Forgotten Ruin

I think I’ve smashed through some 20+ of Jason Anspach’s books (usually co-authored with Nick Cole) over the past 3 months, so it’s safe to say I’ve gone from having never heard of this pair of authors to being an absolute mega-fan pretty quickly. I started this series after knocking through the Wayward Galaxy books (Anspach and Chaney) and was initially a little worried that the core concepts were too similar. However, not only are they plenty different enough for those worries to be waylaid but the writing style also has a different flare both to Wayward Galaxy and Galaxy’s Edge, with a far heavier focus on combat and less on characters. It absolutely works, although it does leave me craving more in-depth information on this familiar yet strikingly different universe the pair have created.

This novel is first-person perspective, with us seeing the insanity of this far-future fantasy world through the eyes of Talker, a freshly minted Ranger translator who is a genius with languages. In order for the component parts of this story to mesh with any sort of coherence, Anspach and Cole had to come up with an absolute doozy of a premise, and that premise is as follows: a nano-plague is busy destroying all technology in modern society and also causing people to apparently mutate into monsters. The US government decides to send a load of soldiers forward a few years in time using a time machine that they have in Area 51 in order to rebuild society once the nano-plague has burned itself out. Unfortunately, the time machine doesn’t work as intended at throws the Rangers 10,000 years into the future when the effects of the nano-plague have effectively converted the surviving human populations into a range of fantasy races who have spent the last ten millennia killing each other. Also, the nano-plague made magic real… somehow. That’s it. That’s the premise. It sounds insane because it absolutely is, and it works because the Rangers themselves are just as disbelieving of what has happened even as they are forced to mow down hordes of orcs as soon as they land. The fact that they have to mercilessly bury the mass incredulity that accompanies this premise in order to survive means that we as the audience do was well, and very quickly we forget about the insanity of it all as we are treated to a non-stop bullet-storm of modern soldiers kicking the arses of every fairy tale baddy we’ve ever thought of. And I have to admit, by the end of the book, I abso-bloody-lutely loved it. We aren’t given a chance to second-guess what’s happening because second-guessing is a distraction and a distraction under these circumstances will get you killed. It works and it’s great.

This book is wall-to-wall action with only a small breather about two-thirds of the way through. Everything else is just the Rangers struggling to survive this mental fantasy world. I like my military sci-fi novels, and I guess this is my first military sci-fi/fantasy novel, so apparently I love this sub-genre as well. If you like action in your novels, then this is absolutely a book for you. If nuance and deep plotlines are essential for you, then maybe give this one a miss. I quite like the latter but am completely hooked on the former, so this book really worked for me. Describing how a Carl Gustaf 8.4cm recoilless rifle loaded with an antipersonnel round blows apart a giant’s torso isn’t something that I thought I needed in my life, but apparently I was wrong. However, all the constant action does get a bit much. The opening series of battles accounts for about half of the book when really it could have been half as long and the story wouldn’t have suffered at all. I mean, I love fast-paced combat in books, but even this got a bit too much for me; although it did drive home the level of exhaustion that the Rangers were feeling in a very real way.

I am dying to learn more about this book’s universe. The info dumps that we do get are brilliant, with about as wide a range of fantasy races and creatures making appearances both in person or at a historical/geopolitical level. We get a scattergun perspective of the 10,000 years within which different areas of the world have been either conquered by this orc horde, or liberated by this alliance of elves, or kept under the tyrannical rule of that lizards-man faction, and so on and so forth. There’s so much that we are merely shown in passing and I really, really just want to get to grips with a couple of them in detail. That’s the one thing that this book was lacking. If you stripped away all the combat there really wouldn’t be all that much to this novel, but then it isn’t really trying to be anything but action-action-action, and as someone who appreciates action a great deal, I can both enjoy and respect that. Having said that, I was going to give this book a flat 4.0 stars for the lack of deep, character-drive story and such. However, right there at the end it hit me. It hit me really hard. I have never actually burst into a flood of tears delivered by any book’s emotional gut-punches, but I have come about as close as my manly man-ness is willing to admit maybe eight or nine times. And after one of the closing scenes in this book, it’s now nine or ten times. I won’t give away what it is in the slightest as it could ruin it for future listeners, but suffices it to say, it got me in a way I didn’t think this book had the capacity to and was completely out of the blue. Well done Anspach and Cole. Well bloody done.

As for narration, I don’t think I’ve come across Christopher Ryan Grant before, but he gave a solid performance all the same. Anyone who can give individual voices to such a wide range of Rangers when objectively you half expect each of them to sound the same is clearly doing something right.

Personal Score: 4.25 stars

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Buy 'The Sage's Lot (Blood and Balance, Book 1)' here!