Book Review: The Red

The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

Saga Press, 2015

Prolific sci-fi author Linda Nagata's new book The Red: First Light (with its eye-catching cover by the great Larry Rostant) plunges the reader deep into a tightly-imagined world that often feels just a couple of news cycles ahead of our own. Lieutenant James Shelley is the commander of an LCS, a linked combat squad of hired mercenaries patrolling the desolate African outback for “insurgents” in a near future when soldiers are cybernetically linked not only to each other but also to the titanium exoskeletons that give them enhanced strength and speed in combat, as well as all the logistical advantages of an onboard computer system:

I'm moving fast. His first bullets don't get anywhere near me, but he shifts his aim and closes the gap while I fire back. I aim from the hip, using the bead in my visor to get the right line. The trigger drops away from my finger as my tactical AI takes over. A single shot, and the kid flies backward, spinning half around before hitting the slope behind.

The outward trappings of The Red: First Light hew fairly closely to the standard military-sf outlines. There's plenty of action, paramilitary superiors are forever telling Shelley that this, that, or the other things are classified, and there's a mysterious but key little detail that sets Shelley himself apart from the other grunts on the line, in this case that he seems to have a sixth sense for impending danger. Nagata is a practiced old hand at both satisfyingly deploying these familiar bits for readers who want nothing more and also at introducing some new wrinkles into the old cloth. The adventures she puts Lt. Shelley and his crew through steadily escalate and complicate, and the main plot deepens as we learn that our hero's precognitive quirk might have a very sinister explanation.

And along the way, at every point where a less-assured writer would simply dump exposition, Nagata instead weaves it into Shelley's reflections on his life, as when the thinks about the lack of romantic fraternization in his command:

Lust is brain chemistry, but so is the way you feel about your sisters and brothers. You might love them, you might die for them, but unless you're a twisted fuck, the last thing you want to do is have sex with your siblings. That's incest revulsion, and though I've never seen it mentioned in a manual, every LCS soldier knows that Guidance has figured out how to mimic the sensation in our heads. It might take a day or two to kick in, but it always happens. We don't live with other men and women, we live with brothers and sisters. I'm an only child, but since I've been in the linked combat squads, I've learned what it's like to have siblings. We are a celibate crew.

For all its author's inventiveness, The Red: First Light can sometimes feel derivative, although this feeling drops off significantly as the plot thickens – there's every reason to expect that the next two books, The Trials and Going Dark, will be even more enjoyable than this very enjoyable first installment. Fans of military sci-fi have a first-rate new series to enjoy.