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Book rec: Warchild series by Karin Lowachee (spoilers in comments)
I've been meaning to write up something on these books for ... er, awhile now. I took along the first, Warchild, as airplane reading material back in August, and oh, I fell hard for it, hard enough to rush off to Amazon the first time I had Internet access and order the next two so that they'd be waiting for me when I got back to Alaska. (Sadly, it looks like most of them are out of print, but they're pretty easy to get from Amazon's used book resellers.) Anyway, I'm sick and I can't sleep, so I thought this might be a good time to write about them for a while, because I really want to talk about them and I don't know anyone else who's read them! :D This rec is cut for length, not spoileriness -- I've tried to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but if you have triggers relating to sexual violence or child abuse, read the warnings (in paragraph three) before reading the books. They contain potentially quite triggery material!
The series to date consists of three books, Warchild, Burndive, and Cagebird (and I read on her website - or somewhere - that she has eight books planned, but has had trouble interesting a publisher in the next ones). They are stand-alone books, each with a different protagonist whose lives touch on the same set of history-making events: a pivotal battle in an interstellar war between humans and aliens, with the potential to change the future of both peoples. The books deal with the same extended set of characters, but main characters in one book recur as minor characters in the other books. I imagine that you could read them in any order, although I was glad I read Warchild first, as it sets up the main conflict and also features my favorite set of characters.
I need to warn you guys that these books are dark, and contain potentially disturbing and/or triggery material including (but possibly not limited to): rape, child abuse, genocide, PTSD, self-harm (cutting), and drug and alcohol abuse. Basically these are unflinching and graphic books about the psychological effects of war on children. Most of the main protagonists are young people whose lives were uprooted and destroyed, directly or indirectly, by a conflict that began generations ago: violence begetting violence, war orphans and children raised on stories of the other side's atrocities becoming the next generation's leaders, on and on without end.
But the reason why I love these books so much is that they're all about breaking that cycle of violence, on both a societal and a personal level. They're not just books about war and trauma -- they're books about people who survive some of the most horrible things that people can go through, and then they pick themselves up out of the mud, and reach out a hand to others in the same situation, and go on. They're books about broken people finding a family in each other, and I think we all know how much of a total sucker I am for that particular theme. *g* They're books about finding ways to beat swords into plowshares when swords are all you've ever known.
The books aren't all gloom and doom and psychology, either. They're basically space opera -- unusually realistic and well-drawn space opera, but space opera all the same, so there are battles and explosions and spies and space pirates and so forth. :D Don't pick these books up if you want a light read, but there is a lot going on -- I can't really do more than scratch the surface without getting spoilery, but I loved how the author handled not just the characters' personal traumas but also the scope of a generational conflict in which the original act of aggression (the humans trying to seize one of the aliens' colonies) has long since been blotted out by repeated acts of atrocity and retaliation. How do you dig yourself out of that pit, when the war's been going on so long that everyone on both sides has valid reasons for seeking revenge? That's true of the characters on a personal level as well as their societies. These books have very well-drawn portrayals of PTSD and trauma recovery, at least to the extent that I know anything about those topics (which isn't much). But they feel meticulously researched and very believable.
One other caveat, aside from the general darkness: these books probably aren't a good fit for you if a lack of female characters is one of your dealbreakers. It's not a huge issue for me, especially since the books do a pretty good job with the handful of background female characters that they do have -- their armed services are integrated, the women we do see are perfectly competent and not at all stereotypical; it's just that, out of a dozen or so major characters over the three books, almost all of them are male and of the female characters who do wander on and off the page, we don't really get into their heads much at all. Actually, given how much these books deal with sexual abuse, it may well have been an intentional choice on the author's part to leave the women mostly out of it, but I still found myself wishing occasionally that they'd been given more of a voice.
