Soul wracking and terrific.

This reads like it was written as a joke to be as purple-prosed and cringey as possible, but people fell for it so hard that the authors will be taking their secret to the grave.

Here’s a scenario.

Imagine being the leader of a nation. You are the protector of your people, tasked with defending their liberties, guarding their inalienable rights, etc.

Now after years of saber-rattling, a hostile kingdom arrives at your doorstep with a delegation that includes The Evil Queen, who can control people with her mind.

Do you,

A) Invite this psycho to the heart of your government, where she can mind-control everyone to do whatever she wants.

B) Tell her that you must conduct meetings remotely, maybe over Skype.

C) Have her assassinated immediately in any of a dozen creative ways.

D) Marry her.

Well, if you’re Kai, you do A and D. And you make these decisions unilaterally and with zero deliberation. Lesser Emperors might have consulted their top generals or their intelligence chiefs. But not Kai! He must “make this decision alone” (his words). Maybe additional facts and intel would only cloud his special brand of logic.

Anyway, that’s how Kai sells out the people of his country: at the first available opportunity. He hands them over as slaves to a mind-controlling sadist for her to do with them as she pleases without even putting up a fight.

If you are wondering why,

why would Emperor Kai (who is really good looking, btw) do such a thing? Well, according to the lore of The Lunar Chronicles, Kai does this because he is braindead. I think the technical term is shit-for-brains. Where there should be brains in his cranium, there is instead shit. But again, he’s also very attractive - keep that in mind - just not smart, since that's not a quality familiar to Meyer or any of her fans or characters.

Anyhow, another thing you might be wondering is why in a future of such flourishing scientific progress, the nations of Earth have reverted to an autocracy reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Great question! The reason is that authors like Meyer prefer to write about despotic regimes, even when it doesn’t make sense, because they think it’s easier.

Look, real governments are messy: layers of complex bureaucracy, 99.999% of decision-making delegated to agencies, regulators, clandestine organizations, keepers of institutional memory and expertise many degrees of separation from elected leaders. We’re talking FDA, FCC, BGI, FEC, FTC, FFA, CIA, DOD, NGA, FBI, etc., and I only made up a few of those! There are so many three letter agencies they have their own three letter initialism: TLA.

As you can see, writing about real governments is exhausting and requires thinking and knowing stuff, which Meyer doesn’t do. Instead, she imagines a future where all the governments of Earth are ruled by despotic kings and queens. It's simpler to write, she thinks, mistakenly.

Anyway, there’s a reason that monarchies went out of style with the rise in literacy rates. Public knowledge and education are inversely proportional to a belief in the Divine Right to Rule.

So is it possible to have a monarchy in the 21st century? Of course, and here are some examples.

China’s model of authoritarianism leans heavily into censorship, limiting the population's access to objective sources of information. Wikipedia is banned in China, of course, as are all search engines that don't censor history, philosophy, and many, many books, including those by Carl Marx. All social media companies are controlled by the CCP, and encryption is illegal. The words “Tiananmen Square” and that iconic photo below are also illegal.

The CCP utilizes various other psychological techniques, like a weird social credit system and a surreptitious form of state violence, as in they'll make dissenters disappear but always deny it.

Russia has a different strategy. They are overt about state violence! No denials here. People are encouraged to report each other to the state, and dissenters are beaten and publicly humiliated, put through a kangaroo court, and imprisoned. Whereas Chinese repression relies on ignorance, the Russian variety relies on fear.

The third model for authoritarianism in the 21st century could be

Saudi Arabia, whose mechanism of control is financial, although religion also plays a small part.

Most Saudi citizens work very little, an average of an hour or two a day, engaged in fake jobs for the government funded by oil. Actual labor is conducted by slaves. This arrangement keeps Suadis docile and dependent. The royal family doesn’t have to coerce its citizens or even lie to them: everyone knows exactly what’s happening. They are in a gilded cage of suburban blight.

To sum up, these are some of the main strategies for maintaining autocratic rule.

1. Keep the population stupid.

2. Keep the population terrified.

3. Keep the population dependent.

4. Use religion.

Now Meyer has created a fantasy realm in which all the people of earth (billions and billions of them) enjoy enough scientific understanding to have spaceships and cyborgs but not democracy.

So how does Emperor Kai maintain control? Does he rely on censorship and indoctrination to keep his citizens stupid, or does he have his secret service kidnap protestors and torture them to death? Does he simply pay people to STFU and pretend he’s an "Emperor"? Does he even take his own fake title seriously, or is the population of earth so stupid that they actually believe in the Divine Right of Kings?

Anyway, there's so much to complain about here. The "terrifying" invading Lunar army is... wait for it... wolves with no guns. They are vulnerable to bullets, but alas it never occurs to Kai or his minions to shoot at them, hence his instantaneous surrender. The way it’s described, I doubt the Lunar army could conquer Texas let alone all of earth with their gunless wolves, but whatever.

It would not be difficult to believe that Emily Henry’s books are AI generated. The writing style is good but unexceptional; the narrative arc is immaculately banal; the characters are melodramatic and their problems are shallow. Honestly, not bad. Not good either, but hey, sometimes we crave trash, and Emily Henry is the Arby’s of romantic comedy. Nutritious? No. Delicious? Also no.

There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly odious sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.

