Where can you go to find the best of the best in MilSF? For great MilSF short stories from today’s best authors, look no further than the So It Begins anthology (Book Two in the Defending the Future series) edited by Mike McPhail, who coincidentally has an entry in this collection, the inimitable and a cool deal “Cling Peaches”. There are sixteen short stories in the anthology, if you include the superlative “Surrender or Die,” a bonus short story by David Sherman, written by fifteen authors. Charles E. Gannon has two stories in So It Begins (as I’ll call the anthology from now on throughout this review), both very good, “Recidivism,” which opens the book, and “To Spec.” One of the features that I really like about the anthology is that there is a section called Author Biographies at the end of the book, before the story of the bonus content, so you can read about the authors and what they have written and learn more about they. if you are not familiar with them.
I can’t go too deep and give a detailed analysis of each of the short stories unless I make this prohibitively long review, but I really enjoyed reading each of the MilSF short stories in the anthology, so I’ll mention at least a little about some of them. the stories, to give you an idea of the literary banquet that is in store for you when you read this collection. I’ve already briefly mentioned four, and in one paragraph, so I’m doing pretty well… except for this expository paragraph, anyway. But there are “brief” mentions of short stories, and then there are brief mentions, which means nothing, except that I’ll go back to the four I’ve already mentioned, write a few more sentences about each one, then cover a few of the other short stories.
MilSF novels and stories with a lot of blood, guts, and action are great, and I usually rank the ones that have tons of these three elements as my favorites. But, I like a good story that zigzags when you think it should, or funny or wacky ones too. That’s why “Cling Peaches” is one of my favorite short stories in the anthology. The title alone made me wonder what the hell it could be about and made me want to read it. Then the search by the story’s two main characters, chief engineer William Donovich and a technician named Patterson for an alien stowaway who likes sticky peaches in heavy syrup, was tense and sometimes funny, and He kept my attention riveted throughout the entire process. whole.
The two short stories by Charles E. Gannon were also impressive. “Recidivism” is a gem about Dan, “a data-entry clerk with no reasonable hope of advancement,” who in his PhD proposal dared to suggest that aliens might one day attempt to take over his planet and possibly even sterilize to its inhabitants, they should not cooperate peacefully. No one believes him, until one day when… “To Spec”, Gannon’s second short story, involves a soldier in the ExoAtmospheric Corps who harbors a Big Secret without knowing what it is, and is eaten up with curiosity to find out again. that is. that’s why he’s risking his life. He put two and two together, and… well, math was never my forte, but I know that, in this case, “two and two” adds up to a great story about one of the many ways I could spell Doomsday: CME, or: “A coronal mass ejection.”
David Sherman is another of today’s leading MilSF authors. He also writes MilFantasy novels, like his brilliant DemonTech series. “Surrender Or Die” is a DemonTech adventure in which a land called “The Easterlies” is being invaded by the feared Jokapkul people, whose ships have “approached Handor’s Bay”. If he’s not familiar with the concept of what exactly “DemonTech” means, it’s that various types of trained demons are used for war purposes, such as to power weapons. Some are used to heal people or to make them invisible. An example of this in “Surrender Or Die” is an imbaluris, the “size of a large owl”, which is “used as a messenger”. “Surrender Or Die” is a cool addition to the DemonTech canon.
“The Last Report of Unit Twenty-two” by John C. Wright is the second story in the anthology. Wright is the husband of another fantastic author, L. Jagi Lamplighter (Wright). They both write awesome fantasy and MilSF works that I highly recommend. Unit Twenty-two is a sentient robot whose job is to extract ore from asteroids. He has a brain that is very similar to that of a human, and although he has been diligently mining for years, he gets it into his head by picking up commercial broadcasts that there is more to life than mining. Unit Twenty-two wants to somehow travel to Earth and spend the rest of their days there; to him, it would be like Heaven. How he gets there and what happens to him when he does is a great addition to this anthology.
James Daniel Ross is the well-known author of the Radiation Angels book series, and “The Nature of Mercy” is from Chronicles of the Radiation Angels. I liked him from his vivid opening line: “he was as cold as seven dead men, buried long and deep.” At first, it struck me as a story about a father taking his son on a hunting trip to the planet Ozmandius in the dead of winter, a kind of “coming of age” story. What he became is something else; is the story of a boy who definitely has to grow up too fast, and his father, who is trying to reach a reinforced bunker with his son to make a last stand against the robots that have become religious and are they have grown old. Testament over the entire human population of Ozmandius. They were programmed by humans to be without sin, but unfortunately, they also lack any sense of mercy. Great story; I will definitely want to read more from Ross in the future.
I must mention the short story “Clean Sweeps” by Jonathan Maberry; In addition to being a good story, for those who may have never heard of Maberry, he is the author of the incredible zombie novel Patient Zero, and a great novel that I have reviewed elsewhere. , The Dragon Factory, about DNA manipulation, mad scientists, and doomsday diseases being released globally in an effort to genetically cleanse the world. Good stuff… “Clean Sweeps” illustrates that the media and the military don’t always get along, like oil and water in that sense. Or, actually, sometimes they mix too well, but occasionally at a high cost in human lives.
The narrator is a Free-Ops sergeant and has a reporter (Tennet) embedded in his unit. They are in a raid on a factory that has allegedly been illegally manufacturing and selling weapons to space pirates. The thing is, they got the wrong information, and the people working in the factory are civilians and they are not making illegal weapons. The whole operation has been organized by people in command above the narrator, for publicity, and the report will not mention that the factory was actually legitimate, run by civilians.
I’ll just briefly say a thing or two about two more stories in the anthology, “First Line,” by Danielle Ackley-McPhail, the wife of Mike McPhail and a very talented author; and “Everything’s Better with Monkeys,” by CJ Henderson, author of the Piers Knight series of novels, including Brooklyn Knight and Central Park Knight. “First Line” is a short story of devotion taken to the extreme, from Lt. Sheila “Trey” Tremaine, “an officer assigned to Special Operations Unit 428, MOS: demolitions specialist.” When an enemy round knocks her down and “kills” her, she at the last moment agrees to have her memories implanted in a mechanical demolition unit. She is told that if she agrees, her experience and training will be passed on that way, and even though she will lose knowledge of her personality, she can still make a contribution. But, she doesn’t forget about her past life and who she is, not at all…
“Everything’s Better with Monkeys” is a clean, light-hearted tale that’s also one of my favorites in a collection of truly great short stories. CJ wrote a short story, “Shore Leave,” in the first Defending the Future anthology, Breach the Hull, featuring the same two main characters, gunnery chief Rockland Vespucci (Rocky) and machinist first mate Li Qui Kon (Noodles). ). They serve aboard the Roosevelt and generally unintentionally manage to screw things up and get into trouble. However, in this short story, they discover how to communicate with globular-shaped aliens on a distant planet who, four hundred years in the future, communicate through song and dance. Well Noodles does, Rocky is pretty pitiful in both, but they manage to save the day in a very enjoyable story.
How It Begins is a must read for anyone who loves MilSF. The Stories I Didn’t Mention, “War Movies” by James Chambers; “Junked” by Andy Remic; “Gunnery Sergeant” by Jeffrey Lyman; “Grendel” by Jack Campbell; “The Glass Box” by Bud Sparhawk; and last but not least Tony Ruggiero’s “Looking For a Good Time” are also great, and I apologize to the authors for not mentioning them in more detail here, but I’m afraid I’m writing quite a review already. long. . The fact that I didn’t cover them further doesn’t reflect their overall excellent quality: there’s just no junk at all in Thus It Begins, which makes it hard to do justice to the anthology as a whole. I would recommend it to anyone who loves sci-fi, especially MilSF.