In The Never Wars --a mind-bending mix of Interstellar and The Expanse --a group of disgraced Special Forces are given one chance to redeem themselves. The question is whether they'll survive long enough for it to matter. Special Forces are used to crazy ops, but orbiting a black hole to slow down time and fight Earth's dirty battles in the future? That's new, even for them. But that's the mission for Owen Quarry, Anaya Pretorius, and the rest of COG, a company of elite, disgraced , soldiers from around the globe. They join a defrocked company commander, an AI warship with self-confidence issues, and a crew of misfit troupers on a dizzying time-quest: prove the concept of stationing armies in spacetime. And if they complete ten missions, they'll be redeemed as citizens in good standing. But the cost will be heavy--in time and in souls. And as one of their own hunts them down and another rises from the past with a key to freedom, Quarry and Pretorius find that redemption and survival are two very different things.
A former reporter for newspapers including the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times, David Pedreira won awards for his writing from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He has also served as a corporate communications director for enterprise software and telecommunications companies, and he currently co-owns a legal and executive recruiting business. He has a Master’s degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Florida, plays ice hockey twice a week, and spends as much time as he can outdoors.
I picked this up after reading Trike's review, I assumed it would be a fun shoot'em'up with some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, I DNF'd at twelve percent. I have a rule - if I'm not invested in the world, the plot or the characters by ten percent - I bail on it.
And I was not at all interested in these characters, and the world building was meh at best. The tone reeks of toxic masculinity and an over-reliance on trendy military jargon. I actually laughed out loud when a character's internal dialogue referred to other soldiers as "operators". It feels like the author spent too much time playing Call of Duty and wanted to write a book about it. Trike says it gets into some interesting ideas later in the book, but I was not hooked enough to stick around for it to get better.
The Never Wars by David Pedreira is a very interesting concept for a book. A group of soldiers employed by an organization to be used on missions when needed. When not needed, they are kept essentially in stasis by having their ship hide close to the event horizon of a black hole. Great concept. Excellent way to begin a novel. Unfortunately for me, about midway through the book, something changed and I stopped caring about the characters. I was still interested enough in the story that the book moved along well enough, but that connection was gone. It was a good book that started strong and ended well, it just sort of meandered in the middle for me.
My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Blackstone Publishing for an advance copy of this science fiction novel of the future, where corporations vie for power and a chance to start over means fighting from the shadows and the passing of time.
Being a powerful corporation, one that is fighting for territory, brand recognition, and sometimes for its own corporate survival takes a lot of work, a lot of money and a lot of time. Organizations need workers, people to do the dirty little things that need to be done, but just as one gets them trained and ready, time passes and those skills start to suffer or degrade. Or they want to leave, which means hiring people, competing with other corporations and again, watching these tools lose their sharpness. Until one day an opportunity it presented by that Artificial Intelligence project that has also cost a lot of money, but is paying dividends. Using math, and science, a ship can be placed near a black hole, loaded with people who have particular skills, but will not be missed. Close enough that time passes differently, years for the real world would be weeks for them. Nothing could go wrong, until it days. That is the premise of The Never Wars by David Pedreira, a military science fiction novel about a future not that far away, where humans have gone to space, and yet taken many of their issues with them.
Owen Quarry has fought in many places under many United States names in the country that used to be America. A man who has killed for pay, until the day he shoots the wrong person, and finds himself in a prison among the stars. Quarry is offered a deal. A corporation is starting a program, using trained men and woman, to help keep Earth from falling into the hands of outside planets, planets that have been settled by Earth, but not friendly to it. Quarry along with others who are either imprisoned, set for death or otherwise disgraced are given a choice. Work for the corporation, do a select level of missions, and get a pass and a new life somewhere. Or die in prison. Quarry takes the offer, but finds there is always a catch. The team is based in orbit around a black hole, where time passes slower the closer one gets. These missions could take decades, as they remain off the grid and off of time. And than things start to go wrong.
A military science fiction novel with a lot of hard science, and a lot of speculation. And a lot of great ideas. The book throws one right in, building what the world looks like through the characters experiences, but not overwhelming with facts. The writing is good, the action is plenty and also well written, with some interesting ideas in tactics and weaponry. There is a Dirty Dozen aspect, but that is fine as the story moves so well, with a lot of twists an surprises. I really liked the idea of hiding an army near a black hole, the idea is pretty novel, and makes for a good story, especially for fans of the genre.
Recommended for readers of Marko Kloos and Jerry Pournelle whose writing Pedreira reminds me of quite a bit.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. What starts off as a by-the-numbers MilSF actioner evolves into something much more interesting by the end, clearly taking its cues from the Haldeman classic The Forever War.
