I'm never going near water again and you can't make me. Nope. You can sandblast me when I start to stink, but I'm done with anything clear and liquid looking. Seriously. Who knows what lives in that stuff? It could be aliens. Wait. I hear you laughing. There can't be aliens in the water, right? Well, actually, yes there can and all it took was Blaine Lee Pardoe to point it out. Splashdown is not his newest novel, he has a few others already published in his Land & Sea series (and I'm already about one hundred and fifty pages through the second one) but I just got around to reading it because I'm, like, a lazy nerd or sumfin'.
Probably. I mean maybe. Then again how many of you nerds have published over three hundred posts promoting the genre? So maybe I'm just goofy instead of lazy. I'm definitely something though.
Ok, so maybe I'll just say I should've read the book sooner.
At any rate, anything I had read by Pardoe previous to this (besides his interview here.) was in the Battletech Universe, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I did know that I've always loved both Pardoe's writing and his BT Mercenary unit, the Northwind Highlanders, but I had never read anything where he created his own setting before. I was a bit concerned, but I shouldn't have been. Splashdown is the best thing I've read by Pardoe and that, my friends, is a serious compliment indeed.
As a kid my first love reading-wise was mysteries. I grew up not knowing much about the world of Speculative Fiction because my parents were mundanes. I was reading the Hardy Boys by the end of first grade. Of course, I later moved on to Speculative Fiction, but that love will always be there. I mention that because Splashdown, at least in part, reads like a mystery. It's a good one, too.
See, weird things start happening. A plane disappears. It is later found reassembled, on the sea floor under a whole bunch of water. (I'm not going to look up the exact depth. Let's just say it's diver squish deep.) Some people disappear near the water. A ship goes to see and contact is lost. It's never seen again. And no one knows why.Well, except Pardoe and his readers, but that's the fun part.
I know I mentioned that Splashdown reads like a mystery in parts, but it doesn't have the crusty old police detective you may be expecting at that point. Nor is it truly a cozy. The investigators, rather than being a random housewife or crossing guard, are professionals of a different type. We have the military intelligence community, an investigative reporter, and a billionaire looking to profit off of the crisis doing the legwork. Well, sort of. The billionaire actually pays people to do the legwork, but you get the idea.
And even once the humans find out that there is an alien presence, there's more of a mystery as well. Splashdown takes place in the year 2039, so the tech is a little more advanced than ours, but not by a whole lot. Humanity doesn't really know what it's up against. These are not your standard Trek/Wars type "funny looking human" type aliens. These are actually aquatic species. Their armor and armament appear to be part of their bodies, but they're not the Borg. The weapons grow as a natural part of their anatomy. And what's worse, they don't work the way our weapons do, so defending against them, or defeating their armor, isn't as easy as it should be.
That's not to say that Splashdown is only a mystery book. There is plenty of good, old-fashioned, ass-kickery to go around here. I'm just not going to tell you who it is that gets their asses kicked. Let's just say that the fights are well written, suspenseful, somewhat gory, and don't always go the way I want it to. Earth is hurting. Things are looking grim.
And of course, what's a Blaine Lee Pardoe book without robots? This time around they're known as ASHURs: Augmented Soft/Hard Unconvention Combat Rigs. These things are impressive. They come in various sizes and loadouts, but by and large, other than some specialized recon models, they pack about the same punch as a light or medium 'Mech in Battletech but are closer in size to the mecha that appear in Matrix Revolutions, or at least that's the impression I got of them. ASHURs are super cool and function almost as part of the infantry. I've been a fan of mecha since the early 80s and Robotech so seeing them so well done was a real treat.
The world Pardoe sets up in Splashdown is so intense and topsy-turvy that the government is actually forced to act in an intelligent manner. As hard as that would be in real life, Pardoe makes it work, in fiction at least, by putting the right person in charge and feeding him the people he needs. I love it. I'd like to see such an approach implemented here in the real world, but I probably never will. It reads like a common-sense loving person's dream though.
My one complaint is that we don't know enough about the aliens and why they're here. That's tempered by the fact that we need to not know everything yet. The air of mystery I mentioned earlier is important to the story. I still want to know what these things are, where they came from and why they want to conquer my planet. Then again, this is book one of a series and I have faith that we'll learn more in the future. If I'd have picked this series up earlier, there's a good chance I would know what was going on.
For right now, though, I'm just going to keep reading. I can't wait to see what comes next. There is some stuff going on that looks promising. There's more stuff going on that looks troublesome. I need to know how this all gets resolved. That's why I'm already about a third of the way through Riptides, the second book in the Land & Sea series.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Bouncing Alien Sand Fleas
Splashdown
Blaine Lee Pardoe
Wargate Nova, 2023
Splashdown is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.
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