March Upcountry by David Weber and John Ringo
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
One of the things that Baen Books has excelled at is developing promising new authors. Many of the other major science fiction publishers have a habit of treating new writers as effectively disposable. Buy their first book and toss it out there to see if anything happens. Because of the way books are ordered, a new book by a relatively obscure writer may have only a week or two on the shelves of bricks-and-mortar stores before they're removed and stripped for a refund. If too few books sell, the next book will be printed in an even smaller print run and bookstores will buy fewer of them (known as buying to the net), which fairly guarantees a downward spiral of declining sales. With the rise of Amazon.com, things have gotten a little better, but it's still an enormous crapshoot with one's career to be published with most of the major publishing houses.
Not so Baen Books. One of the things they pioneered has been the practice of partnering a newly signed writer with one of their established authors for a collaborative series. When S. M. Stirling was first showing his promise with his Draka series, he was invited to help David Drake write a series retelling the story of Belisarius on a lost colony world of a collapsed Terran Empire. The Raj Whitehall series quickly grew beyond its original bounds to incorporate several other novels, in which digital copies of Raj Whitehall and the computer Center were cast across the interstellar depths to help other worlds pull themselves back out of their dark age of technological regression.
When John Ringo burst on the scene with his Legacy of the Aldenata series, Jim Baen decided to partner him with David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington series, on a new military science fiction series. Unlike both men's prior work, which dealt with protagonists who were established military figures, this novel would be a Bildungsroman, the story of a disaffected young man learning to be an adult and a leader.
In the case of Prince Roger, the protagonist of this novel, he's the third son of the ruling Empress of the Empire of Man. And there's a complication -- his father is a very problematic former member of his mother's court, who was banished and is known to be angling to cause further political trouble. So while Roger's older brother and sister have been given responsible positions in their mother's court, he is firmly kept away from power and in purely symbolic positions, where he has developed a reputation as a complete whineybutt.
As a character, he rather reminds me of Brandon nyr-Arkad at the beginning of The Phoenix in Flight, the first volume of Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge's Exordium series. They're both the youngest son of the monarch of a powerful space nation, and both are viewed as a scapegrace. And both of them are about to be thrown into an extraordinary voyage that will transform them from a callow youth to a worthy heir to the throne.
However, unlike Brandon, Roger doesn't start his adventure by blowing off an important ceremony to go running off on a lark with an old buddy, not in a story written by two military-sf writers and published by Baen Books. Instead, Roger is firmly in the custody of his bodyguard unit of space marines as he heads off to perform a ceremonial duty on one of the very minor backwater planets of his mother's interstellar realm. He's not happy about it, and he's pretty much openly sulking, but he knows he's not going to be given much choice about it. Not with elite Space Marines guarding him, and a top-notch crew on the spaceship taking him there.
Except none of them counted on sabotage by one of their own, turned traitor against her own will. Although on the surface it looks like a typical space opera with strong military sf elements, it also has an element that (at least in the early 2000's when it came out) is straight out of cyberpunk: the "toot," a computer that is implanted in the user's brain and interfaces directly to the mind. And like any computer, it is susceptible to hacking and malware if proper security precautions are not taken, and taken rigorously.
And that's exactly what happens to one young woman -- she's turned into a "toombie," a sort of cyber-zombie whose body is now a tool of whoever inserted the malware into her toot. Although she is found and killed (which is a mercy, since there's no way to undo the malware) before she can completely destroy the ship and kill everyone, she has damaged the tunnel drive badly enough that the ship cannot continue on its planned course. Instead it must drop back out into normal space so they can make the necessary repairs.
It looks like it's going to be no more than a mildly annoying layover on a primitive planet that has only a very minor Imperial presence. But when they arrive at Marduk, they discover a nasty surprise: a warship of one of the Empire's most determined enemies, the eco-fanatical star nation known as the Saints.
Normally such a lightly armed warship would just jump back into hyperspace and flee. But with their tunnel drive sabotaged, their backs are up against the wall. Their only hope is to get Roger and his bodyguard unit down to the surface, where they will need to make an overland trek to the Imperial spaceport. However, they need to distract the Saints' ship enough to protect the shuttle from being attacked, which means that the entire crew of the ship will be sacrificing their own lives to provide that distraction to the enemy's sensor suite.
For the first time Roger's world is truly shaken, as he contemplates the level of devotion being shown by these people. He's still thinking about that as they land and hurry away from the shuttle, which must be destroyed to cover their tracks. But it doesn't mean that he's any happier about his situation, which puts him in in direct conflict with the commander of his bodyguard company.
