Michael Lavoice's Any Given Doomsday

Dude. I’ve been a Battletech fan since the early 90s. I always loved the Solaris VII setting. If you’re a fan you know what I mean: It’s a place that features paid ‘Mech fights. Like Hunger Games in robots, only not as lethal. So when I saw a book that was based on a group of people that fought in the arena in mecha, or maybe power armor is closer, and then went to war I was all about it. Gladius Leagues indeed! So I got my hands on a copy of Michael Lavoice’s Any Given Doomsday and I checked it out.

I’m glad I did. Any Given Doomsday is a rollicking good time. It starts out just like I thought it would: With a scrimmage. There are some WWE type interviews, people hyping an upcoming match, even though the Gladius League is all about legitimate competition. It’s an organization set up to substitute for warfighting. If one planet has beef with another planet, they can put their teams against each other in the arena instead of actually killing people and breaking things. Well, probably. Death is rare in the arena, but it’s not unheard of.

I love this premise. If you’ve read the writings of both Dwight Eisenhower (and who doesn’t like Ike?) and/or George Patton you know that both men compared football to war. What Lavoice does in Any Given Doomsday is compare war to football with a touch of Vince McMahon style “sports entertainment.” There is a lot more to the book than just what happens in the arena but I feel like Lavoice could have done an amazing book out of just that if he didn’t have a better idea.

But then everything changes. One day planets start going silent. No one knows what the story is for sure. Then a call comes through from a planet just before it goes dark. The caller mentions the word “monsters” before the call drops. Things get weird from there. But it’s not until the planet Miranatha gets hit that we really find out how bad things are.

Nick “Warhorse” Landry gets stuck leading a team on an expedition to get off the planet as it’s being overrun by the alien hordes. Then it’s time to make a run for it. Get to the spaceport and maybe you can clear the system if you don’t get shot down on your way out…

Talk about intense. They’re fighting against they’re not sure what with unknown capabilities and with no way to know what they want. They’re not sure what tactics their enemies will use or what their ultimate military objective is. That all almost makes the fact that they don’t know where the enemy comes from pale in comparison.

Landry steps in and gets his people headed in the right direction and that’s where things get even more interesting. I don’t want to get anymore spoilery than I already have, I mean seriously if this review was any more spoilerific it would smell like week old dead fish, but trust me when I say that things continuously get more difficult and the tension keeps getting higher. I kept waiting for the good guys to find an easy way to get SOMETHING done and they really didn’t, even when they thought they did. It’s like watching the first few episodes of Firefly. You keep waiting for something to go right, but then broken parts, Reavers, forgot the left turn at Alberquerque, “Like a leaf on the wind.” Boom.

Or sumfin’. And I hear you whining about mixed metaphors, but I wanna see you write a blog like this for ten years and not mix the occasional (constant?) metaphor. It takes a lot of braining to make the words go, okay? Sometimes they mix together.

At any rate…

I like Landry. I like Landry a lot. He’s the guy who does the job even if he doesn’t want it. He leads when he’d rather go home and forget about the whole thing. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that he lives in an era in human history where no one has fought a war in centuries and he never thought he’d have to be a member of an actual military that hadn’t existed five minutes ago. He gets things done. He has the brains to put a decent plan together and the reflexes and self confidence to adjust on the fly when he has to. He’s a heck of a leader. I’d follow this guy, and not just to the buffet line.

Then there’s that guy. His callsign is Badger and he is in desperate need of a size ten and a half wide enema with full rotation. Of course, I’d need a new set of steel toed boots to really do it right. He has an ego the size of Texas, no desire to follow orders or really even any understanding of the team concept and no respect for the equipment he’s relying on to keep him alive. I won’t deny the dude’s ability to fight or his courage but he’s still the kind of guy I love to hate.

The aliens in Any Given Doomsday could be a bit more fleshed out. We don’t get to see a lot of them when there’s no shooting going on. Then again, this is the first book in the series and there is plenty of time for us to get in the heads of the aliens later. We do get a good look at one of the reasons they invaded. I won’t tell you what it is but you can’t miss it. There’s a reason why I hate the aliens even though I don’t even know them. I’ll just put it that way.

Don’t get me wrong. Any Given Doomsday is a complete book with a resolution and everything. Seriously, Lavoice knows his business. It is still obvious that there is a lot of story left to tell as regards Warhawk and friends. I’m looking forward to reading about it. I might have to wait a bit to pester Lavoice about it then. AGD was just released as of the day of this writing. Then again, if you wanted to pretend you didn’t know that and go pester him about the next one, I wouldn’t feel bad about encouraging you.

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Captured Flags

Any Given Doomsday
Michael Lavoice
Theogony Books, 2025