DT Read's Tentacles of the Dominion

Seldom can an author change the entire basis for a series and have it work. John Ringo comes to mind as an author who didn't (and if you've read the Legacy of the Aldenata series AKA The Human/Posleen Wars then you're familiar with the Callie Trilogy. I kinda didn't like them because they didn't fit.) quite make it fit. I never liked the Callie trilogy much, not because it was poorly written, but because it didn't fit the series. 

Enter D.T. Read and her latest (re)release, Tentacles of the Dominion. I was a bit leery at first because I had advanced warning that this was a book unlike the first two books and I wasn't sure how things were going to turn out. I was worrying for no reason though, because this is a damn fine book. 

I've remarked before how well Read writes family life and Tentacles of the Dominion is actually the best example of that so far. Lujan Sergey has been badly wounded while protecting an important person at a treaty signing. His son Tristan, the main character of the first two books, is literally light years away fighting on another planet. His wife is left alone to be with him while he tries to recover from a nearly body-wide paralysis plus blindness and deafness using methods that would not be available in the real world. Read gets into Lujan's head. Read gets into his wife Darcie's head. 

Lujan's recovery is totally believable if you excuse the Science Fictional methods used to make it work. He struggles. He fights. Lujan is an admiral in the Sperzah, which is a spaceborne version of the Navy SEALS and he refuses to give up like one. He has that ungoldy persistence combined with stubborn pigheadedness that gets him through anything he needs to get through. If he pushes himself further than he should at times then so be it. You don't accomplish great things by refusing to challenge yourself or by thinking small. Basically, when I finally get to sit down and have a drink with all of my fictional friends, Lujan gets a double. He's hard core.

Darcie is the kind of wife that every man wants. She's tough. She's loyal. She sticks by her man no matter what it takes and helps bring him through the fire regardless of the cost to herself. Seriously, I've got a lot of respect for her and she gets a girly froo-froo drink, too. Make that two. She's earned it.

Oh, and a moment between Lujan and his mother and sisters deserves mention, too. Mom is totally believable to the point where I didn't know whether to laugh along with her or cry for Lujan. Either way, it worked out well and I had a good time with it. And when Tris makes it back, there are times when I almost did well up.

I mean, I didn't, obviously, because I'm Jimbo and Jimbo is a big, strong, proud, smart, brave, rough, tough guy.

Of course, I taught my daughters to be all of that and they still cry, but not me. Nope. Never.

But yeah, speaking as a guy who lost his dad unexpectedly, I felt for Tris when he came back from deployment. He hadn't lost his father but in some ways it had to have felt like he did. The dude in the hospital bed wasn't the guy he went rappelling with last book even if he was. If you've ever seen a loved one go through something catastrophic you'll get that. 

But I also felt for Luj. I'm watching my oldest grow up. She's a high school senior this year, just drove me out to dinner and is getting invitations from lots of colleges because of her brains. I always raised her to do her best and succeed but it's still hard to believe that she's so old and grown up now. It's the same for Luj, who sees his baby grown and helping Dad when he needs it. It's a weird thing if you haven't experienced it, but any parent who has been through a similar time can read that part of the book and feel it in their soul.

That's not to say that Tentacles of the Dominion is all family and medicine. There is a big-time political plot going on complete with spies, duplicity and murder. There are a few action sequences and they work where they're supposed to. We get that whole pulse pounding feeling a couple times and it's fun but that's not what Tentacle of the Dominion is really all about.

If you're a fan of my blog then you're familiar with my whole "someone to root for and someone to root against" thing, then you know I love to hate a good villain, and TOTD has one that I just want to reach out and touch, preferably with a bladed weapon in his core region. Seulemont Remarq is sneaky. He's slimy. He's duplicitous. He'll do whatever he needs to do to achieve his ends and he has no sense of remorse. His only loyalty is to himself and on that level he's a fanatic. He seeks power for his government, but not as a loyalist. His goal is to empower the government to empower himself.

He's got friends and followers, or at least accomplices, in high places, too. There is indeed a great deal of corruption in the government and it seems to be spreading. They even manage to get Lujan retired while he is convalescing, thus removing him from a position where he has a chance to really influence what happens next. It almost has an air of legitimacy but it's fake. And, of course, nothing is worse than fake legitimacy, with the possible exception of my sense of humor. Even that's only possible though.

I do find myself a bit bummed that this is the end of the trilogy because I feel like there is more story to be told here. I won't go into details because it would spoil too much, but I truly do feel like there should be at least one more book to detail the fallout from this one. I think I can get up with saying that there are some loose ends that need to be tied up. Then again, I hear that there are some sequels coming, turning this into an ongoing series once again and that your favorite blogger might have something to say about how they go. 

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Burnt Fuses

Tentacles of the Dominion
D.T. Read
Theogony Books, 2023

Tentacles of the Dominion 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. And, not to be that guy about it, it is Christmas time and I know you've got some shopping to do. So clicky the thingy and throw some pennies atcha boy.

