Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth

Book 2 sees us thrown right back into the war between the UEAF and Regime, or at least initially. Book 1 was all about the action, jumping from flashpoint to flashpoint and only stopping to plan the next assault and slap a bandage on our wounds. It was that high-octane pacing that allowed some of the gaps in Book 1’s story to be glossed over, but not so for Book 2. Here Hernandez takes significant time and effort to go through and backfill those painfully bleeding holes in the lore. So is this book as fast-paced as Book 1? No. Sure, it still has plenty of action to keep you going, but there’s a lot more subtlety and intrigue now. What this does is change the dynamic of the book, giving it a healthy shot of the substance that was painfully absent from Book 1. And I for one say that doing so was the best thing for it.

So in Book 2 we are treated to three character perspectives, one up from last time. Now we of course have Pappy, pushing forward the main storyline and taking up a good half of the book. Then we have Speaks-the-Truth, our arse-kicking rebel teacher who is trying to find a quieter life for herself and her people. And finally we have King Momak, who in his previous life was our friend Speaks-to-his-Spear from Book 1. All three perspectives work together to paint for us a far more vibrant and detailed galaxy that Book 1 merely provided the canvas for. All those burning questions about Regime society, history, culture, and even economics are provided where before they weren’t even mentioned, producing a fully fleshed-out quasi-human society with all the wonderful weirdness of its bio-tech aesthetic. I’m genuinely pleased by the time Hernandez has taken to craft a living-breathing culture from the scaffold of a people that he gave us in Book 1, taking the alien nature of the Regime’s bio-tech and crafting it into a human-like culture. It was what was sorely missing from Book 1, although taking the time to explain so much does slow our adventure down some. Regardless, it was both fun and interesting to listen to. What more could you ask for?

The story itself is engrossing, with a hell of a lot more twists and turns than the straight-on ‘find and kill the enemy’ of Book 1. Where Book 1 was the story of a single campaign to liberate one world, what we get here are a series of smaller missions across a wide range of planets and locales as the UEAF tries desperately to halt the advancing Regime tide. In Book 1 we were told that the Regime were a serious threat to humanity, but now we are actually shown it, the vast resources that the Regime can call upon and the devastation inflicted upon the colonies caught in their path. It adds a lot more weight to the stakes. The chapters from Momak to, although a slower burn, show us in-depth truths about the Regime, highlighting some aspects as incredibly human and other as utterly alien. One thing that I am very happy about is that we were actually given a little more of an explanation as to the driving forces behind the rebellion, something that seemed painfully absent in Book 1. Both their aims and the fractures that start to form in any such movement are explained to us in far greater detail, once again fleshing out both the characters and their nations.

Book 2 isn’t as fast-paced as Book 1, but what it loses in heart-pumping action it more than makes up for with universe building. Put simply, I was willing to let go a lot of the absent content about how this universe works in Book 1 because it was our first outing and the writing style kept my attention pinned too much to what was currently happening to worry over much about everything in the background. It wasn’t the kind of writing faux pas that I could forgive in a sequel, and luckily I didn’t have to. This book is an improvement in exactly the places it needed to be keep me hooked to the series, and it was an all the more fun listen because of it. Great stories are built atop great foundations, and we now have a universe with sufficiently firm footing to keep my pedantically picky mind in check.

As for narration, Ryan Kennard Burke does another fine job. I think he may have toned down the somewhat over-the-top cockney accent a little since his last performance. That or Hernandez toned down her over-the-top idiosyncrasies. Either way, great performance.

Personal Score: 4 stars

Professional Score: 3.75 stars