Ironclads was an utter delight
Storywise, it’s somewhat like if Saving Private Ryan was rewritten as a Shadowrun campaign. A corpo Scion – an invincible mech suit that lets the very rich play at war – has gone missing in a questionable and ugly war. Now it’s up to a ragtag group of disparate expendables and at least one bio-horror to rescue the business boy.
It’s a good premise, but the pacing is what knocks it out of the park. I can’t gush enough about it. This novella zooms with a confidence you don’t usually see in sci-fi: here’s this grim future world, here’s are the stakes of the mission, here’s shotgun blast of military sci-fi ideas, and here’s a hint that things are even more fucked than you’d think. It starts fast and doesn’t hit the brakes until the abrupt ending.
I have two knocks against it. The first is the narrator, who is that same sort of detached, “eh, it’s a living” type of career soldier I’ve reading since 8th grade. The straightforward nature of the guy does help ground the story, but I could have used someone more interesting at the helm.
The second is how it delivers its political message, which is with the subtlety of a baboon. This isn’t that type of book so it’s not a big complaint, but sometimes it feels like the author was worried you wouldn’t get it. It’s only a notch or two less than the Libertarian Police Department bit from the New Yorker.
This was my first Adrian Tchaikovsky book who apparently cranks out award winners like once a week, so I’m looking forward to tackling more of his works.