Book Review: SPLASHDOWN by Blaine L. Pardoe

Blaine L. Pardoe experience with Battletech, and paired it with his extensive knowledge of American military history to pen some stories in the Land & Sea mecha series.

Being a 90s kid, I saw a fair bit of mecha in my day. Gundam episodes made their way across the Pacific, ExoSquad had a decent legacy run, and of course there was the heavy-hitter, Battletech, with its desktop game series MechWarrior.

Then the 2000s hit and everything became either a Pokemon or a superhero, and we gearheads have had to content ourselves with Iron Mad or middling Transformers movies for our entertainment.

Well, it just so happens that Blaine L. Pardoe has some experience with the Battletech IP, and decided to pair that up with his extensive knowledge of American military history to pen some stories in the Land & Sea mecha series.

His first entry makes a—ahem—big splash.

Love that cover art. It’s what made me stop and click to see what the story was all about. Give me big heavy metal things firing missiles from afar and throwing punches up close. Check it:

The Story

A little over a decade into the future, the western world is recovering from a protracted military campaign against Russia that played out in Alaska. We won (hell yeah) and now we’re in the post-war phase, where a lot of broken veterans are trying to re-integrate into the civilian world. Some of them have physical scars or bionic limbs, others are facing the reality that their highly specialized combat skills don’t exactly translate to practical things. Bummer.

We spend a decent amount of time getting to know a cluster of these veterans by their challenges and their situations. In a very general sense, they miss the camaraderie and the purpose they had in combat, and they’re not looking forward to this next phase of life. Once this became clear to me as the reader, I kind of nodded my head and kept reading—it’s a very readable, if not unexpected, piece of military fiction that says a lot of the same things as other mil-SF these days.

But that’s okay, it’s not the only thing this book is about. While the veterans are doing their thing, a bunch of Government Watchdogs and Nerd Scientists start to notice strange happenings in the oceans of the world. Planes are disappearing. When they show up, they’re damaged by…well, it’s hard to say. Could be animal. Weird claw marks and such indicate that they’re dealing with something new here.

Then they make some breakthroughs, and realize that Earth is in the early stages of an alien invasion. Worse, it’s been going on for more than five years, the aliens just hang out underwater and are studying us by stealing our biggest machines and taking them apart. Now that they know we’re on to them, they begin the kinetic phase of their invasion, and suddenly America finds itself at DEFCON 1.

Fire up the mechs, boys. We’re going to war.

The Characters

Because of the volume of military SF I’ve read this year, I’ll admit I’ve started to become a little bit name-blind to characters in these books. It isn’t necessarily that they’re all the same, but rather that their situations all tend to be very similar. I’m a trucker, so if I read a bunch of books about guys who were truckers, I’d expect it to go the same way.

That said, it was easy to follow the goings-on. One officer in particular, a longtime mech operator whose ex-wife and estranged daughter are working their way out of his life, gets a BS assignment to inter casualties in Arlington National Cemetery. He’s in an extremely low place when the invasion breaks out, and suddenly finds himself needed again, and he throws himself into the new conflict with refreshed purpose. I’ll always cheer for someone getting another chance at greatness.

In the periphery of the military figures, you have other power players making moves: ambitious media personalities who definitely aren’t (wink) a younger version of MSM supermodels, or tech moguls who definitely aren’t (wink) a more debonair version of Elon Musk. You know them by their attributes, and their motives make sense because of that. Pardoe writes easily identifiable characters here so that he doesn’t have to waste time setting the table. You get to dig right into the meal.

And for a book series based on game mechanics, well, that’s one of the top commandments.

The World

You’ll recognize the international beefs, with a few differences because it’s set in the 2030s. Also, the militaries of the world have gone toward mechs, and you get a quick rundown of the different types and sizes of machines that they use. (Something tells me I’d be a Rhino pilot…)

The Politics

Nothing from our zeitgeist.

Content

R for language, and combat violence.

Who’s it for?

Fans of Battletech/MechWarrior, especially since the series creators both worked for that IP before getting cancelled sometime last year. I haven’t looked into how or why and I don’t really care to, cancel culture is stupid and this book is not. It’s also definitely for veterans, but accessible to guys like me who aren’t.

Why read it?

I love a fast-paced book like this one, a book that can put me in the world without taking ten thousand words per chapter to do it. And I really want more high-quality mecha to go mainstream. It seems like those are hard to come by in novel format, and I finally got one here.

On to the sequel!