But still -- I loved these books a lot, and I'm crushing pretty hard on some of the characters right now. They totally mashed down my buttons for found-family and getting up from the wreckage and just generally trying to be a good person in the face of overwhelming odds. And if you want to read some really good military sci-fi or space opera, these books are definitely that!
ETA: I have found other people who've read them! *bounces* And there will be SPOILERS in the comments - though not in the post itself!
The series to date consists of three books, Warchild, Burndive, and Cagebird (and I read on her website - or somewhere - that she has eight books planned, but has had trouble interesting a publisher in the next ones). They are stand-alone books, each with a different protagonist whose lives touch on the same set of history-making events: a pivotal battle in an interstellar war between humans and aliens, with the potential to change the future of both peoples. The books deal with the same extended set of characters, but main characters in one book recur as minor characters in the other books. I imagine that you could read them in any order, although I was glad I read Warchild first, as it sets up the main conflict and also features my favorite set of characters.
I need to warn you guys that these books are dark, and contain potentially disturbing and/or triggery material including (but possibly not limited to): rape, child abuse, genocide, PTSD, self-harm (cutting), and drug and alcohol abuse. Basically these are unflinching and graphic books about the psychological effects of war on children. Most of the main protagonists are young people whose lives were uprooted and destroyed, directly or indirectly, by a conflict that began generations ago: violence begetting violence, war orphans and children raised on stories of the other side's atrocities becoming the next generation's leaders, on and on without end.
But the reason why I love these books so much is that they're all about breaking that cycle of violence, on both a societal and a personal level. They're not just books about war and trauma -- they're books about people who survive some of the most horrible things that people can go through, and then they pick themselves up out of the mud, and reach out a hand to others in the same situation, and go on. They're books about broken people finding a family in each other, and I think we all know how much of a total sucker I am for that particular theme. *g* They're books about finding ways to beat swords into plowshares when swords are all you've ever known.
The books aren't all gloom and doom and psychology, either. They're basically space opera -- unusually realistic and well-drawn space opera, but space opera all the same, so there are battles and explosions and spies and space pirates and so forth. :D Don't pick these books up if you want a light read, but there is a lot going on -- I can't really do more than scratch the surface without getting spoilery, but I loved how the author handled not just the characters' personal traumas but also the scope of a generational conflict in which the original act of aggression (the humans trying to seize one of the aliens' colonies) has long since been blotted out by repeated acts of atrocity and retaliation. How do you dig yourself out of that pit, when the war's been going on so long that everyone on both sides has valid reasons for seeking revenge? That's true of the characters on a personal level as well as their societies. These books have very well-drawn portrayals of PTSD and trauma recovery, at least to the extent that I know anything about those topics (which isn't much). But they feel meticulously researched and very believable.
One other caveat, aside from the general darkness: these books probably aren't a good fit for you if a lack of female characters is one of your dealbreakers. It's not a huge issue for me, especially since the books do a pretty good job with the handful of background female characters that they do have -- their armed services are integrated, the women we do see are perfectly competent and not at all stereotypical; it's just that, out of a dozen or so major characters over the three books, almost all of them are male and of the female characters who do wander on and off the page, we don't really get into their heads much at all. Actually, given how much these books deal with sexual abuse, it may well have been an intentional choice on the author's part to leave the women mostly out of it, but I still found myself wishing occasionally that they'd been given more of a voice.
But still -- I loved these books a lot, and I'm crushing pretty hard on some of the characters right now. They totally mashed down my buttons for found-family and getting up from the wreckage and just generally trying to be a good person in the face of overwhelming odds. And if you want to read some really good military sci-fi or space opera, these books are definitely that!
ETA: I have found other people who've read them! *bounces* And there will be SPOILERS in the comments - though not in the post itself!
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I read the books a little while ago and also loved them (and wrote reviews)! It is very rare to come across someone else who's read them!
OOOH PLEASE DO TELL WHO ARE THE CHARACTER YOUR ARE CRUSHING ON?
