The Final Wars Rage

Even more tension here in the second installment

There's a rich tableau of intrigue in the latest book in the Final Wars series. With the cyborg queen of New Paris deposed and in exile, hidden by an emperor's son, the Nipponese and Martian cultures have intense conflicts come to a boil in this book. It's an amazing thing to see artificial intelligence-driven military power facing off against a generations-old Nipponese royal family, one where three sons duke it out for control of their world: a moon base called Nippon One.

The Japanese culture and traditions are fully deployed in this book. Final Wars Rage has a reverence for the code of the Japanese people and an awareness of how those habits can hobble a people, too. If you wonder how the country's national anthem would play out during a tense negotiation with a world directed by AI constructs as leaders — yeah, that's centuries-old tradition against advanced AI code — Final Wars Rage delivers. The book also breaks the boundaries of death and the life after, wrapped around the great tent pole of love.

The writing is vivid and the dialogue is sharp. There's visceral violence, because that's what you might expect out of the 23d Century where the technology is still well designed for destruction of humans. The green fog is still hovering around what's left of Earth, a planet that's not entirely wiped out. It's a pirate playpen now. But one of the greatest gifts here is the characters, drawn with attention to detail and the kind of connections you can expect in a book that has its eyes on a trilogy.

It's hard to get everything that this book does well into a review like this, so go enjoy the discovery. Book One mixed French with Japanese milleaus in the same adroit way that Book Two blends Martians and Nipponese. Though it all, the hero Bastien Lyons gives us a set of shoulders to ride through the adventure. What he sees in his heart, as well as before his eyes, gave me a wild ride.