I cover Advance to Contact, Book 3 of C.J. Carella’s Warp Marine Corps series, where a diplomatic mission turns into a fight for survival and the story splits across four people: Captain Fromm and his Marines, a CIA operative, a fighter pilot and a corporal in Charlie Company. I go through the setup without spoilers and say how it fits the series.
I’d highly recommend this series, and this book is a big step up in scope.
Advance to Contact is Book 3 of C.J. Carella’s Warp Marine Corps series, and it’s where the scope of the story really opens up. If you’ve been following my posts you’ll know military SciFi is one of my favorite genres, and I’ve covered plenty of it, from The Ember War. The Warp Marines are a series I’d highly recommend to anyone who likes the genre, and this book is a good example of why. It carries a warning for violence, strong language and adult content, and it earns that warning.
A quick reminder of where we are, in case you’re jumping in partway. Humanity was bombed back to the stone age by the “Snakes”, rescued by the “Puppies”, and has since built a fleet and a Marine corps that the rest of the spiral arm calls Warp Demons. By the time this book starts, the war has spread across the galaxy and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been. A diplomatic mission is meant to be the quiet part of the story, but it turns into a desperate fight for survival almost immediately.
Four stories in one book
One of the most interesting things about this book is that it’s told through four very different points of view. Captain Peter Fromm and his Warp Marines face old enemies and new threats inside a colossal space habitat ruled by a mysterious alien civilization, and their lives and the fate of their country hang in the balance. Fromm is the thread that connects it all back to the earlier books, and having him on the page again feels a bit like catching up with an old friend. The habitat itself is a great setting for a Marine story, because a place that big and that strange makes for a lot of danger.
Heather McClintock is the CIA operative, and she faces her toughest opponents yet: a race of decadent immortals with godlike powers and murderous urges. Her only weapon is an untried new technology with lethal side effects, which is about as risky as it sounds. It’s a very different kind of story from the Marines’ fight, and it shows you what a small team with the wrong weapon can face when the enemy can’t die. Having a spy on the page as well as soldiers gives the book a good change of pace.
Major Lisbeth Zhang is a fighter pilot who risks her very soul when she makes contact with entities from the depths of warp space, and her choices may lead humanity towards a golden age or eternal damnation. That’s the strangest of the four threads, and it’s the one that ties most closely to the idea of warp space itself, the thing that gives the Warp Marines their name. Then there’s Corporal Russell Edison, who just wanted to travel across the galaxy, meet exotic aliens and shoot them. These new ETs want to play with Charlie Company, and they’re about to find out that Marines only play to win.
A diplomatic mission is also a smart way to start a Marine story, because it puts soldiers in a place where they can’t simply shoot their way out. The Marines are there as guests of a mysterious alien civilization, and everything about the situation is built on trust that neither side can afford to lose. When that falls apart, it falls apart inside someone else’s home, with no easy way out and no friendly fleet around the corner. That’s a good test for the kind of grit and small unit tactics the series is known for, and it’s one of the reasons the early chapters pull you in.
From a single city to the whole galaxy
It’s worth looking at how far the series has come since the start. Book 1 was a small unit siege on a single hostile planet, with a platoon of Marines holding an embassy against angry mobs. Book 2 widened that out to the defense of a whole world against an enemy with technology as good as ours, and a Starfarer nation that wasn’t a bunch of savages. Here the canvas is even bigger, with a colossal habitat, a CIA operation and a pilot who is reaching into warp space itself. The Marines of Charlie Company still need to keep their heads down and do their jobs, and the grit that made the first book such a good read hasn’t gone anywhere.
It also follows on neatly from the way Book 2 ended, with a revolution in space warfare that changed things dramatically and hinted at some new and potentially worrying developments for the universe at large. This book picks that thread up and runs with it. The warp-space entities that Zhang meets are the obvious payoff, and the series is stronger for giving its technology consequences instead of treating it as a gadget. That’s the sort of realism I’ve enjoyed in these books from the start: new weapons arrive as gradual improvements and have costs attached.
The title is a good fit for the book too. Advance to Contact is a military phrase for moving toward an enemy until the two sides meet, and that’s what every one of the four threads is doing in its own way. Fromm’s Marines push into a habitat they don’t understand, McClintock walks into a room full of beings that can’t be killed, Zhang reaches out toward things in warp space, and Edison’s company is about to find out what the new aliens want. Each of them is advancing toward something, and each of those somethings is dangerous in a different way.
How the four threads fit together
I’ll leave the story itself alone, because it’s best enjoyed without knowing what’s coming. What I can say is that the book doesn’t treat any of its four threads as filler. Each one has its own tone and its own stakes: Fromm and the Marines are the straight military story, McClintock is the spy thriller, Zhang is the cosmic horror, and Edison is the grunt’s view of all of it. Between them they build a picture of a war that’s not just about ships and guns, but about what humanity is willing to become to win.
That mix is what sets the book apart from a lot of military SciFi, where the point of view tends to stay with one unit and one commander. Here you get the whole machine (I’ve listed plenty of books in this vein in my Kindle Unlimited military SciFi picks, and few of them try this), from the corporal on the ground to the intelligence operative working in the shadows, and they all feel like people with something to lose. It’s a lot to juggle, and the way the blurb describes the four of them tells you the author is trying to do something ambitious. It sets up the larger shape of the series, and it builds the sense that humanity is stumbling toward something bigger than another war.
The Warp Marines are also a good fit if you like a series with a clear direction. The books were written to build toward something, and the stakes go up each time, with each volume widening the scope while keeping the human characters at the center. That’s a harder trick than it sounds, and a lot of series lose their way once the scale gets large. This one stays focused on its characters, which is why I keep coming back to it.
Where to start, and who it’s for
If you’re coming to the series for the first time, start at the beginning with Decisively Engaged rather than here, because the characters and the setting build up from book to book. The early books set up everything that this one pays off. If you like small unit tactics, you’ll find plenty of them, and if you like your military SciFi with some big ideas in the background, this book has those too. It’s gritty, it moves fast, and it never seems to run out of things to throw at its characters.
But if you’re already in, this is where the series steps up. I’d highly recommend the Warp Marine Corps as a whole, and this book is a big part of why. It widens the story in a big way, which is what a middle book in a series needs to do, and it leaves you wanting to see where the four threads end up.