Birds of Prey

I wanted to review a David Drake book, and I meant to do The Dragon Lord, but I couldn’t find it, so it will have to wait. Instead I picked up this one, and by the time I found out it was really SF and not fantasy, it was too late to read anything else, so here we go.

Drake has done a good bit of alternate history, and his interest in the late Roman empire has fueled more than one book. This one starts out rather messy, then pops a good premise and some well-drawn characters, meanders around, and has a pretty good climax, so let’s run through it.

The book follows Aulus Perennius, an agent of the Roman government during the reign of Emperor Gallienus, who had the misfortune to rule during the economic catastrophe known as the Crisis of the Third Century. The book does not concern itself much with the larger political situation, but the setting is important as it evokes a sense of collapse and decay running through the Roman culture. Aulus is an agent of the fictional Bureau of Imperial Affairs, which is a kind of Roman-era CIA tasked with addressing threats to the empire in a covert fashion.

The book opens is a lumpy fashion, setting up some action that turns out not to matter and introducing political strife that’s historical, but amounts to background noise to make the book seem more accurate. Drake has obviously done his homework, and he fills the descriptions with carefully-researched period details that add texture, but too often obscure what is going on. Filling traveling music with little flourishes is fine, stopping the action to do it is not.

Aulus gets involved with a mysterious Roman noble Calvus, who enlists his aid to stamp out what is described as a cult, but turns out to be led by aliens. I think Drake missed a step here by making the aliens more strange than menacing. Their electric weaponry is flashy, but as described does not sound super-effective, and he seems to have gone for the exotic effect rather than a more realistically imagined technology. The aliens themselves are more bizarre than anything else, seeming to be awkward and rather weak.

The center of this alien-led cult is in Cilicia (Turkey), which is a long journey from Rome, and the bulk of the book is taken up with the trip. A cast of secondary characters is assembled, most of them with FODDER stamped on their heads, and off they go. The great mistake of the plot is that at least the middle third is taken up by a sea-chase with Gaulish pirates and a battle. The whole thing is well-done and vivid action, but it has nothing to do with the main plot, and by the time chapter after chapter of it is over you are like “oh, right, aliens.” Drake got carried away with the sea battle and forgot he was writing a book about something else.

It’s made more annoying by the fact that after the harrowing sea chase they end up captured by the pirates anyway, so the whole middle third of the book is essentially spinning its wheels. Then we have an unpleasant and unfortunately rather graphic gang-rape scene that derails the tone, and it takes a while to recover from that – in some ways it never really does, since all of it is so unnecessary. Even by the standards of 1984, the rape scene is gratuitous and ugly.

After squandering reader goodwill we finally get to the rather gripping finale, when the group is heading down into an underground cavern pursued by an Allosaurus. One of the more interesting side-plots is that the aliens are from Earth’s future – as is Calvus – fighting to prevent the aliens from essentially destroying the entirety of Mediterranean civilization in a bid to wreck human social and technological development. Calvus is actually an android of some kind, sent back to prevent this. The time-jumping has caused rifts that allow other time slippage to take place. The inference is that the time-travel technology is not well-tested, and has unforeseen side effects. It’s an interesting idea that would warrant a longer book.

But at the end, the aliens are rather handily defeated, and Calvus explodes to destroy all the remnants of their technology. The relationship between Aulus and Calvus is one of mutual respect and is well-drawn, so the end has a bittersweet quality.

So how is this like Sword & Sorcery, and what makes it not? The violence is graphic and bloody, and the main character is definitely morally ambiguous. Aulus has a code and a devotion to the cause of the empire, but he doesn’t much care how he accomplishes his goals. The SF elements are so muffled they might as well be fantasy, but the stakes of the game are far too high for a usual S&S tale. The fate of the world – in fact all of human history – is in the balance, and this kind of world-saving quest is not what S&S is about.

The good aspects are that Drake is a solid prose technician, and his action scenes especially really zip along. That said, he does get hung up on details a lot, and loses track of his pacing when he is caught up in the action. The violence is swift, bloody, and brutal, and the characterizations are good. Interestingly, Drake opts for a very vernacular, modern style of description and dialogue, making this seem like a very modern story despite the avowedly historical setting.

The problems are mostly that the book spends way too much time following plot threads and side characters that go nowhere, and sidelines its own main plot for like 60% of the novel. The lack of a real antagonist is another lack, and the aliens spend so much time offscreen and are so poorly described that they have no personality. There were a lot of interesting elements that never got the depth I would have liked, and there are too many unanswered questions by the end. Drake has his strong points, but this is far from his best work.