SF/F Review – Aftershocks

Aftershocks, by Marko Kloos

Synopsis: Years after an interplanetary war has ended, insurgents from the losing side are starting to show up.

Book Review: I’ve written before about my dislike of the Series Trend. ie: everything is a series now, rather than a single book, because that’s the only way most writers can make a living. But Aftershocks is really taking this problem to a new level.

Aftershocks is a prologue to the real story. That’s it. It is the equivalent of taking the opening crawl from Star Wars and inflating it to a novel rather than a few paragraphs that set up the movie. You can see the beginnings of a story coming, and it looks like it’ll be a good one. The world building is good, the writing is intelligent, the characters are interesting. But the main action of the story literally doesn’t even start, it’s all just set-up.

One might say that this is fine, because Marko Kloos is a proven author with a solid track record. His prior series is well received, and even people who don’t like Military SF say that his series is a stand-out exception. I can believe it, because like I said, the writing really is good. One could very well just trust the author and settle in for a ride. Isn’t this what I do anyway when I read web serials?

The prose is particularly good at quickly and efficiently building visuals. Where other authors take pages describing something, and you still aren’t quite sure what’s happening, Kloos manages to play a fully realized scene in your mind on every page. Everyone is accounted for and the environment feels rich, and he does this all with just a few lines. It’s an extraordinary power!

The characters, likewise, are relatable, and each one feels like a different person with a unique personality. I, personally, also really appreciated the recognition of human sexuality. Much like real-life people, these characters have libidos. They recognize when someone is attractive, and the effect it has on themselves. I’ve been seeing this less and less in SF/F, as novels either become directly about sex/sexual relationships, or completely ignore it. It was neat to actually see a character feel sexual attraction to a stranger, but just not act on it, like almost everyone IRL does almost every day.

Still, I can’t get past the fact that nothing happens. When I reached the halfway point of the book and realized that I hadn’t even get to the part where the author makes a promise to the reader, and probably wouldn’t until the last chapter because Everything Is A Series, I felt disappointment lapping at my knees. Not Recommended.

Book Club Review: It really is good prose. It reads fast, and the novel is short, which helps with turnout. There’s even a few things of interest to talk about, regarding the (rather intentional) parallels between Aftershocks’s world and post-WWI Germany. If anyone in your book club has experience with military bureaucracy and/or military culture, they’ll bring a fair bit to the discussion. So you can get talking for a while. But the most common refrain was “It felt sorta… empty.” I guess I’d wait until at least three books are out and then read them all in one go, so there’s something to sink one’s teeth into, story-wise. Until then, Not Recommended.

Also… I had a ridiculously hard time getting hold of an ebook version of this. I wasn’t allowed to simply give Amazon (or any other online retailer) my money in exchange for the book! I had to put in a lot of work to get it, and if I wasn’t reading it for my book club I would have given up early in the struggle. WTF, Capitalism? What is going on here?