You may regret asking this because you may not be able to shut me up *g*
I fell for Jos and Niko like a ton of bricks. Probably Jos a little more, because we're in his head and he's just such a wonderful character, so nuanced and believable and so utterly convincing and yet not at all victim-like in his brokenness -- and this holds whether we're seeing him through his own eyes or someone else's (actually, once we did start seeing Jos from the outside, I was really impressed with how consistent the picture of him as a character was, including the things he doesn't tell you (but that you can tell he's eliding). And then Nikolas-dan -- I'm not sure why I fell for him so hard, actually, except that I've always kind of had a Thing for the archetype that he embodies (both of them, actually -- the warrior-priest, and the "big brother mentor", as TV Tropes phrases that particular character type). And maybe it was just restful to have at least one character who had a happy home life and isn't a giant broken mess ...
Actually, I really liked most of the characters in the first book, particularly Aki, maybe because I was so hungry for a female character to relate to. (She's a medic! She does stuff!) Ironically, the only character I really disliked for most of the first book (well, other than Falcone), was the character I fell for like a ton of bricks in the second book ...
Cairo Azarcon! ♥ ♥ ♥ It's funny because I really disliked him when we were first introduced to him through Jos's eyes, but the more we found out about him, and the hell he'd gone through (EIGHT YEARS HOW DID HE EVER), and then how he tried so hard to be a good father in his own emotionally stifled way and how he'd used what happened to him to create a haven for other people like him and to fight back against the pirates so no one else had to go through what he'd gone through ... OH CAIRO. ♥ ♥ ♥
Though I found it wretchedly difficult to relate to Ryan as a protagonist. After what Jos had gone through and how he'd struggled with it, Ryan's poor-little-rich-boy problems just seemed so appallingly petty. Interesting as it was to see the same events through Ryan's eyes, I really wished he'd been knocked off his pedestal much sooner, and given more to deal with ... I don't know. I struggled with Ryan. I struggled with Yuri too, though for different reasons -- actually one thing I love about these books is how she keeps taking The Enemy and then makes it impossible to go on seeing them as such. She does it with both the strits and the military in the first book, and the pirates have been very much The Enemy for two books and we've only seen Yuri as a stone-cold killer, and now suddenly we're in his head; it was hard at first, not in the same kind of wanting-to-smack-him way as with Ryan, but just ... I'd start falling for him and then go, "This is Yuri! He runs a galaxy-wide child sex slavery ring! YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKING HIM!" (And then in the end, despite myself ... I did.)
Re: You may regret asking this because you may not be able to shut me up *g*
Oh man, Cairo. I did like him from the start - he's my type, what can I say - but I loved him a billion times more as soon as we got further into his character. I love, LOVE the way he runs his ship. How on the one hand it's the orphanage for troubled teens, but on the other it's also a kind of prison-rules place where you have to be able to take care of yourself because running to the authorities with every infraction is going to get you an ass kicking and not much more.
I struggled with the second book for many reasons, but I agree, I spent much of it wanting Ryan to get slapped across the face already and snap out of it. But I think the thing I loved about Ryan from day one was how utterly... unselfconscious he was, as a character and a narrator. He gives SO MUCH, it was a bit of a shock after being in Jos' head. So I was always amused by him, and sort of horrified, at how thoroughly he was capable of embarrassing himself. I mean that scene where he gets drunk when he's first on Cairo's ship? JFC. I was cringing so hard! And at the same time loving it, because it was something you rarely see in a protagonist.
Ahaha I loved Yuri during the first 50 pages (before we get into his flashbacks basically) and then was a bit put off by him - in the sense that parts of his characterization didn't make sense to me - but throughout all of it I loved the mindfuck of having someone like him as a protagonist. The strength of these books really in getting into people's heads and constructing compelling narratives for unlikable characters.
