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Life After Hell
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 29, 2026
The weakest book in the series. I am giving it five stars so the author will continue writing these and advancing the overall plot. The plot was dismal, the politics were simplistic and obvious (like reading a woke version of Christopher Nuttall - i like his books too) but I liked the action scenes and the overall setting.
The name itself suggests some sort of aftermath and side adventure so the stakes are not very high. What I disliked most was the addition of the Scooby gang and their amazing powers as untrained operators who dodge both the professionals (always explained away), bad luck, and the jitters. The whole series until now, with some necessary suspension of disbelief and some plot armor, has been about the value of training, professionalism, and ordinary people remade by the system. The kids got through two black ops without Janeka's special, one-of-a-kind training course to produce a good trooper. The university segments were the worst part of the book, though i found the changing major subplot to be interesting in its rationale. I also disliked the cliched approach (and a bad one too, some cliches can be used well) of the chaotic, party hard, anti-social behavior crowd that turn out to be amazingly serious, competent and dependable, despite strong drug use in the most competent and self-assured case (if not planned already, might want to consider making that character a plant by an intel service). The cute fluffy aliens who are basically Weber's treecats were okay, but the social commentary of radically different alien species having sixth senses that make them "nice guys" and harmonious was a bit blech. The runners could have kept the special sense and that's it. No need to beat me over the head with anti-humanism. I think the book would have worked better if the students were treated as the amusing sidenote they deserved to be, and if the action were carried out by a competent task force that the author would feel comfortable actually sacrificing to give some real stakes and to let the enemies be competent as well. As it is, not one agreeable character dies or even suffers major injuries and they're all ready to do it again by the ending, despite the series being heavily into describing the trauma and PTSD suffered by people in action.
This leads me to the politics and ideas. The initial series was quite interesting, with the debt-based systems, the outsourcing of key state functions etc. This has devolved in this book into "rich asshole" used unironically many times by different characters (albeit in the same peer group so I guess less jarring?). At one point, they even drop the term generational wealth as an invective, which is a throwback as far as social commentary goes. Since James Burnham wrote about the managerial class and the rise of the mass organizations like modern corporations over 80 years ago there has been a steady divorce between ownership and control over productive wealth. The owners retreat into politics, art and philanthropy like the Rockefellers, the managers take over. Rand's heroes who name their company after themselves rarely last past the first generation. Musks are rare today and their ethos NEVER lasts beyond the founding generation. Hell, some of them are not even leaving the money to the kids these days. The main villain of this story is quaint in how antiquated he is today - someone who has both generational wealth and control over his enterprise, an active owner-manager from a line of them. Apparently, he got the job because of his dad and granddad having power within the same structure. But he is also obviously competent and very good at his job, despite the exaggerated moral failings. This is rare enough today, I would not expect it to be more common in the future and it would have been interesting had the author adjusted his setting to account for that and to make his character both possible and unexceptional within the setting (like how Battletech justifies space feudalism when ground feudalism is gone). Why would 120 years of the managerial revolution described by Burnham be reversed in the next 200 for a setting that is socially 10 minutes into the future and very current day in its sensibilities? The author is right that wealth begets wealth, but this is done through networks, degrees, connections, the access and the possibility of having the right internships (the modern day cursus honorum of the Romans) as much as the actual wealth (and that wealth is mostly liquid to be deployed where needed rather than caught up in the generational ownership of a particular company). These have the added benefit that they underpin what people call "meritocracy" (but started out as an ironic term) and which could have been used to build the villains into something better. I would have been far more engaged with a villain who dismisses his own extremely privileged background in favor of his own story of his rise to power within our corporation, and who insists (like many of today's elites) that he worked for what he had and that he got it on merit and that he faced racism and discrimination over his dumb French name and accent. With the setting being so heavily Americanized, how can you not have elites lecturing people on how difficult their childhood was and how middle class or even poor they were? Instead, corporate aristocrats barely 200 years into the future (longevity treatments included!) talk about breeding. The mustache twirling and cigars were absent, but mutually disdainful and distrusting characters openly boast of not working for a living, and their number 2 people (presumably extremely high up on the ladder) are getting lectured by the heroes that they can never be number 1 because they are not from the right family. Corporate elites do not talk like that even today. This is a caricature that appeals to today's proles (in spirit if not in status), not an actually useful (and accurate) social commentary through sci-fi narratives. The villain should have been more righteous and woke than the stupid "chaos goblins" instead of pathetically villainous with the superfluous abuses and other moral bankruptcies. The contrast with Former President Aguirre from earlier in the series, who engaged in hybrid warfare to weaken his enemies through deals with the devil before the war broke out and was brought down by the many compromises he made, cannot be stronger. Even law enforcement gets short shrift - the exploration of privatized police agencies and justice would have been interesting, but only led to lewd, thieving and presumably rapist gendarmerie officers. These attributes had to be assigned directly to the characters to make it clear that they are bad, rather than having them be ordinary decent joes doing bad or neutral things in a crap system because otherwise we might get the sense that the corporate oligarchy Voltaire is an actually pleasant, orderly and safe place to live in, where the wishes of the residents are a priority for the administrators. And the author doesn't want that even though the contrast between sympathetic and productive place and the strong previous claim by the runners would have been interesting and very current with today's issues. Instead, the state of Voltaire is painted from the start as iredeemable and sinister with presumably absentee owners buying up property in luxury real estate developments made on native ground and where police randomly harass tourists in the street and steal their money. So a corporatized Latin America? Why was it relevant that they were private police when any Soviet, Nicaraguan or Nigerian officer working from the state could be seen doing the same?
