Following a particularly expensive civil war, Confederacy of Sentient Beings accepts the nomadic Thraki fleet into its space, unaware that they are being relentlessly hunted by an AI armada under the control of the Hoon. As the Hoon fleet draws closer to human space the Confederacy has to choose to either fight the new invader or eject the Thraki out of their territories...

By Force of Arms: A Legion of the Damned Novel (2015 - 295 pages) is part of a new ongoing series of militaristic science fiction novels, written by William C. Dietz.

It’s never good coming into a conversation that’s half way through and the same can be said of a book series. This novel follows directly on from By Blood Alone, the novel which introduced the Thraki and their eventual settlement in the Clone Hegemony. I really would suggest that you read the previous book before taking up this one, as the characters and situation set up in that novel are brought to conclusion here.

On its own it’s a strange book. Dietz obviously had in mind creating a massively complex universe in which to set his stories. He would not be the first writer to attempt this, but I feel that this attempt has not been as successful as it could have been. The book contains many interesting ideas and science fiction tropes, but whereas others have created complexity and shown it through a limited number of characters, Dietz’s novel contains, perhaps, too many for such a short novel.

This creates the problems of the story continuously flitting between places and story elements, loosing character development along the way. The problem is that we spend so little time with any single person,or being, to actually develop any attachment to them. This jumping around also slows down the plot; nearly the first two hundred pages contain mostly meetings and politics, leaving the ending feeling rushed and unsatisfying.

For readers of the series, this change of pace may come as some surprise as the earlier books were heavy on cyborg action, whereas this one relegates the legion almost to the periphery of the plot. The new characters, such as the Hoon, don’t really have enough space, so even though they remain intriguing we don’t really learn more about them by the close of the story.

The book works better paired with By Blood Alone, but still suffers too much from jaw jaw and not enough war war.

6

Charles Packer