Thursday, June 6, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Aftershocks by Marko Kloos



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 1 2019 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

 Aftershocks is the first in a new science fiction series by author Marko Kloos, who's mainly known for his Military Science Fiction series, Frontlines.  I'm not a big fan of MilSci, but I've greatly enjoyed the Frontlines series, so I was excited to see Kloos branching out into different genres.  Aftershocks is the first of that new series (titled "The Palladium Wars"), and while there are MilSci elements involved, the book is for the most part firmly in the Space Opera category.*  It's also a more epic in scope than his Frontlines series - which is a bit more of a series about a single character despite the grander plot - and I was excited to see how Kloos would handle the shift.

 *or maybe, "Epic Science Fiction?" since a good deal of it takes place on planets?  Whatever, you get the point.*

 And well, the answer is of course: pretty well, as Kloos is still a great writer of characters, to say nothing of interesting settings and action scenes, but Aftershocks still felt at the end like a massive missed opportunity.  The reason is that the book feels really incomplete: the book is under 300 pages long and ends before any of the main characters' story arcs has any sort of resolution whatsoever, leaving me just frustrated at being given nothing satisfying to go along with the book's loose ends.  There aren't really any dramatic cliffhanger endings either, and so it all just feels like I read two thirds of a book, without anything to make it feel like what was there was worth my time.

More after the Jump:

-------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
Five Years Ago, the war Gretia started with all of the other planets in the system - Pallas, Oceana, Rhodia, Hades, and Acheron - came to an end, with the Alliance of the other planets accepting Gretia's surrender and occupying the planet.  Since then, Aden - a former Blackguard of the Gretian military - has spent the years as a POW in a Rhodian camp.  But as the terms of the surrender agreement dictate, Aden suddenly finds himself released, and adrift in a system where his planet of origin, and his military background, make him an outcast.

And now that five years have passed, things are starting to stir once again, with mysterious actors pushing events once again towards conflict.  The abandoned Gretian navy is destroyed right under the Alliance's noses, an Alliance patrol on Gretia is ambushed by men with stealth technology, and pirates seem to be becoming more active in the system at ambushing freighters.  It is clear that for Aden, for an Alliance soldier on Gretia, for an Alliance patrol ship captain, for the daughter of a major Gretian corporation taking her first leadership role at the company - that these events threaten to change everything, taking their very lives in the process if they're not careful.
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As I mentioned above the jump, Aftershocks most differs from Kloos' Frontlines series in that the book does not just stick to one character's point of view.  Aden gets our most page-time as the point of view character, but Dunstan (Alliance Patrol Ship Captain), Idina (Alliance Sergeant on Gretia), and Solveig (Gretian heir to a major planetary corporation) all get their own third person point of view chapters and story arcs.  These story arcs generally don't intersect with each other: only two of the four main characters have any interaction at all, although they all paint a combined picture of what is happening in this universe.

And Kloos makes all of these characters interesting, even if a few of them are pretty typical character archetypes.  Again, Aden gets the most chapters here (basically every other chapter follows him), and his story as the struggling former POW trying to find a way in this world works really well.  Idina's plot almost feels like a buddy-cop plotline, with her getting to appreciate her Gretian partner on patrol, but its executed well.  Solveig may be the typical heir to a corporate empire who wants to do things a little her own way and with morals her father may not quite align with, but she's not as naive as the usual version of this plot and it works with everything else.  Dunstan is a capable and competent captain of the patrol ship, and while his own personal development is the least interesting of the four, his storyline provides some excellent action and space opera scenes.  They're all interesting characters and story-arcs that I'd have loved to see more of.

And that's the problem with Aftershocks: we don't see enough of any of these story arcs.  And yes the first book in a series, especially one epic in scope (epic fantasy or space opera) is guaranteed to end with a bunch of cliffhangers or loose threads for later books to pick up later.  But the first book still needs to wrap up at least one initial plot arc, even if its clearly not the overall one: think of Game of Thrones wrapping up Ned's plot arc, or The Fellowship of the Ring separating the party as Sam/Frodo go into Mordor - sure those series couldn't have ended with those first books, but readers got a satisfying conclusion to one stage of the story, making it all worth it and ensuring they knew there was a more satisfying conclusion coming.

Aftershocks doesn't have a single story arc - or stage of a story arc - come to anything resembling an end.  Our mysterious antagonists remain mysterious throughout and are never revealed, our protagonists discover that something is happening but none of them actually discover any particulars whatsoever, and practically none of the characters have any character development arc conclude or reach a new stage by the end of this book.  The one exception is Idina, who gains a growing respect for her Gretian police comrades, but that's such a minor (and obvious) development it isn't enough to satisfy.  You know going into this book, or at least by a few chapters in, that someone is manipulating events in the system to start a new conflict with possible new mysterious technology, and you spend the entire time of this book waiting for this to emerge, and it remains in the shadows, small outbursts aside, even at the end.  And it's not like this is a long book - it's under 300 pages!

Kloos' past works is probably enough to get me to try out the second book in this series, but I'm going to need to see significant developments from that book to make this book not feel like a waste of time.  So I can't recommend Aftershocks that highly at the end, which is a shame: Frontlines didn't have this same problem despite ending its first book on a major cliffhanger, so I was surprised to see it here.
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