I read Steel Storm back in 2015, and I’m writing this up now that I’ve finally gone back through my notes on it. Those notes are short and blunt, which is how I tend to take them mid-book, but they say enough about how I felt. This is the second book in Casey Calouette’s Steel Legion series, and it is a slightly weaker book than the first that I still wanted to keep going with. That second part matters more than the first.
If you haven’t read the opener, start with my review of Steel Breach, because Steel Storm picks up straight from it and I’ll be talking about the aftermath of that story. I’ll keep the spoilers for this book light, but you can’t really discuss a sequel without touching what came before.
Where does Steel Storm pick up?
The first book was about trench warfare in a science fiction setting, which is a combination I hadn’t seen before and one I really enjoyed. A penal battalion of convicts, thugs and drug addicts was handed obsolete armour that the Sigg Empire had thrown away, and was told to break a decades-long stalemate against the insect-like Kadan. It worked, more or less, and the survivors of that fight are the people we follow here.
What I noticed straight away is that the men of the legion are no longer convicts in any sense that matters. They fought, they won, and they earned something. But the thing I find interesting about the way Calouette handles them is that being a hero hasn’t made them better people. Without a new enemy in front of them, the veterans of the last battle slip back into their old behaviour. That felt right to me. Plenty of military science fiction treats a hard fight as a kind of redemption. It’s more believable, and a bit more uncomfortable, when a unit full of thugs goes back to being thugs the moment there’s nobody to shoot.
It doesn’t last. The Kadan attack again, this time on a different planet, Squire, and the legion is sent to deal with them. That’s the engine of the book and it’s a perfectly serviceable one.
What did I think of the tanks?
The tank battles are the reason I picked up the series, and they’re still interesting here. The equipment problem hasn’t gone away either. Before the story really gets going the legion has to find itself new tanks, because the old Sigg ones were given up at the end of the previous book and the ones they’re handed now are even older. I liked that. A lot of science fiction hands its heroes ever-better kit as the series goes on, and this goes the opposite direction. The machines are worse, the people are the same, and the problem of winning with what you’ve got is what drives the action.
It’s the same quality I enjoyed in the first book: nothing here is a superweapon. Problems with equipment and the plain misery of war come through, and you don’t get a new gadget in every chapter to save the day. If you like your military SF grounded and mechanical, that part of the series is a real strength.
There’s also a bit of fun to be had with the setting. Travel between worlds is by gate, and I wrote in my notes that transfer through a gate makes you sick, and that the further the distance, the longer you’re sick for. It’s a small detail and I’m glad it’s there. It gives the jump from planet to planet a cost, which a lot of gate-based science fiction skips. If you want to see gate travel played far more heroically, the Troy Rising series does it on a much larger scale.
One more character note: Captain Horace Toro, who as far as I could tell is the one and only human starship captain. I enjoyed that. It tells you how thin on the ground human space power is in this setting, and it makes him feel like more than a background name.
Where does the writing let it down?
This is where I have to be straight with you. The writing in Steel Storm is a little clunkier and not as fluid as the first novel. I noticed it early and it stayed with me throughout. Steel Breach had a fast, direct, short-chaptered energy that got right to the point without messing about, and a few small typos didn’t slow it down at all. Here the prose gets in its own way more often, and the pace feels less certain.
I don’t want to overstate it. It isn’t a book I struggled to finish, and the clunkiness didn’t spoil the action for me. But if you’re coming to it straight off the first book, you may feel the step down, and I did. It’s a common sequel problem, and honestly it’s one I’m more forgiving of in a small-press, self-published series than I would be elsewhere. The author is still finding the rhythm of a bigger story.
Why do I want to read the next one?
Here’s what saved the book for me. While the tank battles are interesting, the thing I cared about much more this time is the mystery sitting underneath them: the Order of Terra, the Emflife and Umi. I definitely wanted to read the next book to find out what’s really going on, because that’s the key to the whole story.
Without spoiling anything, the Emflife are attacking because humans are seen as a threat. The reasoning is that humanity will dominate the galaxy simply by numbers alone, and the Emflife are not willing to allow that. They are determined to remove the threat. I like this a great deal as a motive. It’s not malice or hunger. It’s a cold bit of arithmetic about where the species is heading, and it recasts the Kadan war as a sideshow to something bigger and stranger. It also fits the Emflife as I understood them from the first book: fearsome, shape-changing synthetic beings that I found properly scary.
That’s the pull for me. If the series had been nothing but tank battles, the weaker prose might have been enough to put me off. Because it’s actually asking a question I want answered, I’m willing to forgive the prose and keep going.
Who should read Steel Storm?
If you enjoyed Steel Breach, read this. It’s not as good, but it moves the story in a direction that makes the first book look like the opening of something larger, and the answer to what the Emflife want is worth the trip. If you haven’t read the first book, go back to it. This one assumes you’re already invested in the legion and won’t do much to win you over on its own.
If you like this kind of thing more broadly, I’ve pulled together some favourites in my top military SciFi picks of 2016, and there’s a lot of overlap with the sort of readers who’ll enjoy a rough-edged, equipment-poor war story like this one. For something with a different flavour of space war, try The Terran Privateer.
You can also find the series listing, with the books in order, on the Steel Legion page at Goodreads. And if the whole idea of trench warfare as science fiction sounds odd, Wikipedia’s article on trench warfare explains why it was such a grinding, bloody stalemate, and why it makes such an unusual backdrop for a story set among the stars.
One last thing about how I read these. I went through the book making notes as I went rather than waiting until the end, and that’s the main reason this review reads the way it does. The things that jumped out at me while I was in the middle of it were the gate sickness, the worn-out tanks and Captain Toro, and the things I remembered at the end were the clunky prose and the Emflife. If I’d waited a week I’d probably have remembered the battles and forgotten the details that made the setting feel lived in. It’s a habit I’d recommend to anyone who reviews books, because the small texture is the first thing to go.
So here’s my question for you. Do you stay with a series when the writing slips but the central mystery has you hooked, or does a drop in quality make you walk away? Tell me in the comments.