OMG FEEL FREE TO FLAIL MOAR. We haven't even covered Evan yet! Dude, I love Evan. I LOVE JOS AND RYAN INTERACTING. LOVE. I love how Ryan is often playing at being the person that Evan actually is. And Evan's sorta like, "yeah so, this persona you try to adopt sometimes? Of someone profoundly more fucked up and promiscuous? I'm actually him." and Ryan's all "...er. *gulp*"
And CORPORAL DORR. <333 AHAHA
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Oh yes, I read that and I found your thoughts on the integrated military vs. the pseudo-integrated military utterly fascinating! Actually one reason why it's taken me awhile to respond to this comment is because I keep lacking the attention span and functional brain cells to talk about this with something resembling actual intelligence. (Damn you, cold germs!)
But yes, a big yes; I think actually what struck me about reading your meta on the topic is just how difficult it is to see our own blind spots. Here in the US we're steeped in images of a male-dominated military culture, in the media and the news and through our own family members who are in it. Even though female soldiers and pilots and so forth are slowly being normalized, it's still being done through that lens and in terms of that culture. It's difficult for us to think of the military without thinking of that specific vision of the military, the military of GI Joe and every American war movie ever.
So, while I wasn't wholly satisfied with the presence of women in the first book, nothing struck me as specifically off until reading your analysis of what a fully integrated military would actually look like, and everything you said made me go, um, YES, that makes perfect sense, and why didn't I see that before? I don't think I'd realized just how subtly and insidiously my mental image of "the military" (any military, anywhere) has been influenced by the military that we actually have in this country, and the way that it works.
Actually, in general, you have many thinky thoughts in your posts that I want to dissect more deeply and HAVE NOT GOT THE BRAIN CELLS TO DO IT. *smacks brain* I think in general, these books -- I think they're wonderful, I love how they deal with colonial issues and generational conflicts and war and invading vs. indigenous peoples, and yet, I can also see how they're written from the viewpoint of someone who lives in a Western culture (I think she's a minority of some kind, but you can still see those American/Canadian/Western cultural assumptions in these books). I suppose I'm noticing it because I'm acutely aware of it in my own (non-fannish) writing as well; as hard as I try to project myself into the mindset of the people I'm writing about, or to craft my fictional conflicts without making them obvious analogues for real-world conflicts, my own cultural background and personal beliefs work their way into the fabric of the setting anyway: the default cultural assumptions that we aren't even aware of, the fictional tropes that we've grown up with. On the one hand, we can't turn that off -- it's inevitable, everything you write is going to be a product of your own brain and culture; that's just how it works! But it's a problem when it becomes a barrier between the author and their ability to create the world and tell the story that they're obviously going for -- I think that is true a little bit in these books, and I know it's a huge problem in my own writing, that I've been trying to deal with.
... mmm, rambling commment is rambling.
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OH CAIRO YES. ♥ This is such a fiction-kink of mine, the idea of the outcasts and outsiders all banding together and making their own haven, their own place. So many of the shows and books and anime that I've fanned on use this as a central concept -- Firefly, SGA, and so forth. I was so delighted when I really started to tumble to what Cairo had created here, and especially after the Macedon went rogue. BUTTONS PUSHED. HARD.
Ryan ... I think that most of my problems with Ryan were not Ryan's fault so much as a measure of how deeply I'd fallen for Jos in the previous book, so not only was I dealing with the dissonance between the two protagonists and the relative level of shit that they were having to deal with, but I also kept wanting the book to GET BACK TO JOS NOW and kept struggling with the urge to just skim ahead until Jos showed up, dammit! I kinda wish they'd compressed the onstation half of the book somewhat and gotten Ryan to the Macedon sooner, because for me, that was where the book really began to take off -- I agree with your comment that the plot kinda degenerates at that point, but the character interactions are so made of awesome that I could totally have read a whole book that was nothing but Ryan bouncing off the Warchild cast and LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT.
