Conventions of War

This third book, originally conceived as a trilogy, is easily the best. (So far)

Everything about it is extremely satisfying even if it is very frustrating for the two main characters.

The battle on the homeworld, overthrowing the invaders, feels just like a more fantastic, more glorious version of the French Resistance during the WWII occupation, but thanks to the full weight thrown into the economics, the intrigue, great hacking, and the rising up of the population, it happens to work BETTER, IMHO. At least for a coherent story. And I rather cheered throughout it. :)

The battle out in space was no less fun, but I tended to get a bit more frustrated with the Old Praxis way of doing things. Stupidity and tradition do seem to go show more hand-in-hand, no? So my frustration was always on the side of our dear hero who always had a trick up his sleeve. Gotta love this kind of story. :)

All told, the entire novel is pretty freaking fantastic. My original reservations during the first novel were washed away in the steamroller of the story that came after. :) This is one of the best Space Operas I've read.

I totally recommend THE SERIES. By no means do yourself the disservice of merely reading the first book. :) show less

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Title: Conventions of War
Series: Dread Empires Fall #3
Author: Walter Jon Williams
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 688
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

Caroline Sula survives the destruction of the secret government and the Naxid takeover. She begins the counter-insurgency which leads to her becoming planetary governor of the former Capital World of the Praxis Empire. She leverages that to get a promotion and to get her own spaceship command. show more She uses the new tactics and does well in battle. She still has feelings for Gareth but in the end loses out to Gareth's new wife, who has given birth to his son. She decides that the military life is the life for her.

Gareth Martinez does “fights in space” and wins and stuff. The Naxid's end up unconditionally surrendering. Gareth doesn't so much choose his wife and son over Sula as much as he is ambushed by the family and given no choice. Really pulls at the heart strings /sarcasm.

The Empire is at peace but everybody knows that it is only a matter of time before another war breaks out as each species tries to figure out where it stands now.

My Thoughts:

This book was almost 700 pages and it shouldn't have been a jot over 300. It was simply too long without enough real story to fill it up. I found myself skipping whole pages of descriptions of almost everything and I didn't miss one part of the essential plot. So much of the writing just felt unneccessary and almost filler-like.

The fighting, whether with Sula planet side or Gareth in space, was good stuff. However, there was zero tension and you knew they were going to win in one way or another. When you read about their second battle and you're only on page 300, you KNOW they win. Instead of the Batman roller coaster from Six Flags (where you go upside down multiple times and do all sorts of twisty turny, stomach churning twists), this was much more akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean kiddie ride at Disneyworld. Slow and sedate and enjoyable. But not thrilling by any stretch of the imagination.

There is a whole murder mystery sub-plot that occupies most of Gareth's time and once again, it felt like padding. You have a whole Space Empire in turmoil and we get a murder mystery? It made the Naxids seems like caricature bad guys since Gareth was able to spend so much focusing on a mystery rather than fighting against them. Once again, it totally destroyed the tension.

The whole Gareth/Sula thing. That really bugged me. I mean, really bugged me. Gareth made his vows to Terza, his new wife and she is now pregnant. Tricked or not, Gareth said the vows and made the decision. Then when Sula decides to pursue him and it appears that he might divorce his wife to be with her and the whole Family ambush right at the end of the book where he decides to stay, it felt like I had eaten one of Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler's Mystery Sausages (Discworld reference there btw).

Each book in this trilogy dropped a half star for me. I think the quality and style of the writing was exactly the same for the whole thing whereas I was expecting improvement. So it's not that each book gets worse, it's that each book doesn't improve in any way or live up to the premise held forth in the first book.

The cover is the best part of the book and that is a damning indictment no matter how you look at it.
* very sad face *

★★☆☆½ show less

Williams, Walter Jon. Conventions of War. 2005. Dread Empire’s Fall No. 3. HarperCollins, 2018.
The central theme of Conventions of War, the third volume of the first trilogy in Waler Jon Williams Dread Empire’s Fall series, is in the title. While Lady Sula wages a vicious guerilla campaign against the alien rebels in the capital city, Gareth Martinez engages in battles in space at the other end of the galaxy. Both leaders violate all the conventions of war that have dominated the empire for generations. The book wraps up the military and romantic issues of the first two books, leaving just enough room for the series to continue into a second trilogy that is currently underway. If you like competently written military science show more fiction, this is an engaging trilogy with a satisfying conclusion. It does not break any new ground in the genre, but it does well in the mainstream. 4 stars. show less

Normally a trilogy ends on a high note. In this one there were two threads: a galactic one, covering the alien Naxxid's revolt to gain control of the Dread Empire of the Shaa, founded on a pitiless conservative creed, the Praxis, and a personal one, the smouldering romance between Lady Sula, a lowborn who murdered and replaced her 'Lady' and Lord Gareth Martinez, a real noble, but from a backwater planet and thus considered a hick. As in the previous books these two perform wonders, Lady Sula running a resistance campaign against the Naxxids on the capital planet, Zanshaa, and Martinez winning more space battles. While the outcome of the Naxxid revolt is predictable, what is not is the feeling of failure, after suppressing the revolt, show more to change things fundamentally. The dead weight of the Praxis still rules and both Sula and Martinez must bow to its ways. Tradition triumphs, so the cycle of revolt and suppression will seemingly continue, without end. show less

The “Dread Empire’s Fall” trilogy starts off with the death of the last immortal Shaa, the race of which conquered the galaxy and put all of the defeated races beneath it’s yoke, imposing it’s ideals and values upon them. After the death of this race, a civil war begins between a renegade group of Naxids, and the remaining races of the alliance – including the far-future members of humanity – over whom should rule over the galaxy. I’m reviewing the three as a single story, because the only way that I really read the current crop of science fiction trilogies is all at once – I can’t really wait for a year to find out what happens in the next novel, and by this stage, I’ve forgotten most of the original story, show more anyway.