Richard Weyand's Eve of War (Agency Book One)

The Agency doesn't exist. I know it. You know it. I bet even he knows it. But somebody forgot to tell Bert Magnum and he works for the Agency. I know, I know. I mean, I get it. If it doesn't exist then how can he work for it? Listen, I'm a book reviewer. If you wanted a sense maker, you came to the wrong blog. That's not my thing. But you can read Richard Weyand's Eve of War and then we can not make sense together. Togetherness is a good thing, right?

This is actually a really entertaining story. A detractor might be tempted to say that it's pretty much James Bond INNN SPAAAAAACE, but honestly, I thinks it's totally James Bond IIIIIIINN SPAAAAACE! and I love it. Listen, folks. Things work because they work and James Bond works. There's a reason that James Bond has like 87689768976876876868688969869876868968976 movies and they all sell like a billion tickets each, then live forever on rentals/streaming. And trust me, it's not just the martinis.

What could possibly be better than a super-cool secret agent with lots of neat toys who gets the girl and does the super-spy stuff and tries to save the day? I'll tell you what. It's the super-cool secret agent with lots of neat toys who gets the girl and does the super-spy stuff and tries to save the day who has an alien companion. I mean, the fact that it basically lives in the shower IS a bit weird but, I mean, it's an alien. It's SUPPOSED TO BE WEIRD.

There should be a song about how aliens are supposed to be strange. Maybe we could set it to the tune of someone else's song. Does anybody have Weird Al's number? Seriously guys, you don't want me to sing it. You just don't.

Anyway...

There are widgets and gizmos and superdrugs and hot chicks and guns and bombs and mishaps in cars and maybe some other stuff...

To go with allergies. Seriously, that was a shocker. What secret agent has allergies?

And yes, we get to find out how the alien got there EVENTUALLY. I won't tell you how but it works and it's interesting and yes, it's weird but we just had that conversation.

There's a lot of good stuff here, and the even better news is that there is more coming. It seems that Eve of War is the first book in a series called The Agency, which apparently DOES exist. The books, not the Agency. The actual Agency is basically just like Area 51 and Delta Force. It doesn't exist, never will and does all kinds of stuff that never happened. Actually, I know a couple of guys who served on submarines. Maybe they can tell me how things that never happened in places they never were worked. Uhh...

Nevermind.

You know, the whole Science Fiction thing doesn't mix very often with the whole Super Spy thing, except in cases where the spy has nifty tools that don't exist in the real world. Eve of War is a legit Science Fiction story complete with star nations and interstellar travel. Humanity is still humanity, but they're out there.

Eve of War takes place in a corner of human space and the rest of humanity is only mentioned passingly. There are definitely strong hints of something out there though, and I kind of get the feeling that the playing field is going to expand in future volumes of the series. I haven't read any of the follow on books yet (and I think only one exists at the moment) but there's a hint, a possible hit of foreshadowing I detected...

Yup, you're right. I'm more Inspector Gadget than James Bond, despite the similar first names. Go, go Gadget review!

Didn't work, still writing.

So yeah, I think there's more coming, similar to how David Weber started his Honorverse in one corner of the universe and then made it bigger, or how I started my Dungeons and Dragons campaign with one town and expanded it. This is an approach that a lot of writers use because it makes sense and it works. Try to cram too much in too quickly and you get the Green Lantern movie. It's better this way.

I'm really looking forward to where this universe can go. It's kind of refreshing to read some SF that's not the same old SF and Weyand has achieved that here. I love starships and big, stompy robots and weird unobtainium power sources, etc but there's more to the genre than that and it's nice to see someone step outside of the standard tropes and give us something new and, this is key, do it in its own universe.

Seriously, those of you have read John Ringo's Human-Posleen War/Legacy of the Aldenata series may remember The Weapon and the trilogy of books centered around Cally. Those were good books, well written and action packed with believable characters but I think they lost something because they didn't fit in with the rest of the universe. For me, at least, the LOTA universe is, and always has been, about mass combat and asskickery. There may have been a bit of "Uh oh, here they come" at the beginning of Gust Front,  but the story is supposed to take place on the front lines. 

For Weyand, that's not an issue. He didn't pull the bait and switch with this story. This is a spy-centered story and that's what he's given us. I hope he keeps it that way. The day may come when mass space battles are part of the story of Bert Magnum and The Agency, but I hope they either happen "off-screen" or as a small point of the larger story rather than a focal point. Magnum is the kind of guy who risks his life for his star-nation, but in a different way. Don't get me wrong: I'm excited for more of this series but I want it to stay like it is. Here's hoping, anyway.

Bottom Line: 4.75 out of 5 Doses of Com-Ply

Eve of War (Agency Book One)

Richard Weyand
Weyand Associates, Inc, 2022

Eve of War (Agency Book One) 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.