And the Mighty Will Fall by K.B. Wagers: Review by Liz Bourke
And the Mighty Will Fall, K.B. Wagers (Harper Voyager 978-0-06-311524-8, $19.99, 464pp, tp) November 2024.
And the Mighty Will Fall is K.B. Wagers’s tenth and latest space opera novel, the fourth book in the NeoG continuity after 2023’s The Ghosts of Trappist. And the Mighty Will Fall brings the action back to our solar system and the long-running conflict between advocates for an independent Mars and the central governments of Earth, when the peaceful transition of control over the Mars Orbital Station (MOS) from the central Coalition of Human Nations to local Martian administration goes horribly, violently wrong. Wagers has described this book as ‘‘Die Hard in space,’’ and they’re not joking – but it’s also working with deeper themes and a more serious view of the consequences of violence.
Commander Maxine Carmichael of the Near Earth Orbital Guard (essentially a Coast Guard that’s armed and authorised to use force, but translated into space) has achieved success and found a family of choice in her chosen career. She’s also a scion – less estranged than she used to be – of a very prominent family as well as being a sports star from the annual Boarding Games, which makes her perfect to be the face of the handover from the NeoG’s perspective. Along with Lieutenant Commander Saqib Vahid, one of the newest members of her Interceptor crew, she’s trapped on the MOS when violent actors claiming to be from Free Mars take control of the station and hold its inhabitants hostage. The NeoG admiral commanding is taken captive, but manages to give Max the station’s command codes first. Now Max is the only one aboard the MOS free to act. Alone, hunted, afraid for the hostages, and having to kill just to survive, she has to get to the bottom of who the attackers are and what they really want before they can take full control of the station
Sylvia Moroz is the leader of Free Mars. She’s welcomed the transfer of the orbital station into local control as a step in the right direction – not enough, but meaningful nonetheless. She’s not involved in whatever is going on with the station, but someone claiming to be from the NeoG just tried to kill her. She doesn’t believe it was them. This is some other actor, trying to set the people finally making meaningful steps towards lasting peace at each other’s throats once more. She’s not opposed to fighting, or to violence, but it has to have a point. With the attackers on the station trying to frame her, and people trying to kill her, she reaches out to the NeoG and to Commander D’Arcy Montaglione (whom series readers may remember from The Ghosts of Trappist has history with Free Mars) to work together to figure out what’s going on and to stop terrorist attacks on the ground.
Meanwhile Jenks and the rest of Max’s chosen family are working frantically to get her assistance, help rescue the hostages, and answer the questions Who are the attackers? and What do they want?
It turns out that what they want is bloody and destructive vengeance on both sides of this long-running conflict: to ensure that everyone else suffers as they did.
And the Mighty Will Fall is very much a series book when it comes to its characters, and is probably best read in sequence. (If you haven’t read this series yet, you have the prospect of a lot of enjoyable space opera fun.) Here, Max is separated from the family that she’s worked so hard to build and forced into more and more extreme acts of violence in order to save and preserve civilian lives. This violence, combined with her isolation, takes a deep toll on her. In some respects, the lasting effects that committing violence has on her parallels the lasting trauma of the violence between the Free Mars and Coalition of Human Governments. Everyone exposed to it has been wounded by it, often in deep and lasting ways: ways that make them lash out, and want to hurt others. The difference between Sylvia Moroz and D’Arcy Montaglione and those of their comrades who want to move on from the cycle of violence, and the attackers aboard the MOS, is that they want to build a world where it is possible for everyone to heal, rather than punish the one that made them hurt.
In its meditations on violence, seen through the lens of its characters, And the Mighty Will Fall reminds me of the tail end of the violent political struggle in Northern Ireland that I grew up just across the border from, whose echoes linger in the cross-border institutions of the Republic and the effort that goes, now, into keeping sectarian violence at the level of words. And the Mighty Will Fall feels painfully timely this year, and painfully optimistic, about the fruits of long-running violent struggles.
It’s a damn fine science fiction action-adventure novel, nail-bitingly tense, with excellent character development, some stunning twists, and a bedrock sense that we save each other through kindness. It’s also brilliantly queer-normative. I enjoyed it a great deal, as I have done with everything that K.B. Wagers has written so far.
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Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus
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