Sauvage Sitdown - A Counterfeit Barsoom

Being a review of Warlord of the Nightmare Realm and Broken Land by Doc Spears

No frame narrative on this one fellas. I am not a happy camper. I am forced to give a negative review. I don’t want to give negative reviews, it sucks. But sometimes, so does the book or books under review. I have previously reviewed Doc Spears first Barsoomian effort here. Long story short if that’s too long for you, I liked it. It was good. Colt, the MC, rubbed some readers wrong, and I get that. Sometimes, around wimmen mainly, he’s got more beta male flags than Chuck. But I dunno, I in the first book it works, at least for me.

The problem is, Colt is still the same Chuck in the second and third books. His character arc is a flatline. Which is fine for someone like say, Captain John Carter. He’s already his best self at the start of the story, from the very first sentence. He doesn’t need to change. He changes others. Often by shooting them until they catch fire or change shape, or by stabbing and letting out the red or green, but also just by being himself. Colt on the other hand, is always on the verge of a breakdown, a depressive episode, a crisis of confidence. If anything, it just gets worse as the series continues.

All that being said, I was willing to put up with the whiney isekai protag because the action was hot. Martian Cthulhu? How about calamari? White Martians playing god, kidnapping his gril? Say hello to my little friend. Although translating the chessmen into a road-rash footrace left me cold. By this point Doc seemed to be running out of steam. Running out of things to say with these characters.

But nothing could prepare me for the final indignity. I can forgive much to get my fix of the ultra-vee. But this. This is unforgivable. See what I mean?

“But in the rejuvenation of this land, as vital as they may be to our destiny, it is not enough that we rejoice in the merely tangible necessities and worldly comforts to come. We must also cultivate a means to our spiritual rebirth. And it must begin with me. “I will step down from the throne.” Low murmurs permeated the crowd. “And never again from this seat will a monarch rule over Mihdradahl.”

Spears, Doc. Warlord of the Broken Land (p. 370). WarGate Books. Kindle Edition.

Our not!DejaThoris is abdicating her throne. Because Colt gave her a copy of the Declaration of Independence. I’m sorry, what? Talis Darmon Sylah is a monarch now in her own right. Her father was assassinated by her brother, who was in turn cut down by her own hand. She has killed her own blood for this throne. But ole boy gives her a book and she’s ready to throw a constitutional convention and abdicate. I’m going to be sick.

See, this is all completely out of left field. Talis has, up to this point, been entirely a creature of duty, a reigning monarch first and wife of her husband second. This is what one expects when one is the consort of a queen regnant. One does not expect her to throw away her patrimony because of the scribblings of 18th century freemasonic proto communist radicals.

I could almost buy this happening to the original Deja Thoris. Not that Captain John Carter, good ole rebel that he his, has any love for Yankee revolutionaries or their screeds. But John Carter is the Chieftain of her Heart. If he said they were republicans now, then she would try to figure out what that meant so she could make it so. But Deja was not a reigning monarch, she had that luxury. Talis Darmon Sylah does not.

Upon her lies the burden of a thousand years of patrimony, of blood and treasure, hopes and dreams sacrificed upon the altar of state, for the good of the ruled. Where other Red Martian States have succumbed to the desert sand and slow decline of Mars as the atmosphere plants break down and the seas evaporate away, Mihdradahl has survived. Until now. Benjamin Colt, the destroyer envisions bring modernity to heroic Barsoom, and who is left to stop him?

Someday there’d be floating stoplights, billboards, traffic jams, and transit cops, and what I was doing now would get me arrested. And I’d tell my grandkids what it was like, back when Shansara was a hick town in the middle of a desert. Not the one they knew. The garden paradise of sprawling suburbs, the public lakes crowded with rowboats, parasols shading lovers from the sun as they floated the lazy day away, streets crowded by tourists and their cameras.

Spears, Doc. Warlord of the Broken Land (pp. 375-376). WarGate Books. Kindle Edition.

Far better for the villains of these books to have won.

These books are a NO GO at this station.

Avoid.

Save yourselves.

Fly you fools!