Terran Armor Corps

So I came to Terran Armor Corps straight off the back of finishing another sci-fi series that was so compelling and entertaining (Galaxy’s Edge + spinoffs) that I smashed through all 20 books in 8 weeks, so you can imagine that I was a little apprehensive as to how anything else would stack up for a good while. However, the awesome series of military-sci-fi that is Terran Armor Corps well and truly kicked that notion in the nuts.

First off, let me just say how good of an idea it is for shorter audiobooks to be bunched together and sold in volumes that are the same price as one standard standalone audiobook. There are a lot of other series (almost always sci-fi) that I won’t start listening to because one 9hr book costs the same Audible credit as a 20+hr book from a different series, but here they’ve lumped Books 1-3 and 4-6 together in two volumes. I cans safely say that this was the factor that led to me actually buy the books, and by god am I glad I started this series. Now for the actual content.

Terran Armor Corps follows an eighteen-year-old Roland as he enters his mandatory government service roughly 10-15 years after humanity was nearly wiped out by an intergalactic race of super-aliens who were busy exterminating all life in the Milky Way. 30-50 years before, when the evil aliens and FTL travel were discovered, Earth joined a millennia-old alliance of aliens standing against the threat and at the last minute it was humanity that was able to wipe the bad guys out. Our story now takes place as the hundreds of races from the victorious alliance of necessity are forming new pacts and sparking off new wars as each nation tries to carve out its own corner within a heavily depopulated galaxy. Roland decides to sign up with the Armor Corps of the military, elite soldiers who fight in insanely powerful mech-suits. And from there, the fun begins.

This story has a bit of everything that I enjoy. In the whole first book, very little actual combat takes places as it is primarily Roland’s training, and yet I couldn’t stop listening. The training and getting to know Roland’s lancemates and the other array of amazing characters was so gripping that it even kept an action-hungry pace-fiend like myself rivetted. It’s not just an awesome story, but it’s one that is fantastically written. These books got multiple out-loud laughs from me. The back and forth between Roland and his lancemates is some of the most believable inter-friend dialogue that I’ve come across in sci-fi. They mess with each other in exactly the way friends do in real life, and in doing so the characters are incredibly humanised (even the non-humans). Now there’s an aspect of the universe-building that is both brilliant and infuriating, and this aspect is that we aren’t given all the info on the historical events all at once. In fact, I’m now 5 books in and I think I just about get most of what has happened… I think. That’s why I was a little vague with the timeline earlier. I genuinely don’t know exactly how many years ago each of the series of ground-shatteringly huge events that occurred to humanity actually happened. I’m having to infer it from how old I think current characters are who lived through the events. It’ so irritating as I am trying to build up this universe within my mind. However, because I am constantly having to re-evaluate my understanding of events, I never stop thinking about them, and as such, I am now far more knowledgeable of the events in this series’s timeline than I would be with many other series. It has made me heavily invested in the story and hooked me perfectly.

The combat, of which there is plenty in Books 2 and 3, is awesomely written. Fantastic and epic battle scenes that are fast-paced and graphic. Exactly what I like. However, as the Armor (what one suit is called) are so few in number, we rarely get to see massed groups of them. It is usually just Roland and his lance of three others doing all the in-scene fighting, and as such their plot-armour is about as thick as the Armor they ride. But that’s me just nit-picking.

All in all, I loved Books 1-3 of this series (and I am currently loving Books 4-6). It was lacking that super special something to tip it over the edge to one of my very rare 5-star reviews, but it comes as close as you can get to earning one.

As for narration, I believe this was the first time I’ve heard Luke Daniels narrate, and to start with I didn’t really like him. However, by the end of Book 1 I had done a total 180 on my opinion and now couldn’t imagine anyone else knocking through the extremely wide range of character voices.  

Personal Score: 4.75 stars

Professional Score: 4.75 stars

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