Miles Phoenix's The Lightning War: Rising Storm
A Book Review
It’s not often I get to read a story that reminds me of two of my favorite Science Fiction series of all time. That made picking up Miles Phoenix’s The Lightning War: Rising Storm a real treat. Phoenix has successfully blended the strong female warship captain (reminiscent of both the Honor Harrington and Alexis Carew series) with a setting based on real world countries IIIIIIIIIIINNN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE that gives it a feel similar to Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant, but with a more up to date political setup. BOAST was written thirty plus years ago, after all.
Rising Storm postulates a galaxy controlled by humanity where planets, systems and clusters are controlled by governments descended from Earthbound ancestors. Accordingly Pilonia Prime, home of the destroyer Błyskawica and her Commanding Officer, Commander Maria Roszak, is basically space Poland. Their allies are the Anglo-Saxon Coalition (ASC) roughly equivalent to the modern Anglosphere but which appeared to me as having a strong American flavor and the Neo-Russian Empire whose origin should be fairly obvious to anyone bothering to pay attention. The three groups together comprise an entity known as the Pact.
Each government/people brings something to the table to complement the others: The ASC has a high degree of coordination. They can put out an impressive amount of firepower, but their real strength is in working together. The New Russians are hard chargers who like to solve tactical problems with sheer firepower. And the people of Polonia Prime have a captured alien technology (although they’re not sure who the aliens were/are or where they came from) named “bubble drive” that basically equates to Star Trek’s transporter technology, only it transports the ship instead of individual crew members.
What comes from an alliance of groups with tactical philosophies this different can’t truly be called “synergy” but it works. The three groups work together against their enemies who are, themselves, working to improve their technology and achieve dominance over known space. They’re not playing games.
In an eerie parallel to things I’ve been watching on the news lately, the name of the enemy faction is The Caliphate. They’re looking to push into the space controlled by the Pact by force. They Caliphate is seeking their own bubble drive technology and they’re building bigger ships. I like this angle because it mirrors what has happened in the real world many times. It’s not just believable, it’s authentic.
Seriously, most of military and political history can be summed up with the following sentences. “First develop the military ambitions. Then develop the technology to win.” That was as true when Ancient Egyptian became the first empire to use copper weapons, at least in their region, as it was when the US invented the B2 Bomber. It works in the story because it has worked in real life.
Of course Rising Storm is a work of Military Science Fiction and so it must have battle scenes. And believe me, it does. They’re crazy and fun. You really get the feeling that things are going off the rails and that only the quick thinking of Commander Roszak and her crew can save the day. And, seeing as they’re the ones with the fancy bubble drive technology they do often plug a gap at a crucial time. That’s not to say that the other parts of the Pact don’t help. They help a lot. It does often seem that the Błyskawica and her crew end up performing the action that ultimately pushes things the way the Pact wants them to go. Fans of both Star Wars and Star Trek should be familiar with this phenomenon. Honestly, so should fans of anything that’s well written and isn’t WoW’s Wrath of the Lich King.
*SIGH*
Tyrion FREAKING Fordring. I like that guy when he’s not ruining the ending of an entire expansion pack.
Anyway…
There’s enough political content in Rising Storm to rival any Michael Stackpole novel, only it’s conducted at the military level. Commander Roszak has to work with military leadership from both the ASC and the Neo-Russian Empire. Having tactical doctrine that doesn’t match complicates things, but that’s not all there is to it. Neither the ASC or the NRE has bubble drive technology. Both want it. Ending up in neutral space to conduct a partisan investigation leads to all kinds of fun. This is the type of political maneuvering that gets lost in a lot of other books because all of the negotiations take place between people in high places and not the people on the ground doing the fighting. Things make a lot of sense this way and it feels more realistic than a lot of what I’m used to.
I find myself wondering where the aliens are. It’s entirely possible that they’re in later books in the series but as of right now, the aliens that invented the bubble drive appear in basically only in the form of one derelict ship. The description of the ship reads really well, and it’s enough to get me interested in who these ETs are and where they came from. As of right now though, they’re basically just a piece of floating salvage. I hope Pheonix fixes that in later volumes.
I also wonder about the Caliphate itself. Rising Storm is the first book in the series and there is still a lot of worldbuilding left to be done, but as of this moment they’re a bit of a cardboard cutout of a villain. They do villainous stuff like attacking our heroes and smashing things, but I’m wondering what their motivations are. I want to know what makes them tick. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens along those lines in the future.
And I guess that’s the review in a nutshell. I’m looking forward to reading more. I already have a copy of the next three books in the series and the first book in a spinoff series. I’ll be reviewing more of Phoenix’s work here in the future. You have been warned.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Mysterious Aliens
The Lightning War: Rising Storm
Miles Phoenix
Self Published, 2025
The Lightning War: Rising Storm 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.
The Lightning War: Rising Storm