Re: You may regret asking this because you may not be able to shut me up *g*
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In some ways the book reminded me of high quality fanfiction, with the h/c aspects of it.
Trouble is, given the content of the first book, I'm hesitant to recommend these to my own kids, even though I know they'd probably enjoy them. I've got her newest title, Gaslight Dogs, I think, but haven't read it yet.
INteresting: I just re-read my own comment, and you'd think I didn't like the books that much from some of hte things I said, but I really did love them. Just...hard to read, though, like you, I loved how that all worked out in the end, and how the character became more than the sum of his experiences, so much more.
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Actually, yes to most of what you said here; I wish she'd gone above and beyond with the aliens rather than basically just taking Japan, throwing in some other random East Asian trappings, giving them wings and calling it good. (And five years ago I'm not sure if I would have noticed that, the lack of world-building effort there; I think I'd probably have just gone, "Oh shiny! And what is Jos up to now?")
I keep thinking that if she'd actually been able to do the series she'd envisioned -- five more books! -- there would have been some books that developed the aliens better, and gave them and their world more dimensions. I really liked how the humans were the original aggressors; we're the alien menace that swept down from the skies, but the books don't shy away from the human cost of the war on the alien side, either.
And high-quality fanfic -- yes!
I have Gaslight Dogs sitting in my to-be-reads; I tried it once, but found the first few chapters hard to get into, and moved on to something else. It's not bad; it's just kind of dense and slow, and not really what I was looking for at that point. I'll definitely be trying again later, because it looks like she's put a lot of thought into the cultural world-building this time (the Warchild series is pretty generic on that front; it's very character-driven) and I'd like to see what she does with that.
Re:
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and honestly, I don't remember the third book at all; Or I may remember it and just have things all jumbled up in my head. It's been six years since I read them.
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one (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/895499.html), two (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/895816.html), three (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/896506.html), four (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/896662.html), five (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/897519.html) (with author comments), six (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/901422.html) (also some author comments), seven (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/901804.html), eight (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/902079.html), and nine (http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/903323.html). Sooo... those should probably fill your need to talk about the books :-)
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ETA: Heeeee, reading her squee posts is cracking me up because that's more or less EXACTLY how I felt while I was reading the book (and pretty much thereafter until I got the second one so that I could appease the craving somewhat), except I didn't get any farther than just thinking about posting it to LJ. Heh.
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Oh, they sound very interesting and after reading the, spoilery, description of my "book dealer" - I think that "Warchild" will be right down my alley... *is a sucker for "broken" characters who won't give up*
Thank you for the rec!
*sneaks away again*
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Yeah, it depends. In this case it was exactly what I needed to read about a book so that I'll buy it but in some cases it's very annoying to read a major plot thing or twist in the description of the book. *sighs* And even more annoying is it when the description is about a really minor part of the book and the "big plot" is something completely different which doesn't interest me at all and I wouldn't have bought the book if I would have known that that is the major plot of the book... *big sigh* Sorry, that just bugs me with no end about book descriptions on the back of them...
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I wonder if I can get my library to order them.
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Knowing what you like, and what you don't like, I think the one thing about these books that probably wouldn't be to your taste is that there is a certain amount of sex in them, and a lot of it is very, very messed-up sex, usually between guys. For the most part it's largely off-camera -- we know that it happens (the main character in the first book was sexually abused as a child and raped as an adult, for example), but it isn't really shown; however, the third book gets a great deal more graphic than the previous two.
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Your reviews are spot on and so nicely put what I liked about them. So dark but so good and I loved all the characters...or at least grew to love them. I remember...I think it's the second books main protagonist annoying me greatly at first and me adoring him by the end!
So very very much hope she gets to publish the rest!
...dang, and now I want to go reread them and I have NO CLUE what coast my copies are on...hmmmm....
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But anyway, yeah - these books mashed down quite a number of my buttons! I really hope the author is able to interest a publisher in more of them, because I will be so there!