Wednesday, October 21, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Savage Legion by Matt Wallace




Savage Legion is the first in a new epic fantasy series by author Matt Wallace, who was previously known for his Sin du Jour novellas and his role on the Hugo Award winning Ditch Diggers podcast.  This is essentially his full novel debut (the Sin du Jour novels were arguably short novel length by the end, but I don't count them) and it's a biggy - 500 pages in the hardcover.  I enjoyed the first three Sin du Jour novellas before DNFing the fourth because I kind of got bored of the style of comedy involved, but Savage Legion promised to be a very different type of story so I had no idea really what to expect from it.

And I was blown away by Savage Legion, a multi-POV epic fantasy novel where I was hooked from start to finish, with serious themes and some really fantastic characters.  Man, the characters - So often, perhaps because of Game of Thrones, multi-POV epic fantasy novels have at least 1 if not more of those characters be anti-heroes, or assholes, or just not likable.  By Contrast, in Savage Legion, all of these characters are incredibly likable, even as they are so so different, and that makes them so enjoyable to read.  Add in a plot that is fascinating and well, I can't wait to see where this series goes from here. 


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
A woman and a girl find themselves in a jail cell in Crache, the greatest country of them all.  Crache was the land that cast off its nobles in the "Renewal" and formed a land in which support would be given to citizen groups - Gens - based upon their value to the whole nation, a truly meritocratic land.  Or so it's supposed to be, except things don't quite work that way....despite a few rare people trying their best to fight back against injustice.

Both the woman and the girl find themselves in jail for supposed vagrancy.  But they find themselves on very different paths.

The girl, Dyeawan, is unable to walk due to crippled legs, but finds herself the charity case of the had of Crache's research center, the Planning Cadre.  But while Dyeawan is only expected to do chores - cleaning the floors, carrying things from place to place in her wheelchair contraption, she possesses an unusually bright intellect, and the uncanny ability to decipher the truth behind her own surroundings.  Soon she realizes that the Planning Cadre is a real place of power, and her skills provide her with the means to rise from within it.....

The woman, Evie, is instead sent with the rest of the inmates to the battlefields, to be part of the "Savage Legion."  By consuming a blood coin, Evie is forever marked as a "Savage", to be used as mass conscripts with lousy weaponry and armor - as meat shields/expendable shock troops really - in Crache's war against its enemies.  She is expected to die quickly....but Evie is more than she seems, with her own hidden purpose: to find the man she loves who she suspects was also taken to the legion, and expose what's really going on the citizenry who knows nothing of it.  But as Evie fights in deadly battles, she will discover that secrets lie behind not just the legion's creation, but the battles themselves, and may soon find herself with a new purpose altogether....
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Savage Legion is an epic fantasy novel that takes place from multiple point of views, with three primary points of view - Evie, Dyeawan, and Lexi - with a few other points of view coming into play here or there (most notably, the Aegin (cop) Daian).  The story does not title each chapter with the name of whose POV it is, but it's fairly clear whose POV we're reading for the most part.  Anyone familiar with Epic Fantasy, or even just Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire, will be familiar with this style of fantasy, and honestly, I don't have very much love for it usually.

But Savage Legion pulls it off brilliantly, as I mentioned above the jump, with what seems like a strange concept:  All of our major POV characters are unquestionably good, likable people we can root for wholeheartedly and without reservation.  The world may be dark as hell (more on that in a second), and each of the three main characters are very different, but they all want in their own ways to improve the world.  Which, when combined with a really fascinating setting with strong themes makes it really damn hard to put this book down. 

So Lexi (who I didn't mention in the plot summary above but is just as important as the other two) wants to find her husband Brio and expose the corruption in Crache, and has to deal with sinister agents of the Protectorate Ministry (Basically Secret Police) and the Aegin (The Cops) who want to prevent her from breaking the status quo.  She and her loyal retainer/bodyguard, an "undeclared" (enby) named Taru are a really fun team as Lexi begins to take bolder steps to stand up to the government that wants to destroy her. 

Then you have Evie, who really infiltrated the Legion just to find out what the authorities did with Brio - the man she loved when he was a boy and his family took her in - but who finds in the Legion truths that upset her understanding of what Crache is...and forces her to take drastic action to change it.  Again, it's not just the combat scenes that make her chapters fun, but how she responds to desperate situations and rallies the others around her, from very disparate circumstances (and the others she encounters are no less fun honestly in lesser roles).

And finally there's Dyeawan, the crippled girl who finds the head of the empire's research facility taking pity on her because of his own disability, but is so much more than just a crippled street-sweeper.  Her uncanny (Magical?  There's no magic in the setting so far, but this ability goes beyond rational honestly) ability to hear and see the truths in others' statements/actions, plus her brilliant capacity for learning allow her in the seat of research to self educate herself about....well, everything and it's fantastic to see her rise up as high as she can go.  But she's more than just about learning because that knowledge allows Dyeawan to realize how unjust her circumstances on the street really were, and how those higher up she meets only act to perpetuate that....which makes her eventual actions a joyous surprise that makes total sense, that made me laugh out loud in joy. 

And the setting here grounds the plot in themes that are very real, as it features its own almost more realistic form of Empire than we usually see in science fiction or fantasy.  Crache isn't ruled openly by a single ruler, or Emperor and its history is supposedly one of overthrowing the noble class in favor of a meritocracy, where resources are allocated to citizens based solely upon how much value their conglomerates (known as "Gens") provide to the people as a whole.  But hundreds of years after its founding, this system is as corrupt as a noble-led one would be, with the Gens being forcibly disbanded or treated poorly based solely upon unaccountable officials, with the whole pleading for support system being more circus than actually providing bread.  It's a tyranny without an obvious head, which uses its supposed ideals to attack the weak and helpless, who it does nothing to save, and which supports itself with constant wars of expansion that it denies are actually happening and by disappearing anyone who would question it.  What is actually happening in Crache will be, because of our world, immediately apparent for readers but not for the characters who have had to live and grow up in that propaganda, and seeing that play out works incredibly well. 

It all ends up to an ending that is mostly pretty damn perfect, with both Evie and Dyeawan's storylines ending at this point in amazingly satisfying fashion.  Lexi's plotline isn't quite as successful, with it relying upon twists near the end that kind of feel out of nowhere, but the route to that point is done extremely well, so she's hardly a point of view character that I ever felt annoyed to be reading.  All in all, I can't honestly wait to see where the sequel takes things, as all three of our main characters, and the others we've met, are now in very different situations with their own new aims as Crache's wrongness has become completely apparent.
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