Thursday, February 27, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Firmament of Flame by Drew Williams




The Firmament of Flame is the third book in Drew Williams' "Universe After" space opera series, which began with The Stars Now Unclaimed (Reviewed Here) and continued with A Chain Across the Dawn (Reviewed Here).  I've really enjoyed the series - which I've been reading in audiobook format - which channels influences like Mass Effect, Star Wars, and Alien through its first two books, with enjoyable action, some great characters, and plots that twist and turn but never overstay their welcome.  So I was really excited to see this book, the third book, coming out this February and took it out of the library in both ebook and eaudiobook format.

And wow, The Firmament of Flame really kicks things up a notch, surprising me by not concluding the series - it is not a trilogy - but continuing to develop both our main characters in interesting ways and confronting them with new strong conflicts.  It's the first book to end on a cliffhanger, and it's a hell of a cliffhanger, with the story taking this series to another level of emotional impact, to go along with its always entertaining action sequences.  I cannot wait for the next book in this series to come out, and when it does I will be there pretty much immediately.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
Over six months have passed since Esa and Jane took out the first Cyn on Odessa Station, and the two of them are now back out in the galaxy searching for more Cyn, along with a crew of their Justified friend and allies: Javier + Sho (his new apprentice), Marus and a young Gifted avail girl named Meridian (his new apprentice), the Preacher, Sahluk (the Mahren warrior), and JackDoes the engineer.  The trail they've found has led them to a dangerous cult - the Bright Wanderers - seemingly worshiping the Cyn for their ability to push back the Pulse, and has led them far off the maps of the known Universe....where anything could be lying waiting.

But what Esa and Jane find is far beyond what they could have imagined: truths about the Forerunners and the Cyn which threaten to upend their understanding of the Universe entirely.   And both Jane and Esa are forced to confront personal truths along the way: Jane of the truth of her past and what happened to the one who meant something to her and Esa of the truth of her present and what those around her mean to her.

And then there's the Cyn and the Bright Wanderers who clearly appear to be amassing forces that threaten to upend the Universe once more....and may have more insidious plans for the Gifted in their desire to follow the plans of their mysterious Goddess.....plans that may not leave Jane, Esa, or any of their friends alive at the end of it all.....
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The past two books in the series each focused on a single protagonist's point of view: Book 1 introduced this galaxy from Jane's point of view and Book 2 further explored it from Esa's point of view.  The two were both great, but very different characters: Jane is a fully formed adult trying desperately to atone for the mistakes of her past who later wants desperately to raise Esa to be better than Jane was while Esa is a teenage girl ripped out of the world she knew and who is trying to figure out who she herself is.....all the while surviving the dangerous job with Jane.  Both books also were self contained satisfying stories that may have had dark moments, but never got too dark despite the devastation that was encountered by the characters.

The Firmament of Flame changes that, with its chapters split roughly in half between those narrated by Esa and those narrated by Jane, with the story continuing both characters' developments....but also getting darker in tone as the events of the book hit much harder on the characters we care about this time around.  Both Esa and Jane remain tremendous characters in ways both familiar and new and the book explores both.  With Jane, her desire to atone and to be a good parent are tested when her past rears up seemingly out of nowhere, returning a long lost heartbreak and contrasting who she is now to who she was then.  With Esa, she may have a better grip on her own powers and on what type of agent she'd want to be, but she's still a kid trying to figure things out, such as what type of person she wants to be and what type of person she's interested in - a question that she has to deal with here, as she finds herself confronted with attraction for the first serious time in her life.  The book does a fantastic job with both main characters developing further over the course of the plot, and I love them both.

The other characters along the way are also excellent.  Our new antagonist characters are more three dimensional than in the prior two books, with one of them managing at the end to somehow equal the terror imposed by the antagonist of the last book.  And our side protagonist characters are great, especially Esa's fellow teenage Gifted - Sho (who we met last book) and Meridian.  Whereas much of book 2 was left to just Jane and Esa against the Cyn, this time we have a whole crew, who feel so much like a family that you can't help but love them all in their own unique ways.

And then there's the plot, which really feels like Williams decided he didn't get serious enough with the last two books so he decided to turn it up a notch.  Now that our intro to this universe and its background is over, we are introduced here to a major new threat teased in the prior books who changes everything and threatens to maintain this series for books to come, if that's what Williams wants (I've found nothing to suggest that this series will end after Book 4).  Along the way we once again have tremendous action sequences - in and out of spaceships - and plot twists that will stun and surprise you....and hit the reader so much harder than anything in the prior two books.    The plot has some flaws - an antagonist's attempt to kill the protagonists at one point in the 2nd act makes absolutely no sense in light of the reveal in the 3rd act, for instance, and I suspect other plot points don't hold up upon reflection - but honestly these things don't matter, as in the end the plot finishes with an ending that satisfies....and comes with an absolutely brutal cliffhanger.  I have no idea how Wiliams will have the characters move on from this, but damn do I want to know right this second.

My prior reviews of the past two books had basically said that this series was fun space opera, but never really hit the level where I considered it a truly great series.  This book takes that leap, and damn am I invested now.
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