Doomsayer (The Conquests Of Brokk #3), by Thane Keller

[Note:  This book was provided free of charge by Adams PR Group.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

It is not always the easiest thing to jump into the middle of a series and to get one’s bearings.  When one is reading military Science Fiction, as this book is, each volume in the series gets one further and further away from the origin stories that make many of these characters compelling, and already in this third book the author has a handful of characters who the author is supposed to care deeply about and a somewhat complex set of galactic states, all of which are riven by internal rivalry as well as conflict with other states as well as uncertainty regarding a fly-by with another galaxy with provides the potential for exploration and expansion as well as dealing with hostile enemy civilizations.  If you like military SF, this book is certainly a competent example of it, with the sort of conflicts that one could see in authors like Bujold (to give but one example) who have a similar interest in geopolitics on a galactic level where diplomacy as well as force and the possibility of conquest are all present, as is the case here.

Without giving away too many spoilers, this particular plot is a complicated one, seeing as it was likely set into motion by the two previous novels in the series, which established the titular Doomsayer as a woman of great charisma who is now free from slavery and helping Brokk to avenge himself on the weak ruler of Jark who refused to reinforce him after having given him a suicide mission to take over Tassi which failed.  The Tassi have sent a plague in revenge (revenge is a big theme in this book) in order to weaken the empire of Jark and make it susceptible to counterattacks either from a galactic alliance or from opportunistic assaults from other survivors.  Meanwhile, a scouting mission goes wrong in Mateen and leads to a brutal realization that rebels have been allying with AI forces, all of which promises more war.  Interestingly enough, what is thought of as a danger at the beginning of the book is largely forgotten by the end, unless it is a subject for future novels, as the timescale we are dealing with here is a bit hard to determine from the story.  The author is juggling a lot of different parallel plots and not all of them get the time or attention that is necessary for them to really work.

The biggest issue I have with this book, though, is with the way that the author deals in such a cavalier fashion with matters of faith.  The author appears to be one of those lamentable writers who feels it necessary to write about priests and religious practices and rituals in his writings without viewing them as having any sort of genuine meaning.  As a result, just about every time one sees a Jark priest (and there are many such moments here), or anyone making any kind of religious appeal, they are engaging in an attempt (often successful) to be a charlatan pulling the wool over someone’s eyes.  As someone who is a genuinely religious person myself, seeing faith treated as an automatically illegitimate and fraudulent appeal is rather upsetting, and in a case like this where the novelist needs the reader to be at least a bit on his side because of the way he has structured his novel to be a militaristic one where diplomacy is similarly eschewed by many of the characters, the end result is to make this book most appealing to those who love bullies and hate morality.  And that’s not a really good place for a writer to be, or a reader for that matter.