PG's Books

This book is starting a new series in the Exodus: Empires at War universe or at least I am assuming that it is a new series since it is marketed as book one. It is a great addition to this universe that Doug Dandridge have created. In this series we take a pause from the war in the Empires at War and embark on another adventure. Well, the war is still there in the background but the story itself is not about the war.

The book starts of as a mission of exploration undertaken by the aptly named Exploration Command. Soon a, previously unknown, civilization is discovered and from there on it starts to get really interesting. Although the Exploration Command’s ships are by no means defenseless, as the more primitive natives are about to learn the hard way, they soon discover that it might be advisable to get themselves a bigger stick. Like a battle cruiser or two. And why not a few marines while we are at it?

As the book blurb states, the natives of this unknown civilization are deeply religious (most of them at least) and as some of us knows, when religion enters the equation then intelligent reasoning and common sense usually exits. Thus the good guys soon finds themselves battling religious fanaticism when trying to save this race from extinction. It is impossible not to draw parallels between these fanatics and the ones that are rampaging around in our real world today, or in the past for that matter. Sadly humanity never seems to learn some things. I suspect these similarities are quite intentional from the authors side.

Anyway, some rather interesting features of the aliens anatomy quite quickly makes them highly interesting for the empire which makes the effort to make these people survive so much more important. So important that ethics occasionally might have to take a back seat. Not that the humans are turned into the bad guys though, except from the point of view of the religious fanatics of course.

To complicate matters there are a number of alien artefacts in the system that are advanced well beyond the empire. They play a rather important role later in the story although this where I have an issue with this book. I will not give any details since it would be a spoiler but when you encounter an artefact that is well beyond your level of science and understanding and which seems to be more or less indestructible you do NOT poke it with battle cruiser weaponry. That is just dumb.

Now, as if there was not enough complications already, the reason why this series seems to be called Exodus: Machine War rears its rather ugly head. As a stand alone book the title is somewhat misleading as there is not really any machine war going on and the machines only appear at the very end. However, obviously this is just book one of a series and should be seen as a stage setter. At first it does indeed look like much of the book have nothing to do with the upcoming machine war but I am sure that the author have some plans on how to tie everything together. If nothing else the empire now have to defend this world.

This is really a great book. Great story, great characters, good writing as usual from Doug Dandridge, plenty of well done fight episodes both in space and on the planet. The balance between the technological superiority of the empire and the more primitive natives ability to give them a black eye despite this is quite good. I am eagerly looking forward to the next instalment in this new series, as well as the next instalment in the Empires at War story arc as well of course.