(Welcome to the Month of the Veteran here at Jimbo’s. We’re kicking things off with a review of a book by Air Force Veteran Damon Alan. Having moved the blog over from Blogger, I’ll be featuring both old and new content promoting the work of veterans. My annual Memorial Day Event will feature all new content though.
We love our veterans here at Jimbo’s and this is a way to give a little back to those who have given so much to us. It’s not enough but it’s what I have to offer.)
Damon Alan served in the US Air Force for four years and the Army Reserve for two years prior to the . His maximum rank achieved was Senior Airman, making him an official member of the E4 Mafia. He was a PAVE PAWS Radar Operator and got to play with the world’s most powerful radar on a daily basis and track things like satellites and possible ballistic missiles. He spent three years at Beale AFB in California and a year at Thule AB in Greenland. I heard it’s pretty cold there.
Alan was the runner-up for Airman of the Base at Beale and turned down an offer to become an officer but turned it down to become and Air Traffic controller. He is currently married to a woman from Kenya and is working to bring her here legally. He has two dogs, a Lab and a Welsh Corgi. Alan says that his daughter by marriage is going to school in Kenya and wants to join the USAF herself when she can get over here legally. Alan is a MENSAn who loves how he can show off his intellect in his writing.
Alan says the most valuable lesson from his service was how to be a man. He mentioned a Captain Watson who showed him “duty, honor and respect for country. I owe him a debt that can never be repaid.”
Wow. It’s been awhile since I’ve watched Battlestar Galactica, but I’m thinking Damon Alan’s book The Anvil of Dust and Stars might just be the start of a series to rival BSG. I mean that for real. There is plenty of action and intrigue here. There isn’t the political angst just yet, but this is the first book. Oh, and Alan seems to have left his president a few light years out of the way. That tends to leave things a bit relaxed on the political front.
The threat humanity faces is an existential one. The Hive is the enemy. They infect humanity with nanites that do bad things like, ya know, killing them till they die to death and to which humanity has no cure. This is bad folks. They can kill off whole planets full of humans with these things and they’re really good at pushing the human militaries back, too. It gets ugly. Enter Sarah Dayson.
Sarah is not just the main character she’s also a spacer. Well, an officer spacer, but a spacer nonetheless. She’s got both a competence and a confidence to her. Sarah knows when to fight and when to flee. She finds ways to solve weird problems. She listens to her subordinates. She does what’s right, even if she doesn’t always want to. I’d follow this chick in to battle.
Sarah starts the book as a newbie but her rise is meteoric. Part of that is her natural talent and ability. Part of it is that the people over her keep getting killed. Things don’t look good. Sarah takes a bit of a beating herself at times, but she doesn’t give up and she won’t let anyone around her give up either. She’s kind of a cross between Honor Harrington, Ben Raines and Admiral Adama.
The people Sarah serves with are a mix of good (mostly) and bad (ugly?) but she works with what she has and gets through the things she has to. They’re also the only people we see a lot of in The Anvil of Dust and Stars but that makes sense. Deployed military give up time with family and friends to focus on doing their jobs. It’s rough on the and their families, but it’s necessary. And when you’re Sarah Dayson and you’ve lost two homeworlds…
Yeah, life is rough.
There is a lot of combat in The Anvil of Dust and Stars. It’s one of the best parts of the book. Alan writes a space fight like few I’ve read before him and his Grappler ships (they’re small craft) have a propulsion system like nothing I’ve ever experienced in Science Fiction and I’ve been a fan since…
Uhh…
I was like uhh..
Yeah, it’s been a minute. I don’t really remember not being a fan of SF. My four earliest friends were named Jim Kirk, Spock, Dr. Leonard McCoy and Mike Boldt. Mike lived around the block. The rest you should be familiar with. When I FINALLY got to the age where they’d let me get into the big kid books I immediately read through the Star Trek Log Books. After that, I found this book named Citizen of the Galaxy by some Heinlein guy. And it was off to the races after that.
So anyway, when I find something that is believable but that I’ve never heard of before, I get excited. The Grapple Drive s a pretty impressive piece of machinery. Impressive, that is, as long as I don’t have to use it. It sounds like something that would work well in combat, but not something that would create the best physical sensations among the crew that uses it . Seriously. Ouch.
Both sides like to toss nukes around as well. Alan seems to have done his homework not just on how much damage a nuke can do as an explosive, but how much radiation can do. Some of what happens in The Anvil of Dust and Stars is leaning heavily on the gross side, but it all fits. Someone, somewhere, once referred to radiation victims as dying from the inside out. That pretty well sums things up and, even with their future science and medicine, they can’t save everyone. That makes a lot more sense than I wish it did.
The Faster Than Light space travel system Alan uses, he calls it “travelling through high space” seems fairly familiar. The exact mechanics are a bit different, they always vary from universe to universe, but it works about the same as hyperspace in The Honorverse or space fold tenchnology in Robotech albeit a bit faster. It works though, because it’s nice to have something familiar in a totally new universe, at least to me. It’s like wearing a brand new outfit to a job interview but rocking the necklace you got in high school underneath for comfort.
The enemy in The Anvil of Dust and Stars is something we don’t quite understand yet. It’s not an alien species per se. Humanity has never found another species out there, at least to this point. The Hive seems to be a fully automated machine society, but it has me wondering: Who built these things? That seems to be a question that no one in the books is pondering and I kind of wonder why. Then again, they are pretty busy just trying to survive at this point.Still and all, it seems like an analysis of where these things came from and why they’re attacking humanity might help defeat them. Maybe some kind of mass attack at a central node would be helpful? I dunno, but I think I’d have to try if I was the one in charge.
Other than that though, and this is the first book in a series so it may be a little too early to reveal everything, this is some damn good world building. Humanity has a bunch of different star nations and they seem to relate to each other in ways that I can understand. Each wants to remain independent and sometimes that causes problems. In other words, Alan seems to have read at least one history book in his life and possibly several others. Division in the face of a larger and more powerful foe has cost many groups of people dearly. The Dark Seas Series is no exception.
This is the type of series I’d like to binge, but it’s Veteran’s Month here at Jimbo’s and I’ve got all these other vets to review. I will be reading the rest of the series as soon as I can though. I can’t wait.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Determined Survivors
The Anvil of Dust and Stars
Damon Alan
All or Nothing Books, 2015
The Anvil of Dust and Stars is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost at no additional cost to you.
Regarding Damon Alan's bio, it's the PAVE PAWS radar, not PAW. Thanks!