Falcon Guard finishes the job, and after seven years I finally know how Aidan Pryde’s story ends. That gap is entirely my own fault. I reviewed Way of the Clans and Bloodname back in 2018, said good things about both, and then simply never picked up the third one. Coming back to it now, having spent the last few months deep in the Clan invasion from the other direction, turns out to be the best possible way to read it.
Here’s what Robert Thurston has been doing across three books, stated plainly. The Clans believe trueborn warriors bred in the iron wombs are better than freeborns, and everything about their society rests on that. Aidan is the proof they’re wrong. He washes out of the trueborn track, lives as a freeborn, claws his way back to a Bloodname under a borrowed name, and by this book he’s a Star Colonel commanding the Falcon Guards, a unit in disgrace after Twycross that nobody else wants. Thurston never once writes that thesis down. He just keeps arranging events until it’s the only thing left standing. No speeches. It works.
Tukayyid from the losing side
This is the same battle I’ve just written about from the Inner Sphere’s point of view, and reading them close together is the most interesting thing about the whole run. In Lost Destiny, Tukayyid is a triumph, a prepared position and a commander who out-thought people too arrogant to think. Michael Stackpole writes it as strategy paying off. Thurston writes the same days as confusion and attrition and warriors who genuinely cannot process what’s happening to them, because the Clans have no vocabulary for losing.
That’s the correct call and it’s not the obvious one. A lesser book would have given the Jade Falcons a noble defeat with all the trimmings. What’s actually on the page is a unit grinding itself down against an enemy it was told couldn’t exist, with the Falcon Guards’ disgrace hanging over every decision Aidan makes. The Com Guards aren’t written as clever here. They’re written as numerous and stubborn and willing to trade lives at a rate the Clans find genuinely offensive, and that’s a much more uncomfortable kind of defeat.
The battles themselves are really well done and they give a different interpretation of events I thought I already had a handle on. That’s a rare thing in tie-in fiction, where the usual approach is to have every book agree with every other book. Two novelists, the same publisher, the same year, the same battle, and they don’t match. They’re not supposed to. That’s the point.
Aidan’s ending is good, and a little too neat
He dies holding a position so his daughter Diana can withdraw. Diana is freeborn, the child of Aidan and the scientist Peri Watson, and by every rule the Clans live by she’s worth nothing. Afterwards his genetic legacy is honoured and taken into the Jade Falcon gene pool, which is the highest thing that culture can do for anyone. A man they spent his whole life telling he wasn’t good enough, canonised the moment he stops being inconvenient.
The bitterness in that lands. What I’d push back on is how cleanly it’s arranged. Aidan saves Diana’s life and still gets all of the credit, and that’s a bit too tidy for me. He gets the heroic death, the posthumous honour, the argument proved in full, and his daughter lives. Thurston has spent three books writing a society that grinds people up and doesn’t apologise, and then hands his protagonist a fairly complete win at the end. The conclusions are a touch simplistic for what came before them.
I’d have liked more of Diana, too. She’s the point of the ending and she’s barely in the book that makes her the point. The freeborn kid who survives because the system’s own poster child died for her is a better idea than the page count she gets. Joanna and Horse fare better, and Horse in particular remains the quiet argument the whole trilogy is built on, standing there being competent while the caste system insists he can’t be.
A warrior culture written as a criticism, not a fantasy
This is the thing I keep coming back to about the whole trilogy, and it’s clearer in this book than in either of the others. Plenty of fiction gives you a warrior society and expects you to find it cool. Honour codes, ritual combat, contempt for softness, the whole package. It’s an easy sell and it usually goes unexamined, because examining it means admitting the society in question is generally horrible to live in.
Thurston doesn’t let it off that lightly. The Clans in these books are organised around a belief that is provably false, and the entire structure of their culture exists to stop anyone noticing. Freeborns do the work and get none of the credit. Warriors who fail are shuffled into lower castes and effectively erased. The ritual duelling that looks so impressive on the page is also a machine for making sure the wrong questions never get asked out loud. Aidan spends three books being the counter-example, and the response every single time is to change the rules rather than the conclusion.
What stops it turning into a lecture is that Thurston clearly likes these people anyway. Joanna is furious and cruel and impossible and she’s one of the best long-running characters in the entire novel line. Kael Pershaw speaks for an institution that eats its own and he’s not written as a monster for it. The Falcons are wrong about the thing at the centre of their identity, and they’re still recognisably people doing their best inside a system they didn’t design. That balance is hard to hold for one book, never mind three, and it’s the strongest thing Thurston does.
Does it fully land? Mostly, yes. There are stretches where the trueborn and freeborn argument gets hammered a bit hard, and somebody who just wanted cool Clan warriors doing cool Clan things could still take that away and ignore the rest. But the ending makes it difficult. The Clans honour Aidan on their own terms, and in doing so they concede his entire point without ever once admitting they’ve conceded anything.
Thurston against Stackpole
I’ll be honest about this because there’s no point pretending otherwise. I’d never rate these as high as the Stackpole books. He does a better job and, honestly, he probably just writes better. The Blood of Kerensky trilogy has more going on, moves faster, and carries three protagonists without dropping any of them, and Lethal Heritage sits near the top of anything with a BattleMech on the cover for me.
That’s not a dismissal of Thurston. The underlying storyline here is genuinely intriguing and the way he writes is still really strong. What he’s got that Stackpole hasn’t is access. Nobody else in the line puts you inside Clan culture the way these three books do, from the sibko upward, with the training and the ritual and the casual cruelty all treated as normal because to the people living it, it is. Jason Schmetzer, who’s written BattleTech fiction professionally for two decades, rates Thurston’s Clan worldbuilding among the strongest in the franchise, and I think that’s right. Stackpole shows you what the Clans do. Thurston shows you why they think it’s reasonable.
So call it a 3.5, and on a generous day a 4. It’s a good conclusion and a good book, and it does the thing a final volume is supposed to do, which is make the two before it look more deliberate than they did at the time. If you read Way of the Clans and stopped, go back and finish it. I did, seven years late. Glad I bothered.
One note for anyone coming to BattleTech cold, and it’s the same advice I’ve given before. Don’t start here. Start with the Gray Death Legion books and get a feel for the Inner Sphere as a place with mercenaries and contracts and politics in it. The Clans only mean anything once you understand what they’re invading.
