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A review by starryeyedreamer
First Light by Linda Nagata
5.0
I found this by searching 'female science fiction writers' on Google and then checking them out online to see if I liked the look of their stuff. (This was after falling in love with Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga). Winner! Also kind of ironic. Turns out the other thing The Red series has in common with the Vorkosigan saga is that it's classified as 'military sci-fi'. This could potentially be a label that puts some people off, especially if they are of the gender the author and I share. Yes, there are a lot of battle descriptions in these books, and a lot of futuristic tech. And yes, it's all first person present tense, and the first person is definitely a man, so if that bothers you, consider yourself warned. I've rarely had a problem identifying with a narrator because of their gender, but I know there are those who do.
How good the battle descriptions are in terms of accuracy I'll leave to someone who knows something about battle to describe, but they get the blood pumping, and despite, or perhaps sometimes because of the tech, the people, the hero James Shelley and his squad, their thoughts and feelings, are always at the heart of it. This series is near-future, which means the Earth it is set in looks enough like our own to have the reader constantly asking themselves whether these events could happen. It also plays out the old-fashioned hero's journey, but doesn't ever try to tie up the loose ends neatly, leaving it feeling a lot more like real life. Meanwhile it shines a light on important questions about who really holds the power on our little blue-green planet (and why), the ways in which we both empower ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable by our increasing interactions with AI, the way our nations use up young men and women in our military forces and what their service does to them, and the dilemmas involved in making decisions about the good of the individual versus the good of humanity.
I don't think I need to tell you how much I loved it (chewed up the series in 3 days, because yeah, I have an addictive personality). But it also interested me as a Lit student how well this series ties in to modern literary themes of postmodernism (with the hero unwittingly becoming the star of his own reality TV series) and posthumanism (with AI interacting continuously with his biology so that he and his fellow soldiers are quite literally part of a network).
If the first paragraph doesn't put you off, definitely give it a crack. I will be giving Linda Nagata's other work a nudge after this for sure.
How good the battle descriptions are in terms of accuracy I'll leave to someone who knows something about battle to describe, but they get the blood pumping, and despite, or perhaps sometimes because of the tech, the people, the hero James Shelley and his squad, their thoughts and feelings, are always at the heart of it. This series is near-future, which means the Earth it is set in looks enough like our own to have the reader constantly asking themselves whether these events could happen. It also plays out the old-fashioned hero's journey, but doesn't ever try to tie up the loose ends neatly, leaving it feeling a lot more like real life. Meanwhile it shines a light on important questions about who really holds the power on our little blue-green planet (and why), the ways in which we both empower ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable by our increasing interactions with AI, the way our nations use up young men and women in our military forces and what their service does to them, and the dilemmas involved in making decisions about the good of the individual versus the good of humanity.
I don't think I need to tell you how much I loved it (chewed up the series in 3 days, because yeah, I have an addictive personality). But it also interested me as a Lit student how well this series ties in to modern literary themes of postmodernism (with the hero unwittingly becoming the star of his own reality TV series) and posthumanism (with AI interacting continuously with his biology so that he and his fellow soldiers are quite literally part of a network).
If the first paragraph doesn't put you off, definitely give it a crack. I will be giving Linda Nagata's other work a nudge after this for sure.