March to the Sea by David Weber and John Ringo
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
One of the great strengths of Baen Books has been the publisher's willingness to nurture up-and-coming new authors. By the 1990's, other publishers were buying one or two books by a new author and tossing them onto the market to succeed or fail, then telling most of them that their sales numbers were inadequate and there would be no third book contracted. Not Baen. When Jim Been discovered a promising new writer, he didn't just publish and promote that person's solo books. Whenever possible, he also partnered that author with one of his established authors to write a collaboration.
The usual method was for the senior author to write an outline and a "story bible" with the basic facts about the fictional world in which the story would take place. The junior author would then take that material and spin it into narrative prose, fleshing out the characters, setting and conflicts. Oftentimes the junior author would do better than expected, and would develop the story to the point that a trilogy would expand into four, five or even six books. As volumes were completed, the senior author would then go through them to fine-tune them and bring them back in line with his or her own vision of the world.
When Jim Been bought John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata series, he also contacted David Weber, author of the Honorverse, which was already Baen Books' flagship series. Weber obliged him with an outline for a story in the tradition of Captains Courageous, of a spoiled young royal heir who is thrown into a difficult situation and forced to overcome his flaws to become a man.
At the beginning of March Upcountry we met young Prince Roger as a sulky and foppish young man who was most definitely not pleased to discover that he was to be sent to a distant backwater planet to show the flag at a local ceremony. But when your mother is the ruling Empress of the Empire of Man, you do as you're told. After all, when Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Except things didn't go as planned. They had a saboteur among their number, the victim of malware in an implanted computer, or "toot." The saboteur was caught before she could destroy the ship, but not before she could do serious damage to their FTL drive.
Now they're stranded on a completely different primitive planet, named Marduk in the galactic catalogs. The plan had been to go to the Imperial spaceport and commander a spaceship home -- but the spaceport had been captured by the Empire's mortal enemies, the eco-fanatic Saints. So our heroes had to ditch on the opposite side of the planet and march overland.
By its climax, Prince Roger had learned quite a bit about himself and the bodyguard of Space Marines detailed to protect him. He's gained allies, indigenous auxiliaries wielding weapons that can be produced by local technologies. And the story ends with him confronting a local monarch who had decided to be difficult about things.
March to the Sea takes up some time later. Our heroes are in the mountains, high enough that it is actually cold. After so long in the tropical lowlands, this comes as something of a shock to our protagonists.
And it's an even worse shock for their allies. The native sophonts of Marduk are exotherms, and are accustomed to a much warmer environment. Incapable of regulating their own body temperature, they seek the warmth of their human companions or they slip into a sort of hibernation.
Finally, the humans make a desperate decision: they will purchase the giant reptilian pack-beasts, the flar-ta from their mahouts and continue without most of their Mardukan company. Of course Cord will continue to accompany them, since his life-debt to Prince Roger will permit no other course of action.
It seems to be a good plan -- until they encounter a species that are to the docile flar-ta what a Cape buffalo is to a common water buffalo. Before the company realizes just how dangerous the situation are, a substantial fraction of their number are trampled into a pulp beneath the clawed feet of these creatures. This disaster, on top of the relentless attrition they experienced in the various battles getting this far, is putting them dangerously understrength. If they continue losing people having to fight their way past every petty kingdom and principality between here and the coast, there's a very good likelihood that they won't have enough people to retake the spaceport.
Worse, they are running low on their vital supplies of vitamin supplements, which the local food animals and plants don't provide, and which their nanites cannot synthesize. If they don't get to that spaceport soon, they may well be so badly debilitated by deficiency diseases that they can no longer function.
So they're caught between a rock and a hard place, and the only way out is through. And just to make things even more complicated, the peoples on this side of the mountains are quite a bit more advanced than the Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples they left behind. The very first person they encounter is a mounted guardsman who bears, among other weapons, a pistol similar to those used around the time of the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion on Earth.
Worse, there's a very good reason that he's both heavily armed and quite edgy. His people are having a lot of trouble with migratory bands of raiders, who belong to a people similar to the Kranolta who gave our heroes so much trouble in the first volume. However, at least some of this new tribal people are using firearms (although it's possible that their primitive weapons were acquired from some of the civilized peoples in the area, perhaps in a "let's you and him fight" attempt to trouble one of their own enemies).
Their time in this upland city is fascinating, not the least in the various ways in which the Mardukans of this region make their home more comfortable for an exothermic species in what is to them bitter cold. Even better, these people cultivate a tree which produces a fruit rich in chemicals that nanites can transform into Vitamin C. Suddenly the humans' critical vitamin supplies can be stretched that much further, since the people with the nanite packs can give their portions of Vitamin C to those who do not.
And then it's time to do battle with the marauding nomads, the Boman. Yet again we see the principle of discipline as force multiplier: when everybody in a unit is working together, they can take on a much larger force of warriors each fighting as an individual.
However, fewer casualties doesn't mean no casualties. And each member of Roger's bodyguard slain in battle now is someone who won't be there to take the spaceport when the time comes, when knowledge of space technology will be critical and local sepoys are apt to do more harm than good.
All the same, they acquire more local allies from the impressed (and young and curious) inhabitants they have just saved, as well as more local mounts that may well be better adapted to the environmental conditions on the downward path into the plains.
And then they encounter a civilization based upon hydraulic despotism, along with a sizable dose of theocracy in the form of a temple that runs a welfare state of make-work projects to keep the surplus laborers occupied. Which means a huge pool of potential recruits for an army that just might be able to ease the process of crossing the rest of the distance to the spaceport, including the vast seas that divide this continent from the other, so that Prince Roger's forces don't arrive at their destination only to discover they're too weak to complete their mission.
Which means training them to operate in units, something that requires first designing and writing the drill manual for a species who have two pairs of manipulatory appendages, each with slightly different hand structures. But when they finish, the training exercises are a sight to behold.
It's clear in this sequence that both the authors are familiar with actual military operations both modern and historical. Given that these books were coming out right about the same time as David Weber was collaborating with Eric Flint on 1633, a novel set in an alternate Thirty Years' War, it's easy to wonder just how much research from that book was repurposed for these.
However, that's not to say that John Ringo is any slouch in the military history department. He's also a former Airborne trooper, so he has firsthand experience in the military.
The rest of the novel is our heroes' journey down to the sea, meeting one after another fascinating culture and winning battles against various enemies, not all of whom are barbarian pushovers. Sometimes the civilized people can be even more dangerous, because they have the resources to be subtle and practice various forms of infighting.
As with March Upcountry, this novel ends in a way that makes it clear that they still have more battles ahead of them. Yet at the same time, it is satisfying in itself.
Review posted June 20, 2018.
Buy March to the Sea from Amazon.com
March to the Sea has also been reprinted along with March Upcountry in the omnibus Empire of Man