So, the book was disappointing but the action was fun. I felt like the Misogynistic Prince was more interesting as an obvious villain (though the misogyny was too cliched for such a connected and progressive setting - the Avalonians are obviously not a sort of North Korea, they are LARPers) and the idea of rich people setting up their own personal dictatorships that get tolerated by the Union would have been worth exploring further. The showbiz sideplot was much more enjoyable, and I feel we could have spent more time on Zed and how his group subverted Misty's to maybe try to control her Svengali-like?
Anyway, I am holding out for the next book.
The name itself suggests some sort of aftermath and side adventure so the stakes are not very high. What I disliked most was the addition of the Scooby gang and their amazing powers as untrained operators who dodge both the professionals (always explained away), bad luck, and the jitters. The whole series until now, with some necessary suspension of disbelief and some plot armor, has been about the value of training, professionalism, and ordinary people remade by the system. The kids got through two black ops without Janeka's special, one-of-a-kind training course to produce a good trooper. The university segments were the worst part of the book, though i found the changing major subplot to be interesting in its rationale. I also disliked the cliched approach (and a bad one too, some cliches can be used well) of the chaotic, party hard, anti-social behavior crowd that turn out to be amazingly serious, competent and dependable, despite strong drug use in the most competent and self-assured case (if not planned already, might want to consider making that character a plant by an intel service). The cute fluffy aliens who are basically Weber's treecats were okay, but the social commentary of radically different alien species having sixth senses that make them "nice guys" and harmonious was a bit blech. The runners could have kept the special sense and that's it. No need to beat me over the head with anti-humanism. I think the book would have worked better if the students were treated as the amusing sidenote they deserved to be, and if the action were carried out by a competent task force that the author would feel comfortable actually sacrificing to give some real stakes and to let the enemies be competent as well. As it is, not one agreeable character dies or even suffers major injuries and they're all ready to do it again by the ending, despite the series being heavily into describing the trauma and PTSD suffered by people in action.
This leads me to the politics and ideas. The initial series was quite interesting, with the debt-based systems, the outsourcing of key state functions etc. This has devolved in this book into "rich asshole" used unironically many times by different characters (albeit in the same peer group so I guess less jarring?). At one point, they even drop the term generational wealth as an invective, which is a throwback as far as social commentary goes. Since James Burnham wrote about the managerial class and the rise of the mass organizations like modern corporations over 80 years ago there has been a steady divorce between ownership and control over productive wealth. The owners retreat into politics, art and philanthropy like the Rockefellers, the managers take over. Rand's heroes who name their company after themselves rarely last past the first generation. Musks are rare today and their ethos NEVER lasts beyond the founding generation. Hell, some of them are not even leaving the money to the kids these days. The main villain of this story is quaint in how antiquated he is today - someone who has both generational wealth and control over his enterprise, an active owner-manager from a line of them. Apparently, he got the job because of his dad and granddad having power within the same structure. But he is also obviously competent and very good at his job, despite the exaggerated moral failings. This is rare enough today, I would not expect it to be more common in the future and it would have been interesting had the author adjusted his setting to account for that and to make his character both possible and unexceptional within the setting (like how Battletech justifies space feudalism when ground feudalism is gone). Why would 120 years of the managerial revolution described by Burnham be reversed in the next 200 for a setting that is socially 10 minutes into the future and very current day in its sensibilities? The author is right that wealth begets wealth, but this is done through networks, degrees, connections, the access and the possibility of having the right internships (the modern day cursus honorum of the Romans) as much as the actual wealth (and that wealth is mostly liquid to be deployed where needed rather than caught up in the generational ownership of a particular company). These have the added benefit that they underpin what people call "meritocracy" (but started out as an ironic term) and which could have been used to build the villains into something better. I would have been far more engaged with a villain who dismisses his own extremely privileged background in favor of his own story of his rise to power within our corporation, and who insists (like many of today's elites) that he worked for what he had and that he got it on merit and that he faced racism and discrimination over his dumb French name and accent. With the setting being so heavily Americanized, how can you not have elites lecturing people on how difficult their childhood was and how middle class or even poor they were? Instead, corporate