This review definitely has spoilers in it, especially with respect to its ending. If you want to fly blind, don’t read this. If you want my personal take but don’t want the ending spoiled, there’s a warning to skip the super spoiler-y bits. Also, my review copy was somewhat longer than the final product.
Maybe it’s just current events aggravating some seasonal affective disorder, but I have to keep reminding myself that progress isn’t linear. Things aren’t so great now, but they could get better tomorrow. Or they could get worse. Or they’ll get better over a long enough timeline (one hopes). It’s as true of someone’s personal life as it is in a universe as dynamic and human as BattleTech.
Admittedly, a universe (even a fictional one) is much more complicated than an individual. Things might have been “good” during the Star League, but not if you were the Outworlds Alliance or the Taurian Concordat. Things were bad during the Clan Invasion for a lot of people, but not if you were a Liao noble. Things got better after the Jihad, but if you were living on Brihuega, you might not have even noticed there was a Jihad.
Gray Monday, though, was almost universally bad. A star-spanning communications network gone in a single day. The chaos, confusion, and fear this event caused defined two decades that would come to be known as the Dark Age. Whether you liked or hated this era of BattleTech, it wasn’t called the Dark Age because of technological progress and camaraderie. People were fighting with backhoes and chainsaws, and then two Clans raised the Inner Sphere in a fight for dominance that culminated in razing Earth.
It’s against this backdrop that we read VoidBreaker, the latest novel from Bryan Young and starring everyone’s favorite space-faring death merchants, Clan Sea Fox. You will note that the cover once again bears a Tiburon, continuing the tradition of every Sea Fox protagonist piloting a Tiburon.
But the book is not so much about a Sea Fox heroine driving her Tiburon to fame and glory. In fact, there’s no fame or glory to be had anywhere in VoidBreaker. This is a clandestine tale of interstellar spycraft, with foreign agents plunging deep behind enemy lines with one goal: to end the HPG Blackout once and for all.
The story revolves around Star Colonel Kenja “Kitefin” Rodriguez, a Sea Fox Watch operative tasked with first finding and capturing former ComStar scientist Tucker Harwell and then—through any means necessary—finding a solution to the HPG Blackout. Harwell isn’t too keen on joining Clan Sea Fox at first, but Kenja is thankfully the type to incentivize with carrots rather than sticks, and after much ado and more than a little top-secret Sea Fox research, Harwell is able to restore a pair of previously non-functional HPG stations.
Getting to the point of restoring an HPG station was hectic, to say the least. Harwell is a hot commodity not just to Clan Sea Fox, but also to every major House, ComStar, and even rival Khanates within the Clan itself, not to mention minor powers in the Hinterlands and the ascendant Clan Wolf with its third incarnation of the Star League. It seems that everyone knows that Harwell is the secret to ending the Blackout, so Kenja has to first find and then defend Harwell from all comers. Harwell changes hands a few times, first from Republic agents gone to ground, then to Sea Fox, then to mysterious mercenaries, then back to Clan Sea Fox again.
When VoidBreaker is on, it’s a veritable whirlwind of action that grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. There’s a few good ‘Mech battles, but most of the novel takes place either on foot or floating in space, with several tense zero-G fights describing the totally alien nature of infantry combat inside a JumpShip. I was especially pleased to see the Belters make an appearance, an oft-forgot highly advanced off-shoot of humanity that uses genetic tinkering to survive the harshness of space (sometimes resulting in “animal-human hybrids”—yes, BattleTech had furries before furries were even a thing).
Call me an adrenaline junkie, but my least favorite moments in VoidBreaker were when the action slowed down—which it, unfortunately, had to because space travel is long and boring, with plenty of time for characters to worry and fret. Through Kenja’s inner monologue, you get the sense that she genuinely believes that Clan Sea Fox bringing communication back to the Inner Sphere is the right and just thing to do, but you also learn that she’s not a soulless government agent willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish the mission.
Is that because the Clan Watch is fundamentally different from how most spy agencies are depicted or is it because the Watch doesn’t have centuries of backstabbing to contend with? I can’t speak to that, but I can say that Kenja seems oddly soft for doing such a hard job. She’s willing to sacrifice herself for the mission but not quite ready to sacrifice everyone else.
She’s also genuinely conflicted with initiating congress with a subordinate, which seems slightly un-Clanlike if you didn’t also read the opening chapter of VoidBreaker where her mentor gets blown up in an op gone wrong. It’s a switch from previous Clan-focused novels and one that I thought humanized Kenja significantly more than her constant concern for the success of her mission.
