Book Review: RIPTIDES by Blain L. Pardoe

Second in the "Land & Sea" series, with mechs versus aliens

In SPLASHDOWN, humanity got a rude awakening when aliens surged out of the seas, where they’d been hiding for years, studying our tech and our civilizations. They know a lot about us. Now they want to kill us and take our stuff.

Time to do the right thing and blow them all to hell with superior firepower…if we have it.

The Story

RIPTIDES exists at the intersection of a couple of different story types: it’s urban warzone survival next to military fiction. It’s mecha near-futurism and international intrigue. It’s a refugee teen looking for her family, and POWs trying to escape an impossible alien prison. Give Tom Clancy a box of ExoSquad toys and an afternoon with Michael Bay, and you start to understand what you have with RIPTIDES.

With multiple viewpoint characters, you get a big picture of what’s going on and how the events are interconnected. The subaquatic alien invaders have already conquered most of Earth, it’s just the ocean part of it where we don’t have as much presence. Next they take the coastal cities, which necessarily puts pressure on the inland areas, and there are logistical nightmares that come out of this. Pardoe doesn’t just tell you about them, he walks you through them with realistic characters who feel the stress and pressure and horror of it all.

Inside of all that you get little interpersonal gems as the characters deal with their own troubles, trying to balance them against the larger threats against humanity. People still have room to be individuals while sacrificing for their families, their nations, their species. It’s the element that lifts the series above a simple daydream about what would happen to the world in this situation. In order to understand that better, I need to tell you about…

The Characters

There’s a big cast in this series, but I want to focus on three of them: CC is a teen girl who has the guts to go back into Los Angeles in the middle of an evacuation because she thinks her mom and siblings are there. Her part of the story reads like a World War 2 survivor memoir, like someone who lived through the occupation of Poland or the Netherlands. There’s a real feeling to her terror but also her drive to keep going, because abandoning her loved ones is worse. She makes friends and enemies along the way, and finds her courage in a horrible ordeal.

Then there’s Reid Porter, who lived through a violent battle and got recommended for the Medal of Honor by his CO, but he feels it’s a political stunt to drum up high morale for the war. The real heroes were either killed or taken prisoner by the aliens. He’s powerless to stop his commanders from pushing it through, and he’s so guilt-ridden by the whole thing that he eventually sneaks away to get back on the front lines.

The flipside of Reid Porter’s coin is Natalia Falto, a lance corporal who got captured by the aliens and taken to an underwater prison. She and her fellow inmates give the reader a glimpse into what the aliens are doing down there, and this is where the strong horror elements of the story really come to the surface. The “Fish” aliens don’t speak English. They have some modest foodstuffs that the humans can eat, so they don’t die of starvation, but they’re dying of everything else; the Fish keep hauling the prisoners out of their cells to experiment on them, hacking up limbs or testing poisons that kill them slowly. The prisoners are powerless to stop it or even understand why. Best they can do is guess, and wait, and be afraid.

Falto does what she can to keep the others sane, though. She knows time is running out and they will probably all die down there; still, she doesn’t surrender, and while we would all like to be that resilient, Pardoe does a good job of writing her in such a way that it makes you wonder if you could do it.

Unfortunately we don’t find out at the end of this book, so I need to pick up the third one in order to see what happens to her. Clever little trick, that…

The World

Ours, in about fifteen years. Slightly advanced tech, slightly evolved political tensions, but all very recognizable.

The Politics

Doesn’t really come through, when you’re running or fighting for your life you don’t really have time to make sure the guy next to you has Correct Opinions.

Content

R-rated for violence and language.

Who’s it for?

Fans of Battletech or Pacific Rim, military fiction, and mecha.

Why read it?

I’m starved for good mecha novels. I’ve dabbled in some here or there, but nobody’s doing it better than Pardoe right now. So I’ll keep up with the series. You should too!