aristocrats barely 200 years into the future (longevity treatments included!) talk about breeding. The mustache twirling and cigars were absent, but mutually disdainful and distrusting characters openly boast of not working for a living, and their number 2 people (presumably extremely high up on the ladder) are getting lectured by the heroes that they can never be number 1 because they are not from the right family. Corporate elites do not talk like that even today. This is a caricature that appeals to today's proles (in spirit if not in status), not an actually useful (and accurate) social commentary through sci-fi narratives. The villain should have been more righteous and woke than the stupid "chaos goblins" instead of pathetically villainous with the superfluous abuses and other moral bankruptcies. The contrast with Former President Aguirre from earlier in the series, who engaged in hybrid warfare to weaken his enemies through deals with the devil before the war broke out and was brought down by the many compromises he made, cannot be stronger. Even law enforcement gets short shrift - the exploration of privatized police agencies and justice would have been interesting, but only led to lewd, thieving and presumably rapist gendarmerie officers. These attributes had to be assigned directly to the characters to make it clear that they are bad, rather than having them be ordinary decent joes doing bad or neutral things in a crap system because otherwise we might get the sense that the corporate oligarchy Voltaire is an actually pleasant, orderly and safe place to live in, where the wishes of the residents are a priority for the administrators. And the author doesn't want that even though the contrast between sympathetic and productive place and the strong previous claim by the runners would have been interesting and very current with today's issues. Instead, the state of Voltaire is painted from the start as iredeemable and sinister with presumably absentee owners buying up property in luxury real estate developments made on native ground and where police randomly harass tourists in the street and steal their money. So a corporatized Latin America? Why was it relevant that they were private police when any Soviet, Nicaraguan or Nigerian officer working from the state could be seen doing the same?
So, the book was disappointing but the action was fun. I felt like the Misogynistic Prince was more interesting as an obvious villain (though the misogyny was too cliched for such a connected and progressive setting - the Avalonians are obviously not a sort of North Korea, they are LARPers) and the idea of rich people setting up their own personal dictatorships that get tolerated by the Union would have been worth exploring further. The showbiz sideplot was much more enjoyable, and I feel we could have spent more time on Zed and how his group subverted Misty's to maybe try to control her Svengali-like?
Anyway, I am holding out for the next book.
July 23, 2026
DNF. The series is worn out. The alien fluffies are silly and tanner escaping without a scratch from every violent encounter is boring. Developing characters and story from Grand Theft Sorcery- especially Sunday - would be refreshing and add more depth in characters. Sunday shows a range of emotions and vulnerabilities, while characters like Lorelei (another worn out series) seem so implacable as to be robotic. Grand Theft Sorcery and wandering monsters series have somewhere to go - and opportunities to build in real loss and peril for the characters. Not just the risk of death but having things precious to these characters at risk and thereby getting the reader invested in the welfare of the characters. In the earlier books, Tanners challenges with his mental health, loss of friends, and career up and downs were gripping. So goes some random thoughts from a long time fan but also an old veteran of military service and sci-fi reading - I would not put much stock in my grognard grumbles.
June 26, 2026
Fantastic book!
Another stellar entry in Tanner’s story. The chaos goblins are here to stay, and I love it. Nothing will ever be the same.
This book fits in neatly after the high-stakes interstellar conflicts of Minos and the Preserve. It’s a breath before Tanner gets dragged back into dealing directly with Amara and her bullshit, but the stakes were just as high. Tanner helped save an entire alien species and made a greedy corporate oligarchy kiss the dirt.
And as usual, Tanner didn’t do it alone, even though it couldn’t have been accomplished without him. There’s so much to love about this story. I already can’t wait for the next one!
Another stellar entry in Tanner’s story. The chaos goblins are here to stay, and I love it. Nothing will ever be the same.
This book fits in neatly after the high-stakes interstellar conflicts of Minos and the Preserve. It’s a breath before Tanner gets dragged back into dealing directly with Amara and her bullshit, but the stakes were just as high. Tanner helped save an entire alien species and made a greedy corporate oligarchy kiss the dirt.
And as usual, Tanner didn’t do it alone, even though it couldn’t have been accomplished without him. There’s so much to love about this story. I already can’t wait for the next one!
July 6, 2026
Tanner and friends to the rescue
Alternate universe, interstellar societies, aliens, adventure
Runners are giant, intelligent mostly herbivores with Stone Age tech and exceptional empathy. They remember Tanner's previous help, and one Runner decides to seek out his help. More high stakes college hijinks, and then things get serious. Great tale! Excellent editing. Ready for the next one!
