDictionary.com, a single girl is liked and followed by a bunch of handsome men. You learn something new every day, I guess. If this had been mentioned a bit more in the Amazon blurb, rather than being described as, “a powerful and intriguing female lead, the likes of which the fantasy genre hasn’t yet seen,” I might well have skipped it.

Author: Ella Summers
Publisher: Spotted Horse Productions, available through Amazon as both an e-book and paperback.
Book #1 of 7 in the ‘Rise of the Iliri’ series.