In a galactic war one government assembles a Dirty Dozen-type outfit for a harebrained scheme of stashing them on a stealth spaceship that skims the event horizon of a black hole so that time dilation causes them to age more slowly. They will periodically pop up into regular spacetime to perform clandestine missions as a surprise wild card. So they’ll be in the gravity well for a week while in normal space four months will have passed. Stuff like that. It’s kind of a dumb plan, but their side isn’t doing great, so why not?
This group of soldiers who’ve been imprisoned for various reasons has tiny bombs placed in their heads to make them comply, shades of Escape from New York or Suicide Squad, Volume 1: Trial By Fire, controlled by an AI overseer. If they complete ten missions, they’re free to go, all charges dropped. The soldiers are a mixed bag, of course — some are genuine monsters while others have committed crimes that were legally wrong but morally correct, such as killing another soldier who was attempting to rape a civilian.
So a kinda out-there scheme combined with a rogue’s gallery of criminals who just happen to be hardened combat soldiers, throw in some bureaucratic SNAFUs on top of the randomness of war… guess how many things go wrong?
This is one of those stories where no one is protected by plot armor, and a number of the characters are well-developed, so it’s not easy to tell who will make it and who won’t. A couple times I was like, “Did you just…?” and went back to find, sure enough, he did. I’ve over-consumed media to the point where few stories hold any surprises for me, so I’m always glad to find one that bucks the trend.
And, like The Forever War, ultimately this isn’t about combat specifically or war in general, it’s really about generational trauma, which only becomes clear near the end. That, too, was a surprise. Which creates a much deeper story than the usual space opera stuff.
TL;DR Review: Rainbow Six-level action with a delightful Suicide Squad flavor. Military sci-fi with all the science you could ask for.
Full Review: From the first page, The Never Wars sets the tone: this not going to be a book filled with heroes doing heroic things. Instead, it’s a story for dark, dirty, gritty people doing dark, dirty, gritty things ex-umbra. We’re quickly introduced to our mission (use a black hole to travel through time to fight enemies in the future) as well as our crew (a bunch of psychopaths, a**holes, and killers, all of whom have blood on their hands and black marks on their records). And then…things get messy! Every single battle is hard-hitting and filled with all the tension, trauma, blood, and guts you’d want from a military sci-fi series. Instead of long, drawn-out battles, it’s quick and ugly, fast-paced and so frenetic you can hardly breathe until it’s over. Then, you’ve no choice but to sit back and take in the pain, loss, grief, and misery of soldiers who have just lost more of their buddies and fellow operators. Love them or hate them, you will be right there and feel alongside them. And, as is expected from a military thriller, the mission is guaranteed to be FUBAR. High casualty rates are just the beginning of the problems to face—you also get to experience first-hand time dilation sickness, mechanical and human operating failure, and corruption and greed among the higher-ups turning everything on its head. Inevitably, it’s the meat-eaters in the line of fire that pay the price. Again, and again, and again. There is a delightful sense of rawness to the story. Everything is told from the perspective of the special operators—the disgraced captain leading the mission, the bloodthirsty former child soldier heading up the long-range recon team, and the isolation-craving survivalist joining the team to get out of a prison sentence. The ultra-competence and razor-sharp edges of each operator bleeds into their narrative and gives a fascinating insight into their worldview. It's not written in the epic style of a David Weber novel, or the grimdark tone of a Warhammer novel. Instead, it reads more like an action-packed thriller (a la Dick Marcinko or Tom Clancy) that just happens to be set in space and involves time travel. An immense amount of fun with a compelling story that will keep you reading to the last page and craving more.
Blurb: In The Never Wars --a mind-bending mix of Interstellar and The Expanse --a group of disgraced Special Forces are given one chance to redeem themselves. The question is whether they'll survive long enough for it to matter. Special Forces are used to crazy ops, but orbiting a black hole to slow down time and fight Earth's dirty battles in the future? That's new, even for them. But that's the mission for Owen Quarry, Anaya Pretorius, and the rest of COG, a company of elite, disgraced , soldiers from around the globe. They join a defrocked company commander, an AI warship with self-confidence issues, and a crew of misfit troupers on a dizzying time-quest: prove the concept of stationing armies in spacetime. And if they complete ten missions, they'll be redeemed as citizens in good standing. But the cost will be heavy--in time and in souls. And as one of their own hunts them down and another rises from the past with a key to freedom, Quarry and Pretorius find that redemption and survival are two very different things.