Alternate universe, interstellar societies, aliens, adventure
Runners are giant, intelligent mostly herbivores with Stone Age tech and exceptional empathy. They remember Tanner's previous help, and one Runner decides to seek out his help. More high stakes college hijinks, and then things get serious. Great tale! Excellent editing. Ready for the next one!
June 29, 2026
A Great Time
Tanner Malone continues to live a life of frustration, fun, fatigue, fighting, friendship, and weirdness.
This was a blast. Good characters with excellent dynamics, villainous villains, a racing plot, exciting action, and practical application of ethics.
Strong recommendation.
Tanner Malone continues to live a life of frustration, fun, fatigue, fighting, friendship, and weirdness.
This was a blast. Good characters with excellent dynamics, villainous villains, a racing plot, exciting action, and practical application of ethics.
Strong recommendation.
July 7, 2026
Strong heist movie vibes
I'd give this six stars if I could. Nobody writes punching crony capitalism in its face like Elliot Kay, and it's endlessly satisfying. Tanner accidentally assembles what feels like a heist movie team for new shenanigans, and I love all of them and every moment of them bouncing off each other.
I'd give this six stars if I could. Nobody writes punching crony capitalism in its face like Elliot Kay, and it's endlessly satisfying. Tanner accidentally assembles what feels like a heist movie team for new shenanigans, and I love all of them and every moment of them bouncing off each other.
July 13, 2026
I re-read No Man's Land to catch up on Tanner's latest escapades and flew straight into this.
I had Becky Chambers vibes at points, things felt a little less military for a time, and yet the conflict and the combustibles all kicked-off just as satisfyingly as ever they did before.
A classic entry in the series and one I enjoyed end-to-end.
I had Becky Chambers vibes at points, things felt a little less military for a time, and yet the conflict and the combustibles all kicked-off just as satisfyingly as ever they did before.
A classic entry in the series and one I enjoyed end-to-end.
August 7, 2026
it just keeps going
What a wonderful story what wonderful characters what wonderful species, especially the “angels” and “capybara”. To be all the way into book 7, and still manage to keep it fresh is rare in any genre, especially science fiction.
In the same gritty realism as a poor man’s fight
What a wonderful story what wonderful characters what wonderful species, especially the “angels” and “capybara”. To be all the way into book 7, and still manage to keep it fresh is rare in any genre, especially science fiction.
In the same gritty realism as a poor man’s fight
June 27, 2026
Good Stuff
A long wait, but worth it. Lots of stuff in the background for future books. Tanner as always is entertaining as the vulnerable badass. The social commentary is also, as always, on point. Quick, write the next one!
A long wait, but worth it. Lots of stuff in the background for future books. Tanner as always is entertaining as the vulnerable badass. The social commentary is also, as always, on point. Quick, write the next one!
July 2, 2026
does not disappoint
Reading this I realized I missed a book in the series. I will get it after I write this. Yes the series is that much fun. I do enjoy the newest friends and how they are integrating into this. I look forward to more of the group.
Reading this I realized I missed a book in the series. I will get it after I write this. Yes the series is that much fun. I do enjoy the newest friends and how they are integrating into this. I look forward to more of the group.
July 7, 2026
A most engaging story. Kept me up past3:00 am
A superb continuation of the protagonist's story which also works as a standalone book. The characters and plot are superbly written and very engaging.
A superb continuation of the protagonist's story which also works as a standalone book. The characters and plot are superbly written and very engaging.
August 28, 2026
Great book!
I am also surprised when I see a new novel in this series and they are also top notch. I am hoping this series continues for a few more novels at least! Thank you for the great book!
I am also surprised when I see a new novel in this series and they are also top notch. I am hoping this series continues for a few more novels at least! Thank you for the great book!
July 8, 2026
Fun read as always!
Mr. Kay is always entertaining. His characters are some of the best. This book is highly recommended. I can't wait for the next!
Mr. Kay is always entertaining. His characters are some of the best. This book is highly recommended. I can't wait for the next!
July 11, 2026
Perfection.
This is both what I expected and wished for as a continuation of this series. Tanner needs a television show adaptation!
This is both what I expected and wished for as a continuation of this series. Tanner needs a television show adaptation!
July 17, 2026
fun addition to the series
A quick action read. Lots of fun. More Tanner Malone fun with Aliens and evil corporations. Includes a great sequence with the Phoenix and crew.
A quick action read. Lots of fun. More Tanner Malone fun with Aliens and evil corporations. Includes a great sequence with the Phoenix and crew.
August 6, 2026
Tanner Malone is to cool for school
Good stuff. I hope more adventures are in the works. The action bits are spot on and descriptions of the fighting are well written.
Good stuff. I hope more adventures are in the works. The action bits are spot on and descriptions of the fighting are well written.
August 30, 2026
Good read
Had a different feel then the other books in the series but opened a whole new world With the runners and was a great read.
Had a different feel then the other books in the series but opened a whole new world With the runners and was a great read.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews