Hard to top

These are great. Hard to put down! Now I'm on the last one, which means Scalzi better start working on the next one! ( )

Taking its title from a quote from the Gettysburg Address, John Scalzi's Can Long Endure, the third part of The End of All Things, follows a platoon of Colonial Union soldiers as they struggle to deal with a series of brushfires that seem to mark the start of a civil war.

Sent first the planet of Franklin, Lieutenant Heather Lee and her squad parachute into parliament mere seconds before the Speaker is due to introduce a vote on independence from the the Colonial Union. Pointing out that proposed motion is illegal, Lee suggests that while its possible the politicians might be taking solace in the words of Ben Franklin, this simply means that, because these are not the early days of the American Revolution and the CU are not the British, anyone who votes in favour will be summarily tried and executed on the spot. Needless to say, confronted with the Union's impressively gung-ho approach, the politicians decide to shelve their plans.

After a couple of similar missions - a pro-independence sniper on Kyoto and a group of protestors on Kyiv - the crux of the story takes place on Khartoum, when a mission that should have been a retread of Franklin turns into a blood bath. Forced to focus on her motives, Lee, assisted by her deeply irascible sergeant, Ilsa Powell, tries to decide how she feels about the Colonial Union, which Powell succinctly and accurately calls a fascistic shit show - albeit one whose motives are somewhat justified given the hostility of practically every alien species ever encountered by humanity.

While the story arc of The End of All Things is pushed forward by events on Khartoum - Harry Wilson and the Chandler appear to start cleaning up the mess - the majority of the story is about Heather Lee, her platoon, and her sense of being caught up in a civil war. And a civil war for perfectly understandable reasons: many of the colonists feel that the Colonial Union is just as willing to use its monopoly on force against its own planets as it is to use it against its notional alien enemies and, having seen an opportunity to give their oppressors the slip, the planets are trying to secede. ( )