The narration of the story largely passes between Gareth Martinez and Caroline Sula, both of which are the main characters of the trilogy. Martinez is a provincial Peer, the equivalent of the nobility in the novel, and his family are desperately trying to claw their way up socially, through the judicious use of marriage and money. Sula is the last member of a once highly-respected Peer group, her parents having been executed when she was a child. Both encounter each other quite early in the first novel, and something of a convoluted relationship between the two develops. There are some other characters that narrate the story, particularly Lord Chen, a highly-respected peer fallen on hard times due to the war isolating his business interests, and whom is financially rescued by the Martinez family, but on the whole, the story passes between the two. The major characters are all well-fleshed out, and are all interesting to read.

I found the military SF aspect of the trilogy to be quite well done, and this series is recommendable for that alone. I quite liked how the three novels kept the reader updated on the strength of the forces of both factions, in terms of the ships that each group had. It was a simple but extremely effective way of showing how the armadas were progressing in the war. Williams also envisages a variety of methods of futuristic warfare – large, pitched battles in space, ground-based guerrilla warfare, a small raiding party, space bombardment of a planet, and so forth. The variety of battle styles does make for interesting reading, particularly since military tactics in this world is narrowly-focused, and has crystallised and stagnated under the rule of the Shaa. The warfare of both sides sometimes comes across like a stereotyped perception of England at war – there’s a refusal of military command to adapt to changing conditions in battle, command is based on social class, with only nobility able to take positions in command, and the decisions of policy makers are partially based upon the commercial interests of the voter and their acquaintances.

The story alternates between telling of the war and how the alliance is faring against the Naxids, and telling the story of how civilian society is reacting to the war. The social aspect of the trilogy, while on the whole interesting, did not always keep my interest like the military part of the trilogy did. The first book is broken up with a backstory of a character named Gredel, whom befriends Lady Sula in her adolescence. The significance of this back story is quite obvious far before the revelation occurs, and during the backstory, slows the pace of the story dramatically. The second book, midway through, suddenly becomes quite concentrated on the idea of several members of the Martinez family getting married within quite a short period. It slows the book dramatically, does not make for interesting reading, nor is the sudden blossoming of various marriages explained well. These are minor complaints in regards to the story considering how much I enjoyed the rest of the trilogy, but do need to be made.

On the whole, the “Dread Empire’s Fall” trilogy is excellent military SF. There’s a variety of ways in which futuristic war is waged, the characters are quite interesting and well-fleshed out, and so is the society the characters live in. There is a variety of perspectives of the war, focusing on a lone, individual fighter and scaling up to commanding a fleet of warriors, and tactical command itself, and the perspectives add variety to the story. show less

The series comes to an end and better than some. We have a rebellious population in the capital, and some shortcuts are taken when the typical foolishness we have come to suspect from the command structure is again displayed.

At some point there should have been a great many other smart people out of the billions to draw from. There wasn't and that is sad. Further, much of this book follows the tale of the second hero, and the first is relegated to a mystery that there are too few clues for all to follow along. Holmes like leaps of deductive reasoning are made where evidence is circumvented for allowing the plot to jump about.

Still the tale is rewarding, and the enemy defeated. Perhaps a few more battles and the discussion or the physics show more involved in how they were to be won could have been detailed. As we have a lopsided view of our heroes, so too do we see a lopsided view of the enemy once the victories they won by surprise are gone. Now the Naxid enemies are dumb as the others who serve the fleet and our not our heroes.

The structure and challenges our heroes are left with leave us wanting to see what will happen with them in the future, which means Williams has done well enough, and that this series is worthy of a possible reread in the future as well. show less

Conventions of War is the third and final novel in Williams' Dread Empire's Fall series. Lady Caroline Sula leads the guerrilla war against the rebellious Naxids on the Empire's occupied capital world of Zanshaa, while Lord Gareth Martinez commands a battleship in the Fleet task force waging a war of attrition on the enemy's economic heartland a la Sherman's “March to the Sea.” I can't say much more about the plot without giving it away, but I can say the book wraps up the series with an ending that -- while not “happily ever after” -- was appropriate to the characters considering their previous actions.Williams did all the things in Conventions of War that entertained me in the first two books -- military space opera without show more the technical jargon, conflicted characters I cared about, and “realistic” spaceships and space warfare. Don't get me wrong, I love laser battles and “warp drive” ships like any good sci-fi geek, but it was interesting to read about the challenges starship crews face with high-gravity accelerations and decelerations, along with the months it takes to simply go from one end of a single solar system to another.If I had any criticism it would be the first two-thirds of the book felt like Williams was killing time before getting to the brutal fight for Zanshaa and the ultimate space battle with the Naxids. While Sula's guerrilla exploits against the Naxids were appropriate to the story (though a tad drawn out), the murder mystery Martinez had to solve seemed thrown in just to give him something to do until the final battle.That said, I still enjoyed the book and the series overall. While not as entertaining as book two (The Sundering), it was a satisfying conclusion to one of the best space opera series I've ever read. show less