I've been a fan of Matt Wallace since the heyday of Podiobooks, a site where freely offered author-created audiobooks helped jump-start the careers of a fascinating and diverse cadre of genre authors. Back in those days, he was the
Failed Cities guy and he and birthday-twin Mur Lafferty were also setting the gold standard in writing-advice podcasts, first on her wonderful
I Should Be Writing and more recently on,
Ditch Diggers.
More than a decade later, most people now probably think of him as the Fantasy Food Guy, for his outstanding five novella cycle chronicling the adventures of a catering firm with an elite and supernatural clientele, the
Sin Du Jour series.
He's entered the Middle Grade fiction market, too, with some charming work I'll probably be writing about in this space soon, because I still have a 12-year-old's heart (and no, you don't get to know where I keep it, how I got it, or to what use I put it).
And along the way, he has tried his hand at epic fantasy, a genre that I occasionally indulge in but don't love and am more likely to avoid -- unless it's coming from someone like Wallace, whose Twitter feed is as full of honest criticism of genre tropes and stereotypes as it is anecdotes about the writing life (and his former career as an honest-to-goodness professional wrestler). I trust him not to disappoint me with another Chosen One/Emperor of Everything/Thinly Veiled Manifesto About How Much Better It Was In The White Male Middle Ages.
Reader, he did not disappoint!
Savage Legion takes us to a fantasy world that could well actually be a science fiction one that is our own in the distant future, like Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire or the Urth of Gene Wolfe's
Book of the New Sun. Like both of things, whether it's a fantasy world or not is kind of beside the point, the sort of notion that might occur to you at some point but you're too busy breathlessly devouring the story at speed to care much. What's happening in this cool world to these great characters? What's going to happen next?
At the center of the story is an imperialist city-state named Craiche, which has a long history of struggling for utopia but at some point decided to settle for just looking like one to its citizens. Once upon a time it had problems like inequality and hereditary nobility and a primitive eye-for-an-eye justice system, but now it's a thriving and beautiful mercantile democracy, though it still has a class system and there are still poor people living in a slum called The Bottoms.
Power now mostly rests with a kind of guild system, though that term implies that the organizational principle is based on trades alone. The guilds, here called Gens, can be organized around trades, yes, but also around ideas like breeding the insects with a weird and useful life cycle that provide the artificial lights, indoors and out, that free citizens from the tyranny of nighttime darkness, or advocating for social justice.
Craiche also has a lot of other cool things to show us, like a sort of elevated rail system powered by the muscular strength of members of yet another Gen, and a central governing complex/amphitheater that is vast and complicated and also somehow all carved via arts now lost, from a single humongous stone; even the seating and tables and shelves -- I wanted to just say "furniture" but I've studied too many languages in which that category of object is explicitly described as something you can move around -- are of a piece with the edifice.
We get to know this world, of Craiche and its environs, through the experiences of, at first three and later four characters: rough and ready Evie, first found getting disgracefully drunk in a tavern, picking a fight with a guy who hits on her, and then getting arrested and thrown into the clink, where she meets our next point-of-view character, Dyewan, a young woman with crushed legs whose inability to walk upright has reduced her to a life of sliding around The Bottoms on a sheet of greased metal and living by her wits -- which turn out to be considerable; were this an ordinary fantasy novel, she'd look perilously like a Chosen One in the making, but what she is and becomes is much more interesting.
Meanwhile, Lexi, a member of a somewhat recently established Gen only a generation or two old, is dealing with the disappearance of her husband, Brio and the rumors being circulated, mostly by the governing body of Craiche through unofficial and not quite official channels, that he disappeared because he is some kind of traitor -- which many individuals in the government's ruling council think isn't so recent a development because Brio chiefly concerned himself with investigating the complaints and advocating for better treatment of those pesky poors in The Bottoms instead of doing something more convenient and productive. The disappearance and the rumors threaten the continued existence of their Gen, and Lexi is down to just herself and a fascinating non-binary retainer, Taru (who gets a point of view chapter at the end of the novel that bodes great things for the next book!), to make things right again.
As things progress, Evie, instead of just being fined or serving some time in the cells, gets hauled with most of her fellow prisoners way outside the city, where they learn that they are now part of the Savage Legion, untrained and badly armed arrow-fodder in Craiche's endless and somewhat secret wars of expansion and conquest. If Evie manages to survive 40 battles (ah, but most are killed in their very first), she can go home to her family or whatever. If she runs away, though...
The Savage Legion's non-training camp is where we see our first bit of Is-It-Magic-Or-Weird-Future-Science, used to conspicuously mark and possibly track Savages who try to desert. Deserters are fair game for a set of terrifying and disreputable looking bounty hunters whom the Savages of course get to meet after the ordeal that marks them forever as the hunters' prey. So, there are not a lot of deserters, especially since they don't really know where they are and the territory in which they are soon to battle is so desolate and inhospitable that it makes Arrakis look like a vacation spot.
Dyewan is spared this fate, however. She is kidnapped soon after Evie is, but where Evie is In the Army Now, Dyewan finds herself in what amounts to the Craiche Institute of Technology, an island off the coast full of craftsmen, inventors, scholars and assorted other nerds. Since the dean, Edger, is himself disabled (with a fascinating and bizarre form of assistive techno-magic I'm going to make you read the book to discover), he makes it a point to recruit the facility's support staff from the similarly disadvantaged. Dyewan, who renames herself Slider to divorce herself from her miserable past while still honoring it, is going to be a messenger and is given an ingenious wheelchair-like contraption to do so and is soon making friends and teaching herself to read -- and, unwittingly, showing herself more than capable of doing much more than hauling notes and materials around campus.
Everybody settled in their new situations, the real plot starts unfolding, and it's a doozy, involving shady political manouvering, possible war crimes, wicked conspiracies, and the slow but relentless disclosure of the litany of crimes that really make Craiche work.
But lest this sound like a whole lot of politics, politics and more politics, remember, this is Matt Wallace, who could have written
Write the Fight Right if our friend Alan Baxter hadn't already done so. There are great huge battlefield conflicts, brutal nighttime raids, assassination attempts and scenes of single combat a-plenty and they're all expertly conveyed even to the reluctant mind of a reader like me who usually skips over the action scenes. Part of this is just because Wallace is, of course, very good at creating characters I care about from the get-go and I'm worried for them every time swords are drawn, daggers readied or fire arrows nocked, but also because he writes his combat scenes with clarity and just the right amount of detail. My heart was in my throat every time.
And no, I don't trust the fairly hopeful note on which most of these storylines ended, for this is the first volume of a trilogy written by a guy who grew up on Star Wars. I'll be taking up the sequel,
Savage Bounty, very soon. Freaking trilogies...
