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Title: Savage Wars
Series: Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars #1
Author: Jason Anspach & Nick Cole
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF / Space Opera
Pages: 397
Words: 118K

Synopsis:

From Galaxysedge.fandom.com

The greatest conflict the galaxy has ever known…

They were the Savages. Raiders from our distant past. Elites who left Earth to create tailor-made utopias aboard the massive lighthuggers that crawled through the darkness between the stars. But the people they left behind on a dying planet didn't perish in the dystopian nightmare the Savages had themselves created: they thrived, discovering faster-than-light technology and using it to colonize the galaxy ahead of the Savages, forming fantastic new civilizations that surpassed the wildest dreams of Old Earth.

Until the Savages came in from the Darkness...

When a Savage hulk lands on glittering New Vega, one of the crown jewels of the post-Earth galaxy, a coalition of planetary governments amasses their forces to respond to the post-human Savage Marines who’ve come to sack and enslave. But what the coalition forces find is something far more sinister than the typical Savage hit-and-run: this time, the Savages have come to stay.

Witness the intense beginning of THE SAVAGE WARS, the epic conflict, built into the lore of GALAXY'S EDGE, that will encompass over a thousand years of brutal fighting. Only the greatest military force in the galaxy can bring this war to an end… and the galaxy will never again be the same.

Experience the beginning of the Legion. Experience the Savage Wars.

My Thoughts:

This new trilogy starts before the Legion existed and before the Savages were vanquished. This mainly takes place on one world that has been invaded by the Savages. To this point, the Savages have always operated alone and conducted hit and run raids, sucking an individual world dry of all resources, including people. This time is different. They've set down roots. They've allied with other Savage clans.To date, the only way to destroy a Savage Ship has been to nuke the world and burn it to its underbed. And only one man has had the courage to do so, Tyrus Rechs. Declared an enemy of humanity, Rechs has his fans and detractors amongst the various politcal factions out in the galaxy.

Embedded secretly amongst the military forces, Rechs has a plan to nuke the planet. He has help from Caspar, another Immortal who has worked his way up to become an Admiral amongst one of the Factions. He covers for Rechs and gives him the opportunity to use the nuke.

Tyrus saves a small group of soldiers who then pledge themselves to help him get the nuke to the grounded Savage ship. Along the way they realize the Savages have put the entire population into cold storage as a food source. Rechs can't bring himself to nuke the planet knowing the population is still alive. He does get the idea to start a military force made up of the best of the best and answerable to no one but himself. Thus the seed of the Legion is planted.

This felt like a long book. It was good, with some serious ground pounder military action but it just felt long, if you know what I mean.

Overall, this was another great entry in the Galaxy's Edge universe. It was also a great peek into the far history of Tyrus Rechs. 1500 years is a long time. There are 2 more Savage Wars books, so we'll have to see if we take great big time jumps or if it really focuses on the creation of the Legion. Either way, I'm looking forward to them :-)

★★★★☆ ( )

Begun, the Savage Wars have.

Jason Anspach and Nick Cole take us back to the beginning of the Legion. To those desperate battles that rent the galaxy in twain, yet at the same time also called forth humanity’s greatest heroes. And it is very much humanity versus… something else. While the denizens of the lighthuggers that left Earth before the invention of the hyperdrive do share common ancestry with the varied multitudes that inhabit the far-flung worlds of the galaxy, being a homo sapiens isn’t necessarily the same thing as being human.

Exactly what humanity entails of you is the living core of this book of military space opera with a very hard look at the horrors of war. War, as such, is horrible. This war, is something else entirely, and if you want to know why, you should take a short detour into the universal phenomenon known as millennialism.

The name for it in English implies a particularity it does not possess. The name comes from the Book of Revelation, referring to the an age of 1,000 years in which Christ rules the Earth. That meaning has been extended to refer to all movements that believe that the end of the world, or the end of an age of the world is imminent, and that therefore radical changes are called for with special urgency.

When the lighthuggers, giant colony ships with the capacity to achieve an ultimate velocity a substantial fraction of lightspeed, abandoned the dying Earth, that seemed abundantly true. An age of the world really was ending, and people responded accordingly. What was different here, is that in our history millenarian movements have always needed to physically co-exist with everyone else. The precursors of the Savages took the equivalent of a commune, a kibbutz, or a cult, and separated it from the rest of humanity for generations, at least.

If you want to know how nutty millenarian movements can get, here are a few real examples. The Skoptsys. The Cattle Killing of the Xhosa. The Taiping Rebellion. The Münster Commune. There is a tendency for such things to get to the point of self-destruction, like the Jonestown Massacre, but there is also the reaction of the rest of society to such things, illustrated by the Taiping Rebellion or the Münster Commune, which were crushed with alacrity.

The Savages are the survivors of a Darwinian process that eliminated those who self-destructed, and protected the dangerous ones, who had an opportunity to consolidate their power completely free from outside interference that might have ended their menace when they were weak. Thus, when the monsters come roaring out of the depths of space on their massive ships, those ships contain every horror mankind has ever feared, dialed up to eleven. Their ideologies swollen to madness, in their isolation, and powered by the wonders produced by the best minds of Earth, unmoored from restraints.

Against these post-human hordes, only one response is possible. WARRE. War to the knife, nuclear weapons, fire, and destruction. Or is it? Thus we return to the question I posed at the beginning? What does our humanity require of us in this situation? The Savages deliberately left their humanity behind, seeing it as weak and broken. For them, the question has been definitely answered.

For the Savages distant cousins who leapt to the stars ahead of them, this is the question that will determine who they will be. Do you need to become a monster, in order to fight them? Can you lose by winning? And at the heart of this question is also a relationship, between two men who understand each other as no one else possibly could.

In many ways, they are utterly different. One is a warrior. The other a magician. Their personalities and habits of mind are opposed, but also complementary, rather than contradictory. Or at least it is possible for them to be so. Coming to agreement for such stubborn and willful men cannot be easy. Which is why the ultimate resolution requires the intermediation of a woman. And from that, great things shall come.

That Anspach and Cole can manage to combine such subtlety with great action in an expansive universe that feels like home will never cease to amaze me. ( )