Here’s where things get especially spoilerific, so if you were okay with the previous spoilers but really don’t want every surprise spoiled for you, skip to the last paragraph.
***SPOILER WARNING! SPOILER WARNING! SPOILER WARNING!***
Spy thriller themes are apparent throughout VoidBreaker and I immediately latched onto GoldenEye as the rubric VoidBreaker would follow. Like GoldenEye, the book opens with the hero infiltrating a heavily defended location by dropping from the sky (although Kenja deploys from a DropShip whereas Bond just bungee jumps from a dam). Things seem to be going well, but then the hero’s partner—Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye, or Kenja’s mentor Seth in VoidBreaker—is inexplicably captured off-screen and used to attempt to bait the hero out of hiding. The partner shouts to “blow them all to hell,” the hero obliges, and then escapes in the confusion.
Sometime after this traumatic event, the hero is assigned a new mission but is beset by a mysterious unknown entity. This is where VoidBreaker and GoldenEye diverge. In GoldenEye, Bond discovers his old partner is the villain about halfway through the movie. The villain explains why he betrayed Bond and MI6, providing the audience with justification for their animosity and focus on the increasing tension as Bond chases the villain down to stop his evil plan, eventually culminating in a climactic fight scene atop a giant satellite dish.
VoidBreaker doesn’t have that big reveal in the middle. Seth doesn’t reappear as the villain until the very end of VoidBreaker, so there’s no explanation for the mysterious forces working against the hero, and the growing tension as events unfold feels diffuse. And because this tension was so unfocused, to me, it didn’t feel like the hero vanquishing the villain in a final climactic showdown. It felt like he just showed up, said, “It was me all along,” and then died.
Kenja is a character with a lot of promise and we get to see her grit throughout VoidBreaker, but I would have liked to have seen more conflict between the former Sea Fox spy-turned-evil mastermind and his star pupil. Putting a human face on her trials would make her final triumph that much more cathartic.
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Besides this one sore spot, VoidBreaker offers a ton of action, further insight into Tucker Harwell and the nature of the Blackout, and best of all, a turning point for the BattleTech universe. More than the fall of the Republic and Hour of the Wolf, VoidBreaker is the true end to the Dark Age. This is when faster-than-light communication returns to the Inner Sphere. VoidBreaker is the birth of a new age of communication, where wars between nations at least start with a tersely-worded message before DropShips full of BattleMechs start arriving. Because what defines a civilized age is a little bit of courtesy.
VoidBreaker is available now wherever fine books are sold.
And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.
Ghost war was my first BattleTech novel, more than 20 years ago. The Inner Sphere was fumbling in the Dark Age on what would become an ongoing struggle that lasted more than half my life. I’m so grateful that after all this time the lights are being switched back on, and Bryan Young is the one doing it. If anyone is a worthy successor to Michael Stackpole, it’s Young. And now we can finally enter the new era with eyes wide open… even if it’s going to take a while for the message to go out.
The phone lines are back! Remember to pay your bills, Clan Sea Fox won’t let you forget.
Comstar may be back in business yet! and without the cancer of the Word of Blake! HAHAHAHA!
once again shall people fear the white Battlemechs of Comstar!
It wasn’t bad by any stretch, I’m really glad to see the story arc of Tucker Harwell, Alexi Holt, and the Blackout finally conclude. I think the weakest part of it overall is that while the idealism of “The Clans were created to protect humanity from war” doesn’t really jive with the character saying it being a part of Sea Fox’s secret police and when said Clan doing the ‘defending’ mainly subsists on selling ever more deadly weapons to all and sundry.
I saw nothing wrong with this. Because hipocracy on the part of major powers like this is honestly the norm.
Feh. Available anywhere fine books are sold…pardon my French, but what a *bleeping* joke. Everything i want i have to order online. Guess what? That means ITS NOT AVAILABLE. SHEEESH.
That being said, I can’t wait for my copy. Looking forward to seeing whatever will happen to poor Tuck. I don’t think he will ever get a happily ever after.
I’m calling it here BTW, expect a rash of the “team anti-woke” to come in here trashing the book, inventing excuses to hate it (peerhaps accusing it of “plagurizing goldeneye) because the book depicts homosexuals in a positive light as existing unremarked on
In the 32nd century, the galaxy’s most valuable commodity is a nerd named Tucker Harwell. The tribulations of this poor beleaguered man amuse me to no end, and I’m looking forward to more… even if I personally like the complications caused by the blackout.
Comstar may be back in business yet! and without the cancer of the Word of Blake! HAHAHAHA!
once again shall people fear the white Battlemechs of Comstar!
God dammit I posted it twice…
welp, shit. sorry folks