This is usually based on the following quote.

"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.

"I know," said Billy.

"That's war."

"I know. I'm not complaining"

"It must have been hell on the ground."

"It was," said Billy Pilgrim.

"Pity the men who had to do it."

"I do."

"You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground."

"It was all right," said Billy. "Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore."

For context, Mr. Rumfoord is an old military historian described as "hateful and cruel" who wants to see weaklings like Billy exterminated.

On Tralfamadore, Billy was introduced to the revelation that all things happen exactly as they do, and that they will always happen that way, and that they will never happen any other way. Meaning, time is all at once. The aliens, incidentally, admit to destroying the universe in a comical accident fated far into the future, and they're very sorry, but so it goes. <- passive acceptance

The entire story up to this point has been about Billy, buffeted like a powerless pathetic leaf in a storm, pushed this way and that by forces entirely outside his tiny purview. He lays catatonically in a hospital bed after the plane crash and the death of his wife, and all the time traveling back and forth from Dresden where toddlers and families and old grannies and anti-war civilians were burned alive in a carefully organized inferno (so it goes), and Billy is about ready to agree to absolutely anything.

It can't be prevented. It can't be helped.

You're powerless, after a while. What hope have we, or anyone caught in the middle of a war, or even the poor soldiers who are nothing but pawns and children (hence the children's crusade), to influence these gigantic, global events?

Therefore, Billy agrees with the hateful, the cruel Mr. Rumfoord, who is revising his military history of WWII, having previously forgotten to mention the Dresden bombing. Women and children, not evaporated instantly, but melted slowly by chemicals and liquid flame, their leftovers, according to Billy, lying in the street like blackened logs, or in piles of families who died together in their little homes.

Incidentally, how can anything be pro-war or anti-war? Because being anti-war is a bit like being anti-conflict, anti-death, and anti-suffering. Is there a book that's pro these things? Is there a book that touches on the subject of war and is not against it?

We don't support wars, though we are sometimes forced to accept them.

Easily the worst book I’ve read this year. It’s impossible to overstate just how shallow, stupid, and puerile this book is. If you like it, fuck you.

"You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm." - Sam Harris

"It’s true that human persons don’t have contra-causal free will. We are not self-caused little gods. But we are just as real as the genetic and environmental processes which created us and the situations in which we make choices. The deliberative machinery supporting effective action is just as real and causally effective as any other process in nature. So we don’t have to talk as if we are real agents in order to concoct a motivationally useful illusion of agency, which is what Harris seems to recommend we do near the end of his remarks on free will. Agenthood survives determinism, no problem." - Tom Clark (excerpt)

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer."

- Albert Camus

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember'd.

- Shakespeare, Hamlet

Part 1

The story's divided into pieces and begins with Felix.

He’s on a military starship orbiting a hostile planet called Banshee and about to be dropped into combat along with 10,000 fellow warriors. The invasion is similar to Normandy on D-Day, and we get our first glimpse of Felix in the mess hall the morning of the drop.

A soldier vomits at the breakfast-line right in front of Felix, whose attitude’s one of and-no-fucks-were-given-that-day.

He climbs into his armor. And it begins.

The next 80 pages are fast. “Mazes,” “bunkers,” and “beacons” are about the most complex scenery beyond the scorching sand dunes. Bleak imagery and nightmare mark the killing ground of massive, ugly bugs that outnumber the warriors a thousand to one, and nearly everyone dies.

By the end of the book, the symbolic hostility of the planet Banshee weaves a recurring theme.

“Remember where you are,” Felix will say. “This is Banshee.”

He is the sole survivor, and you get more insight into his character, as it’s slowly revealed that far from a one-dimensional badass, Felix is a broken soul, his desire to die barely matched by his stubborn, masochistic refusal to do so.

More on this later.

Part 2 begins the parallel story of Jack Crow, right in the midst of a messy prison escape. The shift is abrupt, and perspective changes to first-person.

Jack Crow is a Galaxy-famous pirate and anti-hero. A self-centered asshole with the morals of a cockroach, Crow mistakenly believes he’s the toughest man alive. And, being in a lot of trouble, he strikes a deal with a ruthless Captain mutineer (the main antagonist besides Banshee itself) to charmingly infiltrate and subvert a research colony in exchange for a ship and lots and lots of money.

It's an ugly deal for the colony, and Crow begins to have second thoughts. _________________________________________

Part 3, melding of the stories.

Against all odds, Felix has survived 20 drops.

Banshee wants him dead, the gigantic aliens they fight begin to recognize him, and he is forced to watch as those around him are destroyed one by one.

And yet, like some grotesque cosmic joke, Felix lives… for a while.

That’s all I can say, except that I love Felix. They don’t make heroes like that anymore.

ENDING

Holy shit the ending.

I will say nothing about it.

Final Thoughts

Pros:

1) Short

2) Surreal action

3) Ample badassery

4) Somewhat heartrending

Cons:

1) Short

2) Too short

3) Steakley could have written a sequel.

4) Why was there no sequel?

5) Fuck.

John Steakley died last year. So it goes. Rest in peace. I'm sorry you never got to finish the second book.

Characters similar to Felix from different genres:

The Witcher from The Last Wish

Arlen from The Warded Man

Takeshi Kovacs from Altered Carbon

Absolutely amazing. Enough said.