This book ihas a unique concept and is heavy on the science but not too much to make the average reader overwhelmed. There's plenty of action throughout the story but it did get a little slow in the middle. I was invested enough in the story to want to find out what ultimately happened to the characters. I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Didn’t think I’d like a military shooter in my scifi
I didn’t realize how much of a military shooter this was going to be. I guess I should have known - it’s got “War” right there in the title. Normally I wouldn’t enjoy the genre, but I absolutely enjoyed this one. There is some downright wild far-future thinking, great philosophy around AI, and all the military stuff, that I didn’t think I would like, actually ends up keeping the pace moving.
This is also some of the hardest scifi I’ve read. At certain points I just kept my eyes moving over the text knowing that I was not going to be able to understand any of it. Time travel from black holes and quantum mechanics. It was all a good kind of confusing. But where it gets really fun is the theoretical technology of the “future’s future.” Future weapons and defenses. Government corruption and giant corporations. And best of all a lot of “AI is now their own race” discussions. This book’s universe is endlessly fascinating and I’d love to read spinoffs or sequels.
So I definitely recommend this for readers that like time travel and discussions around AI. There are some good characters/relationships. And tons of twists and turns you won’t see coming. The military stuff ends up lending itself to some great action. Overall, a fun read that tickles the brain.
It’s Suicide Squad mixed with military acronyms and outer space. I liked the characters but it was really hard to enjoy the read with all the military references and fictional space military acronyms. Good God! I liked Cog the most. I did not care too much for all the space battles or hand to hand combat. It’s all too much action for me. I am glad I finally finished. Took me a good 2 months because of all the jargon. I found out there was a glossary at the end of the book but by then I was 6 chapters away from finishing. The ending was bland too but I really do not want to drag this whole experience out any longer.
I'm not a big reader of sci-fi anymore and had to be coaxed into this by a fellow librarian. What a deeply pleasurable book! The plot is fascinating, the action is fast and ferocious (and best of all it isn't overdone), but the characters are the best part of this book. You come to care and root for them. David Pedreira is also very good at cutting to the chase...too many new books lately could easily be trimmed back a couple hundred pages. This book plunges you right in...
Librarians...highly recommended for your picky male readers, especially those that run away from sci-fi.
I'm not a big reader of science fiction but the story sounded interesting and it was for the first half. I was riveted, all the time jump stuff, the battles-it was rattling it on and I really enjoyed it. It's a great premise.
Without any spoilers though, half way through the book starts to focus on just one of the characters and it gets a bit EastEnders (but with space wars) so my interest started to wane. It was a struggle to finish but the first half was brilliant.
Well, sort of OK, but way too many battles for me. If you like lots of description of war and desperate missions then it might be more for you. The basic premise is good, with a band of people who've messed up pulled together for special missions that turn out to be a bit more than they'd bargained for. But the characters don't really get a chance to pull together or develop outside of all the fighting. Plot was quite similar to John Scalzi's Old Man's War, which is done better.
Unfortunately, this didn't work as well for me as his first novel, which I really enjoyed -- it started off engaging, but I began to feel like I'd read the story before, and the massive amount of handwavium surrounding all the technology was something I ended up kind of skimming -- I mean, handwavium has its place, but it was overused here, with multiple jargon and faux-jargon descriptors cluttering too many of the sentences.
Thought it was a good read -I happen to like the integration of the military w/my sci fi. I would say this almost felt like it was written by a screen writer. Perfect for a movie and quite frankly that's what this felt like - a boiler plate sci fi, action oriented movie with the intriguing AI running the ship, the rouge leader who's tough but full of integrity and you've got the wise cracking to break up the intensity.
I think the author did a very good job of conveying very technical, scientific information in a concise way. His war descriptions are realistic and compelling. I just wish he have spent more time on character development. I think he could have made Cog much more interesting and more “human like”, I guess I was spoiled by “Murderbot”!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
I really enjoyed this book. The premise was new to me and was very enjoyable to read about. I enjoy the character development and the many twist and turns. The idea of time travel and wars reminded me of the book The forever war. However I recommend this book it is very easy to read and has a lot of interesting characters.
This concept has even more potential than just this story. Impressive hard science book using time dilation near black holes to skip forward in time. The crew are dishonored soldiers looking for redemption. The ship is an AI. Well told.
I'm not usually into war SF but was intrigued by the premise: using black holes to skip forward in time. Fascinating story with great characters. This is only his second novel. Have to check out what else he's written.
A great name for an average Military Sci-Fi book. It wasn't bad it just wasn't great. I wish I could explain further but all I got is that it reminds me of most others in daytime albeit the premise is cooler.
A little bit of everything in this book. Truly a fresh take on an old storyline. Never felt like any of this book was a slog to get through. Strongly recommend it.
This is a hard science SF story and it is well done. It has an interesting concept of hiding a group of soldiers around a black hole and how time is different.