Riptides, Storm Surge, Flotsam of War and Ratchet's Run by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Gather round, loyal reader(s) and I'll tell you all the tale of how I read four awesome books and was too lazy to review them individually.

Hey, I love to write but sometimes I get really into a story and I don't wanna stop, so I just get the next one, and the next one...

Yeah, I've got a story problem, and not the kind you used to do in math class.

All of this to say that I have confirmed my former suspicion that Blaine Lee Pardoe is a spectacular author. Having read his books, Riptides, Storm Surge, Flotsam of War and Ratchet's Run I have run out of books that are currently published in the Land & Sea universe and I find that I am just a wee bit disconcerted at not having more to read. 

I mean, Pardoe has been cranking these books out at an amazingly rapid pace and I really shouldn't give him problems for not writing fast enough, but would I really be a fan if I didn't? I mean, the way I see it, a fan should serve the following functions for an author

Cheerleader: I love your work, Mr. Pardoe! I'll tell everyone else about it!
Source of Income: Consume the book legally. Make sure the author gets paid.
Pain in the a... I mean Motivator: Urge them to keep up the hard work. Remind them why it's worth it. Even if it's only to get the fan (me) to shut up for five minutes. 

Or sumfin'...

So, about the books themselves...

I mean, I probably should talk about them, because this is supposed to be a review, right? Why wouldn't I just get straight to the point and tell you about what I read? Huh?

Yeah, I know...

Anyway..

Riptides and Storm Surge were both pretty much what I expected only more awesomer. I mean, I put up Splashdown as my pick for the Dragon Awards, but these two were almost as totally amazing. I think I just liked the first one more because I love getting to know new worlds and it was the first book. 

*SHRUG*

And I don't mean what I expected as just more of the same. Those were the books that moved the story forward in a massive way. If Splashdown had been Star Wars, then Storm Surge and Riptides would have been along the lines of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, except that the story didn't end there. But still, the overall plot of the series moves along at about that pace for the first three books.

Some parts of Storm Surge and Riptides are not for the squeamish. I like that about them. They're realistic and necessary, but they're not pretty. There's a bit of mutilation and some torture. It fits though, and it shows the enemy as something other than just a group of aquatic soldier ants constantly moving forward without thinking. I like that. If they came from some other planet somewhere to get here and invented the weaponry to fight the militaries of Earth then they can obviously freaking think. I may not always approve of the way the villains gather information, but it's obvious that they need to and there are many reasons why those things needed to be revealed in the way that they were.

Flotsam of War is a one writer anthology and works more along the lines of The Lost Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman where they went back and filled in the missing parts of their original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy (and I'll shill for them some other time, promise.) only we it's one book instead of three and we didn't have to wait three decades for it. It also kind of reminds me of Nerilka's Story except that Flotsam of War was actually enjoyable.

Oops.

I didn't say that out loud, did I?

Ratchet's Run is probably the only one of the sequels that works as a standalone in my opinion. The others are good books, but you need to read the previous stories to really get them. I think you could probably understand Ratchet's Run with no previous knowledge but it might take you a chapter or two to get up to speed. 

At any rate, it combines an alien invasion and a bank heist by several competing interests and things go totally wrong for the characters. In this case though, that works for the readers because the action ratchets WAY up (DYSWIDT?) and it's crazy fun to read. I just want to know how many times Pardoe had to rewrite that section to get it all straight because there is a LOT going on. He managed it though.

And it's weird, because through most of the story I thought Ratchet's Run would be more of a side story that didn't change the world much, but then I got punched in the mouth with the knowledge that I was wrong. I don't do spoilers but stuff happened. Cool stuff. Something that might be maybe repeatable in other places where the conflict is ongoing. 

I was really pleasantly surprised there, too. Reading  series like Land & Sea can be a weird experience for me (but in a good way) because I always want it to know what's going to happen next but I don't want things to move too quickly and the story to end. So, like you want more, but you want less, but you want more, but not that much, but even more, but...

Yeah, weird. 

Overall though, I was really impressed and I'll be downloading the next one as soon as it gets published. 

I love the tech in the Land & Sea universe though, and I love the fact that it keeps getting better. I also freaking love the way that the new tech works, but it has some bugs. Pardoe doesn’t make his people out to be supermen who can’t fail at anything. The stakes of the war are high. The people, whether military, political or civilian, are aware of this. The pressure is high to DO SOMETHING. Some things are rushed that shouldn't be. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes the consequences of a failure can be extreme. Sometimes the end user doesn't make it. That sucks, but in a real-world scenario it would be inevitable and in fiction those types of equipment failures are the height of realism. Listen, I hate Murphy, and I'm sure you do to, but that guy passed his law for a reason.

Overall, the only disappointing thing about the Land & Sea series is that the next one isn't out yet. But hey, I'm just doing my job by pointing that out, right?

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Safe Deposit Boxes

Riptides

Blaine Lee Pardoe
WarGate Nova, 2023

Storm Surge
Blaine Lee Pardoe
WarGate Nova, 2023

Flotsam of War

Blaine Lee Pardoe
WarGate Nova, 2023

Ratchet's Run

Blaine Lee Pardoe

WarGate Nova, 2023

The above books are available for purchase at the following links. If you click a link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Blaine Lee Pardoe's Splashdown

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.