![]() If this sounds like your flavor of badassery, then you’ve come to the right place! This novel is a brilliant introduction to the Galaxy’s Edge Universe, where they fix everything George Lucas broke in this Star-Wars-Not-Star-Wars adventure. Plenty of explosions, with authentically gritty combat. If you like epic space opera, with a side of military science fiction, you should read this series. When you think you’ve surrounded the Legion… you’ve just made your last mistake. With no room for error, the Republic’s elite fighting force must struggle to survive under siege, while waiting for a rescue that might never come. A world somewhere along the galaxy’s edge, where even the gods fear to tread. Stranded behind enemy lines, a sergeant must lead his band of survivors against merciless insurgents on a deadly alien planet. What should’ve been a reconnaissance-in-force, deep inside enemy territory to secure a political alliance gets ugly fast. What started out as a basic political meet-and-greet mission turns deadly when a hostile force ambushes Victory Company. What started out as a three-hour tour, okay…wrong story. And most of the troops don’t know if they’re putting out the flames or fanning them into an inferno. The Legionnaire understands that the galaxy is a dumpster fire, a hot, stinking, dumpster fire. Generally speaking, my goal is to provide a spoiler free review, so here goes nothing! If the blurb doesn’t catch my eye, then I tend to skip the book unless a friend recommends it. Heck, I cribbed this summary from the back, and then I add my own twist! And not even much of one, since most of the books I read have kick butt descriptions (aka blurbs). And a tacit thesis that militarized violence can be justified when the other is different in custom and language, strange in appearance, and a killable, disposable enemy based on nothing more than the word of a faceless authority.įirst, let me say that none of what I’ll say in this section couldn’t be found on the back copy of the novel. As a mundane, thankless job real men aren't afraid to do, cowards avoid, and the powerful elite exploit for their own ends. It is doubtful I could move on to the next book without feeling complicit in supporting an unquestioning view of the military. It's enough to make every death sting, even if you immediately forget the name of the man who just died. While the characters who aren't fleshed out, you know who is who, and you develop a vague sense of they are. As the locations change-as the characters learn new information-so do the tactics. And Each battle is distinct from the last. You know where characters are, what they are doing, and how their decisions influence the direction of the battle. Regardless of outcome, previous battles don't shape the ones that follow.Īnspach and Cole know how to build tension, sustain it, and not undercut it. The battles are repetitive, padding out the page count. Spatial relationships are near impossible to discern. Hopefully, picking up on the information that is relevant to the plot and has impact on the characters along the way. The battles in military sci-fi is often the descriptive slog one has to power through, if not outright skim, to get to the book's end. I wish I could give this more of a recommendation. Any place that is predominantly populated by brown and black peoples, and is in perpetual turmoil when viewed through a militarized and Western lens. Remove the sci-fi trappings, Kublar is Iraq. ![]() We just don't want the Legionnaries to get the hell off of Kublar, we want them to kill as many Koobs as possible. What's most disturbing is that Anspach and Cole are too damn good at pulling readers into the fray. Good men sent to far away lands to die by the hands of an uncivilized, duplicitous other. A screed about the idiots in government prioritizing quick economic gain over the lives of good men. This is a somber view of hyper masculinity as an admirable trait. Anspach and Cole have no interest in that journey, as the introduction of the lone female character given anything to do, and an overly long epilogue, will definitively confirm. Foreshadowing a character arc in which he will confront his own very human prejudices. There are hints early on that authors Jason Anspach and Nick Cole understand their story is populated by bigots, including their lead character. Trial by combat will judge who is worthy of the respect of the main character, a Legionnaire through and through. Those the main character and his men consider to be real soldiers, the Legionnaires, and those who are not, which is everyone else. The characters, standard archetypes differentiated by class, separated into two primary groups. The sci-fi equivalent of a 1950s war film, the pacing and action relentless. Tense.and Xenophobic, Racist, Classist, Sexist, and JingoisticĪs a military tale, Legionnaire is old school.
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