(Welcome to Day One of the Memorial Day Weekend Event at Jimbo’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Reviews.
Today we’re honoring David Drake. I usually send a short text interview/questionnaire to the author and do a write up based on their responses. Drake passed last December and so obviously that wasn’t possible in this case. I have therefore, stolen the bio from his webpage. Here it is:
While David Drake was studying at Duke Law School, the Army changed his immediate career path to a choice between interrogator or grunt. Dave chose interrogator. He was assigned to the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse, and spent much of 1970 riding armored vehicles through jungles instead of slogging on foot.
During his service, Dave learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn’t run fast enough to get away. He returned to Duke, completed his law degree, and became Chapel Hill’s Assistant Town Attorney while trying to put his life back together through fiction that made sense of his Army experiences.
Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF.
He would rather be a moderately successful lawyer with a less interesting background.
Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.)
Some of the best Military Science Fiction is written by veterans. The reasons for that are obvious, right? They’ve been there. They’ve done that. They may or may not have the T-shirt. The fact remains that all vets, and combat vets in particular, no things that we don’t and they see things in a way that the rest of us can’t. Enter David Drake’s Redliners. Drake served in Vietnam and had some trigger time. That experience enabled him to write something as amazing as Redliners.
Once upon a time I did a review about another book before I migrated the blog over to Substack and talked all about how that author had given a good picture of an officer who had to order her troops into combat knowing that it was going to kill some of them. It wasn’t easy for her and she spent a lot of time trying to find the bottom of a liquor bottle. I thought that was pretty amazing, not because I like books that are maudlin but because it was realistic and working through it was a major character arc for the character.
Drake’s characters are totally the same, only completely different. The members of Striker Unit C41 are suffering from being in combat. They have been on the sharp end for precisely eight four point six kajillion times more than they should have been. They should be pulled out of the fighting and put into psychiatric care because there is only so much that any human being can take and its time to readapt them to life outside of combat. (For the record, that’s where the title comes from. Pulling a member of the military off the line for these reasons is called redlining them.)
But that’s not to say that Drake’s Redliners are psychotic murdering goons. The troopers of C41 are just wired a little too tight. Their minds have been trained to always be on the alert for danger because they’ve been subjected to it for so long. They see things as threatening when most of us wouldn’t because they’ve been through things that most of us haven’t. They’re just a little too keyed up.
And we find all of that out in the first chapter, just like we find out that C41 is being tasked with protecting a bunch of would-be colonists from Chicago as they try to gain a foothold on a planet teeming with dangerous wildlife. Then, once the ship their on crash lands in the wrong spot they find themselves in a spot that’s more dangerous than any place they’ve been in the galaxy. The only thing that could make things any worse is if their enemies, the alien Kalendru, showed up, but what are the odds of that happening this deep into human space?
Of course, things go wrong from about three sentences or so past when the colony ship leaves Earth orbit. They land in the wrong spot. The ship smashes into a rock and unloading becomes a problem. The strikers are called on to herd civilians and they don’t exactly get along with them. And oh, by the way, the wildlife isn’t as bad as they expected it to be but the plants are freaking deadly. They’re like a mix of Devil’s Snare from Harry Potter, the plant that shot Spock in the face with its seeds in ST:TOS and the mines from ST:DS9 episode “The Siege of AR 558.” except worse. The crater they’re stuck in is so freaking horrible that even most Australians wouldn’t live there.
And that leads to some epic level action sequences. Strikers protecting themselves are scary enough but when you add in the civilians they’re protecting, the amount of firepower they’ve able to bring to bear is either amazingly awesome or horrifyingly catastrophic depending on your view of such things. Personally, I can’t help but think that a couple of those disposable rockets might be useful come rush hour, but what do I know? I just work here.
The uncertainty is a thing too. There is nothing to match Planet BZ 459 on Earth, but I can’t help but wonder if Drake’s experiences in Southeast Asia didn’t play into his depiction of the jungle. There is a lot here and when the unexpected occurs it can be downright frightening. The civilians add another level of suspense in these situations because you never know how one will react. They don’t have the training that the strikers do. If they did they wouldn’t be civilians.
There is definitely a mass character arc that takes place between the strikers as a group as regards (hey look, I’m a real professional blogger! I said “as regards”!) their attitude toward the civilians they’re protecting. What starts out as thinly veiled contempt turns into something more than that. It’s a gradual transition and that totally makes sense. That may be the most realistic part of the book. Things don’t change overnight for those of us who have psychic damage regardless of source and watching C41 improve over time feels right.
Redliners is the type of novel that will keep you up at night reading when you know you have to work in the morning. It’s also the type of book that will have you up late reading again the next night when you’re already tired. Drake was that kind of author. If you’re a hardcore, or even just a casual, Military Science Fiction fan,and you haven’t read Drake, then Redliners is the perfect place to start your next unhealthy obsession.
*Looks over left shoulder*
*Looks over right shoulder*
Don’t tell my boss I said that though, okay? He thinks I was tired because my allergies were acting up and I was up all night coughing.
Listen folks, I’ve been reading Drake for years. There are very few people in the business who can write as well as he can. Usually when I do my Memorial Day reviews I try to get hold of the author and find out what they want me to review. Not this time. Drake having passed late last year left me free to pick whatever I wanted to review. I chose Redliners over the Belisarius series and a bunch of other old favorites. This is a good book. Now hie thee off to Amazon and buy it.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Brain Worms
Redliners
David Drake
Baen, 2013
Redliners 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 to you.
Redliners, is by far, my favorite David Drake novel of all time. I've read it maybe 4-5 times in full which puts it in rare company for books I've read. Perhaps only 2-3 others have I read more. I'm not talking partial reads, but full cover to cover. I only wish I could write as good as he does in that surprisingly overlooked book.