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.
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