It's his first encounter with the locals that changes everything. Roger's an enthusiastic hunter, very fond of his old-fashioned "smoke pole" chemical-propellant rifle (rather like another Roger I can think of). And when he sees one of the nastier local wildlife attacking one of the indigenous sophonts, Roger doesn't hesitate to take the nasty down, saving the local's life.
Suddenly Roger's in an interesting situation. According to local law and custom, the local he just rescued owes him a life-debt, and will henceforth be his protector and servitor. Something pretty close to slavery, although as the shaman Cord begins to take that "protector" element as an obligation to teach Roger some of the facts of life, it seems almost more like the role of the dawazz, the slave who teaches an Auxumite prince to be worthy of kingship, in David Drake and Eric Flint's An Oblique Approach.
Further complications arise as Roger and his team are talking with the people of Cord's tribe. The translator programs seem to be struggling with "he" and "she," to the point of causing offense.
However, a little adroit questioning reveals the reason: the Terrans' toots aren't sophisticated enough to resolve a mismatch between "male" and "female" vs. "man" and "woman." For as it turns out, the Mardukan people have a reproductive strategy similar to that of seahorses.
When biologists discuss "male" and "female," they are speaking primarily of gametes, the reproductive cells. Male gametes are small, stripped-down things, a package of genetic material and a delivery system, and are produced in great numbers. Female gametes are larger, contain the full compliment of cytoplasmic machinery (ribosomes, mitochondria, etc) and are produced in much smaller numbers. In species in which those gametes are produced on different bodies (like gingko trees and mammals), the individuals may be referred to as "males" and "females."
When our protagonists met Cord, they assumed that the huge thing between the indigene's legs was a penis, and thus perceived him as male, and a man. But in fact that big thing is an ovipositor, not a penis -- among Mardukans, the female deposits the eggs within the male, where they are internally fertilized and the young grow nourished by the skin slime. Because of this, the biological female takes roles that are typically masculine in pre-industrial human societies, and thus function as "men."
Since social roles are more important than the peculiarities of Mardukan reproductive biology in getting along with these locals who are going to be essential to the team's ability to reach the spaceport, the humans decide to just split the difference and have their translation programs go with social role instead of gametes. And here's one of those places where conservative writers can do innovative things with sex and gender and have it get completely overlooked by the social justice types -- because these writers don't make a huge deal about it. Their characters discover it, deal with it, and move on. If the peculiarities of Mardukan biology become relevant to a plot point down the line, it'll come back up. Otherwise, it's no biggie, and nobody spends a huge amount of time fretting and worrying about who rates higher on the oppression scale.
No sooner than Roger's bodyguards have sorted out the peculiarities of sex and gender among the Mardukan autochthones, they make a most unpleasant discovery: Cord's people have enemies. Aggressive enemies, and they're on their way to visit, with a "what's yours is mine" attitude.
Yes, the Empress's Own have weapons far beyond the power of Neolithic villagers, even warlike ones. But they don't have infinite numbers of them, or infinite reloads. And even an arrowhead of chipped stone can kill you dead if it hits the right place.
So it becomes obvious that the march to the spaceport isn't going to be something they can do on their own. They're going to need sepoys. Sociali, if you want to use the Roman term instead of the one from the Raj. And if they're going to have indigenous auxiliaries fighting alongside them, those troops are going to need training and discipline so they can work in coordination with the Marines, not get in the way. So our heroes set about putting together a drill manual for a species of four-armed quasi-amphibians, and implement it.
The rest of the novel is a series of such encounters, as Roger and his bodyguards discover new cultures over every hill and river. It could almost become monotonous and repetitive, except for the way each new culture has surprising cultural and technological developments: for instance, the Voitan, who have effectively re-invented Damascus steel independently. And oftentimes, the low-tech solutions of the locals prove more useful and more valuable than the super-high-tech equipment of the humans -- because it's been developed in the context of the environment that it will be used in, and it doesn't depend upon energy sources and spare parts that are in limited supply on this alien world.
It's almost a perfect example of the Diversity the SJW's Don't See. Of how conservative writers' diverse casts and actual respect for the cultures of the communities their protagonists interact with gets overlooked and outright dismissed by the Left because it doesn't follow their particular framework of expectations. Which is a real pity, because this is an old-school planetary exploration story written by people who really understand the concept of "intelligence is behavioral flexibility."
Since this novel is the first of a multi-volume series, it's interesting to see how the authors manage to balance the need to make it end in a satisfying way and at the same time make it clear that this is only the first part of a much longer journey. They've won battles, but even a campaign is not a war, and one can win one's battles but lose the war. Something our protagonists are becoming increasingly aware of as the volume closes.
Review posted June 20, 2018.
Buy March Upcountry from Amazon.com
March Upcountry has also been reprinted along with March to the Sea in the omnibus Empire of Man
