Review: Sons of Heaven, by Chuck Dixon

Chuck Dixon gets a chance to write his own version of a Richard Sharpe novel

Sons of Heaven is the fifth of Chuck Dixon's time traveling action novels. We've reviewed the first three.

Review of Book 1: SpecOps gunmen go back in time to save scientists traveling through time.

Review of Book 2: Go back in time to see buried treasure be buried.

Review of Book 3: Go up against the legions of Rome to save a Carpenter’s Son.

Chuck Dixon’s Bad Times #4, Helldorado was fun. Most of what I would comment on in a review was absent. It was essentially one long run-and-gun sequence. It achieved some goals that will carry over into this review. Two major elements came out of Helldorado: our heroes went back in time to recover lost member Rick Renzi, who had been left behind in book 1. Second, in the present, one of our resident scientists behind the time machine had been kidnapped by a billionaire rival of series antagonist “Sir Nigel” — this newcomer knows about the time machine, and wants our heroes to run a recovery operation through time.

In book #5, Sons of Heaven, Chuck Dixon gets a chance to write his own version of a Richard Sharpe novel.

The story

In Sons of Heaven, our merry band of Rangers have grown slightly, and are about to be thrust into the middle of the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1865; a rebellion that ended with 30 million dead.

The billionaire’s target? The biography of Genghis Khan. Sons of Heaven is different from the other novels because it has less of a multi-level plot structure. Less time is spent on storylines in different years, and more time is spent in 1865—that’s mostly because 1865 China is such a clusterf*** it makes a Richard Sharpe battlefield look neat in comparison. Let’s just say that current events in China, with Uighurs being cut up for spare parts, or for breeding stock, seems like a natural evolution of the history of barbarity. But this story throws in everything: siege warfare tactics? Check. History of munitions? Check. Historical cameos? Check. Full scale battles with overwhelming enemy forces? Check. All told, Sons of Heaven is a fun book. I’m just trying to figure out how the final book is going to wrap up everything, given how this ends.

The characters

The big character moments here all revolve around the horrors of war. Despite every character being a military veteran, Chinese warfare of 1865 is a whole different level of Hell from what they know. It’s more on par with, again, Napoleonic warfare, with all the savagery that can be conjured up from the horrors of warfare history. This time, the world very much impacts our characters, whether they like it or not.

The world

Dixon does love his research and you can see it, even in the discussion of weaponry. Since the latest time period is modern, they have to be extra careful in what they bring back. Which leads to an interesting historical conversation about bolt-action weapons, level-action, and that Chinese knockoffs go back as far as China does.

Speaking of research, Dixon even has his team prepared for “they’d all had shots for malaria, yellow fever, rabes, typhoid, cholera, three kinds of meningitis, an alphabet soup of hepatitis, encephalitis, and tetanus boosters.” These and other things glossed over by time travel fiction; take that Doctor Who and Michael Crichton.

The politics

Depends: if you think that highlighting the barbaric past of warfare is somehow racist, or if you think that history must only show barbaric white people, then this book is not for you. Then again, it's 1865 warfare, which makes Fallujah look like Kindergarten. Like all the other Bad Times novels -- it's "right wing" in the sense that it is "Based," since this is thoroughly based in reality.

Content warning

This one shows that war is Hell, and it does not shy away from it. Not for kids. Casual slaughter happens. It's generally messy.

Who is it for?

Anyone who has ever read a Bernard Cornwell novel should enjoy this. Anyone who likes time travel stories who knows history. If you read the military scifi of David Weber or John Ringo, you should easily have a blast with it.

Why read it?

Read this because it's the continuation of a great series, with all the action you could ever want.