Review: Gritty Military Sci-Fi and Coming of Age Story
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 2, 2012
4.5 StarsJohn Bowers has written an impressively constructed, gritty sci-fi that blends several genres: military novel, political allegory, and Bildungsroman. His writing is sharp and clear, with natural-sounding dialogue and snappy, economical phrasing. His prose is error-free.The book's main character, Oliver Lincoln III, is a young man who identifies as pacifist, even though his father runs a major arms company known for its excellent space fighters. To Oliver's way of thinking, such craft should only be used for planetary defense. The novel's main plot takes Oliver from his native Terra (which seems to be the future Earth) to one of the many planets humans have colonized, Sirius. He's there to sell his company's fighters to the Sirian military. While there, Oliver comes to suspect that the Sirians have designs on another human-colonized planet, Vega. As the plot progresses, Oliver moves away from his pacifist impulses.He moves about as far as you can get, actually. The strongest parts of the novel, I thought, were those that follow Oliver on the battlefield. Bowers does a terrific job portraying warfare's disturbing mixture of camaraderie, horror, frustration, terror, and excitement. It's through this meaty central portion of the novel that Bowers generates a convincing coming-of-age story as we follow Oliver from where he starts -- as a nice and bright but naive and pudgy young man -- to where he ends up --  as a fit, tough, morally righteous, yet very humane warrior.Meanwhile, the novel's subplot follows events back on Terra, where Oliver's family worries about his fate and where his best friend, Henry Wells, pursues a related political agenda.I'd categorize The Fighter King as "soft sci-fi." Though Bowers gives us a world with FTL travel, laser weapons, and anti-grav devices on vehicles and elevators, the emphasis isn't on the tech. It's on warfare and politics. Battlefield strategy relies on trench lines, infantry ground assaults, and field artillery, giving those scenes a WWII, rather than futuristic, feel. The novel's gender politics also remind me more of mid-20th-century sci-fi: almost every woman Oliver encounters is a sweet, guileless, gorgeous babe, and he's irresistible to them -- even near the beginning of the novel, when he's not just short and balding, but also pudgy. I thought this element of the novel was rather charming -- sort of Captain Kirk-y -- though I can imagine some readers finding it tad annoying that the female characters don't have a bit more heft. I believe other books in the larger Fighter Queen Saga have more central female characters.The novel's political subplot, especially the heavy use of allegory therein, did strike me as a bit weaker than the main plot. Bowers inventively aligns the Sirians with the mid-19th-century U.S. Confederacy. He does this both allegorically -- his main character is named Lincoln, etc. -- and by proposing a literal connection: Sirius was colonized in part by rascist groups from the American South (Bowers gives the Sirians southern accents), which then took over the planet, subjugating and enslaving other colonizing groups. This racist civilization is aggressively imperial (there's also a Nazi connection, as the Sirian president is named Adolph). Their militarism is motivated by their desire to acquire new "product" for their slave trade. They seem to be primarily interested in enslaving women, and the peaceful planet of Vega is known for its genetically engineered beauties.In Bowers's hands, this set-up yields a passionately political novel: pro-human rights, anti-racist, and pro-military. That message comes through convincingly in Oliver's experiences, and I liked it. But the Henry Wells subplot makes strong allegorical connections to the contemporary U.S., and that allegorical turn made the latter parts of the novel strike me as a bit heavy-handed. Fortunately, the subplot is a relatively small part of the overall book, and the main plot is very strong.I notice The Fighter King has been given a new cover, which I think improves on the silhouette-style art the book had when I downloaded it. The book's formatting is good, but there are scattered small glitches. They certainly don't impeded understanding; they're cosmetic.This is an edited version the review posted on my blog. I was not given a free copy of this book.