Metal Legion Complete Series Omnibus: Mechanized Warfare On A Galactic Scale, Craig Martelle (as CH Gideon) and Caleb Wachter. July, 2020.
To wit:
Scorpion's Fury
Frozen Fire
Hellfire
Lunar Assault
Watery Grave
Cry Havoc
Search & Destroy
End of War
The idea is a classic: a group of misfits battle to make the universe safe for humanity. They square off against various aliens, a galaxy-wide conspiracy, and the higher ups in their own military. Oh, and very occasionally each other. Finally, the menace is unraveled, although at a heavy toll in life, machines and munitions. Peace prevails.
This is sweeping, combat-heavy, epic in scale and ambitious in concept. Compared to comparable series, very little in the series is done badly. Conversely, very little is exceptional either. I had no trouble maintaining my immersion in and enjoyment of the story, once I accepted the dominant point of view and a major style quirk, both outlined below. Lots of combat and a great premise, but I wanted more from it.
The good: there is a ton of action, and Gideon/Martell and Wachter don’t let too much time elapse between episodes of fighting. The aliens were devious and enjoyable friends/enemies--they tended to help or hold back according to their own interests, mixing duplicity and friendship together in a remarkable display of political realism. There is an awesome heavy metal music theme/soundtrack.
·The bad: there is a ton of action, and Gideon/Martell and Wachter don’t let too much time elapse between episodes of fighting. There is character development, just not much and it’s spotty and uneven. Star mech driver Xi in particular disappointed -- she starts off as a believable misfit, grows up just enough to be interesting, takes on a really sophisticated semi-diplomatic challenge which she handles with grace, accrues steady promotions -- and by the last two books is back to treating mankind’s most important allies and the species’ existential crisis with one-dimensional flippancy. Lee “Leroy” Jenkins (hah!) hints at being a commander with a dark and twisty past, but only hints at it. Et cetera…
The ugly: patchy world-building. This has an almost “operations research SF” flavor. Battles have lengthy and excruciatingly detailed counts of how many of which type of projectile were fired, at which point and how they are shot down or intercepted, missed, hit the target, and how much damage they inflicted. I found myself skipping through battles to avoid this. This same level of detail is rarely applied to characters or back story. This is too bad--the authors are clearly talented enough to pull that off.
The “this guy has too much time on his hands” annex to the review:
I’d expected this would be a couple of days’ reading followed by a three-sentence review, but something here resonated. Described as “mechanized warfare on a galactic scale”, the series over-delivers on the mechanized part but skimps on the “galactic scale”. It’s maybe more accurately described as “mechanized warfare over galactic-scale distances”, but I felt teased there' wasn’t something a little more strategic.
I thought that this series excellently captures a broadly American perspective on and understanding of war -- specifically, the allure of and fascination with the tactical and technical levels of war at the expense of wider views or questions. (Think of the average Quora discussion thread on WW2 tanks, for example.)
That’s not to say the authors (or we more broadly) don’t realize there is history or a strategic outlook lurking behind all the fighting. It’s just that those things are secondary to the sheer joy of mounting up, heading in and smashing the enemy into righteous submission (whether doing that is appropriate or not.)
This comes across in the preferred perspective of the books: the view from the commander’s cupola of individual mechs (think tanks on steroids), which is interspersed with reflections from people who aren’t in mechs but clearly would rather be. The authors clearly know there’s more to this, but generally keep a laser focus on fighting and the mechanics of combat.
There is weirdly little curiosity about the larger sinews of war beyond the technical/tactical level, considering how lovingly that level is crafted. There is joint and combined stuff (not all of it combat!) and the operational level of war appears briefly. The strategic level of war appears as an extra in a couple of crowd scenes. Even the human terrain--well, technically the “xeno-human terrain”-- of the Terrans’ enemies and allies is explored only enough to set up the plot in broad strokes.
I kept thinking while reading that knowingly or not, the books reflect a popular understanding of how we — Americans — fought, and understood the fighting of, some recent wars. I thought this was both remarkable and a limiter on the story--it’s SF, after all! And look, I’m not suggesting I’d want Carl von Clausewitz or Thomas Schelling writing military sci-fi. (Dr. Strangelove was more than enough, thanks.) But most of the genre doesn’t even get as far towards the big picture as Metal Legion, which made it a bit disappointing to me that the series went right up to the edge…and then stepped back to the tactical level.
Whether this focus serves us well as a country is open for debate. This doesn’t matter for these books, though, because the stars are the mech drivers, the crews and the machines themselves. And there is a great deal of curiosity about how they do their jobs reflected in how the story is told. Judging from other reviews, this is a strong draw.
To be a bit contrarian, I was bothered by the books’ “uncreative anachronism” factor. Although set in the future (one to which Martelle doesn’t seem to feel obliged to attach a date) a weirdly extensive amount of things seem to have been imported from the 20th/21st centuries. The authors can’t use the term “depleted uranium” enough. The infantry have powered armor but carry RPGs . At least one .50 caliber anti-material rifle shows up. It’s capable--as we are told in an operations research moment--of a 3 round, 8cm group fired in 3 seconds by a gruff but preternaturally talented sergeant major.
While missiles are available in short-, medium-, and long-range versions it’s sometimes unclear what that means in practice. (Also, since we’re on the subject: when you fire one in space in a vacuum, does a missile go “ballistic” when it loses guidance? I don’t think that’s exactly it. But they do here.) And while there is a plot twist that explains why, all of the various hostile factions with the partial exception of the galactic-scale genocide-masterminding bad guys basically are packing the exact same loadouts. This all seemed very low-effort.
But it was still readable and enjoyable--it didn’t feel like 1699 pages and I had no trouble persuading myself to keep flicking pages. The point of SF is to entertain, and this does.
Smirk factor: 0verdone: 0 pts (131 smirks; 56 “I say again”; 32 “capital grade” without explaining what that is; 79 uses of “tungsten” (projectiles); and 25 depleted uranium things.)
Immersion factor: Chest high: 1.5 pts
Writing quality: Average: 1 pt
Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt
Innovative/interesting: High: 2pts (Just fun.)
Total: 5.5/10