Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1): Bombed Back to the Stone Age

If you want military SciFi you need to look no further than the Warp Marines! As you probably know by this time, this genre is one of my favorites, and I’ve written quite a few posts about the books I’ve enjoyed over the years. The Ember War is one of them, and Empire of Bones is another I’m planning to re-read soon. While I’ve yet to make my top 10 list of recent Military SciFi titles, the Warp Marines are fast moving up to the top of that list, and Book 1, Decisively Engaged, gets you hooked right from the beginning. It’s a series I’d highly recommend, and this first book is where it all starts, so it’s the right place to begin if you’re new to it.

Why it hooks you from page one

There’s no slow build up like Weber prefers with his Honor Harrington series. This one gets down and dirty right from the beginning, and the action only gets more frantic as time goes on.

I’ll be honest, I had to re-read this one before getting into the newest book in the series, because it had been much too long since I’d met up with my favorite Warp Marine friends. Going back to it was a pleasure, and it holds up just as well on a second go. The first time round it’s the pace that grabs you, and the second time you start to notice how much groundwork is laid for everything that follows. It’s a series I’d highly recommend to anyone who likes their military SciFi gritty and fast.

What I like about that approach is that it respects your time. Everything you need to know about how humanity ended up in this mess is covered quickly, and then the book trusts you to keep up while the Marines get on with the job. The action is frantic but never confusing, and the stakes stay clear the whole way through. It’s the sort of pacing that makes it very hard to find a good place to stop reading, and it’s why I’d point anyone who likes their military SciFi fast and gritty toward it.

Story in a nutshell

Warp Marines takes us to a universe not too dissimilar to our own. First contact, however, is not something we’d want to repeat, as our initial exposure to the universe at large can only be described as cataclysmic. When one group of aliens (the “Puppies”) escaping from a battle inadvertently leads the other to Earth, the “Snakes” decide to introduce humanity to Starfarer culture by bombing them back to the stone age. These are clean bombs and not nuclear, which simply means the targets are surrounded by a globe of force while the temperature gradually increases within that globe, hot enough to melt steel.

Fortunately for the survivors, who are less than half of Earth’s remaining population, the Puppies are able to defeat the Snakes before they can complete their destruction. Feeling guilty for leading these hostile aliens here, they decide to help bootstrap humanity so that it can survive any further incursions from the Snakes or any of the other hostile races in their galactic neighborhood. While the remnants of humanity might be few, they’re not idle or indecisive. The new American president institutes a program to rapidly build a space-based presence to make sure any future alien attacks are stopped.

He’s not able to build a fleet of sufficient size to fully protect and englobe the Earth, but what he is able to build is a fleet with defences that are new to the galactic scene. It’s one that has the rest of the spiral arm start referring to humans as Warp Demons. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, that’s actually just the prologue. The rest of the book contains significantly more in the way of small unit tactics and advanced weaponry, and it just continues to build up in terms of tone and tempo.

What makes the setup work is how quickly it moves from the big picture to the small one. The Puppies and the Snakes are the sort of backdrop you might expect to fill a whole trilogy, and Carella gets through them in a prologue so he can spend the rest of the book on the Marines. That’s a bold choice, and it pays off, because it means the book never has to stop and explain itself. By the time you reach the embassy, you already know what’s at stake for humanity and what the Marines are fighting for, and the book can concentrate on how they’re going to hold out.

One thing that stands out is how the prologue sets up the moral weight of the whole series. Humanity has lost more than half of its remaining population before the Puppies finally beat back the Snakes, so when the Marines are sent out they’re carrying the fear of that day with them. The Puppies’ guilt over leading the Snakes to Earth is also what gives humanity its chance, because they’re the ones who help it bootstrap into a spacefaring power. That’s an interesting setup, because humanity is neither the strongest nor the weakest player, and it has to make up the difference with grit and some very nasty new technology. If you’re after more books in this vein, my Kindle Unlimited military SciFi picks are a good place to start.

The characters and the aliens

All of the characters are quite well conceived and written, and their motivations are really well described and delivered. The aliens, however, are a bit cardboard and one sided. They’re basically bad and we’re good, and there is no gray area in between. The book follows a small Marine unit sent to guard an embassy on a hostile alien world, and from the moment it’s surrounded by angry mobs the pressure never really lets up.

The Queen of the planet our hero finds himself on is very much based on the Empress Dowager Cixi, and the whole Boxer Rebellion style story is prevalent and annoying, as it’s not really new or unique. In fact another military SciFi book did it earlier and it was very similar. That part of the plot is the weak spot for me, and it’s the main thing that stopped me giving the book an unreserved thumbs up. Everything else in the book is strong enough that I was happy to look past it, but it’s worth knowing about before you go in.

The aliens being one sided is a fair complaint, but it’s partly a result of the book’s point of view. We see the enemy almost entirely through the eyes of the Marines who are fighting them, so there isn’t much room for shades of gray. I’d have liked at least one scene from the other side of the wire, something that made the mobs outside the embassy feel like more than a threat. That’s my main gripe, and it’s a small one next to how well the rest of the book is put together.

The close combat is where this book really delivers. The fights in and around the embassy are tight, tense and well described, and the Marines have to work as a team because there’s nobody coming to save them. That’s what I mean about the fear and the pain: it’s not glamorous, and when someone goes down you feel it. For me that’s the mark of really good military SciFi, and it’s something the book does better than most of what I’ve read in the genre.

What I liked and what I didn’t

The similarity to the Boxer Rebellion is definitely something I didn’t like. I would have liked some more interaction with the different groups of aliens too, as only one side of a story gets tedious and monotonous. I also would have liked more space battles, and especially those with larger fleets, the sort of thing I enjoyed so much in the Saiph books. There is some ship to ship combat, but the book doesn’t really give it enough weight.

However, the small unit tactics and overall grit within the story itself were really well done. You could feel the fear and pain the Marines were going through, and you lived it with them. It was really well done! If you love small unit tactics, this is the one to pick up, and I’d definitely recommend it to any fan of the Military SciFi genre.