Rise of the Valkyries

It has been quite a while since I reviewed one of Tom Kratman's novels on this blog.  Not because of any lack of production on his part, but rather because of a lack of production on mine...at least where blogging is concerned.  As happens with many of us inhabiting the blogosphere, real life has a way of reasserting itself and limiting one's time online.  Such has been the case with me for most of the past year, resulting in just three previous posts in 2011.  Not that I have anything to complain about, mind you.  Since relocating up here to Lubbock in August 2009, my career and life have improved markedly.  But sacrifices have had to be made, and my rate of blog posting has been among them.  That said, with a few moments of time to spare this late December night, what follows is my brief review of Tom Kratman's The Amazon Legion, six chapters of which I posted on this blog back in March 2010.

Set in the same universe as three of Kratman's other novels: A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex, and The Lotus Eaters, The Amazon Legion takes place five centuries into the future on Terra Nova, a planet colonized by humans and with nations not too different from our own.  The story centers around a young woman named Maria Fuentes, living in a small Spanish-speaking nation known as the Timocratic Republic of Balboa.  After being disowned by her wealthy parents for becoming pregnant out of wedlock and having to raise her young daughter in abject poverty, Maria has a chance encounter with Patricio Carrera, the founder and leader of the Balboan military: the Legion del Cid.  Carrera, much to the chagrin of the Republic's Senate, has conceived a radical idea:  integrate gays and women into all levels of military service (including combat roles) by creating specific regiments for each - the Tercio Gorgidas for the former and the Tercio Amazona for the latter.  Much of the novel chronicles Fuentes' journey through basic and subsequent special forces training.  Members of the Tercio Gorgidas are used to train the initial members of the Tercio Amazona, as Carrera has determined than straight men will simply not be up to the task.  Kratman himself, in this interview from 2008 with Blake "Laughing Wolf" Powers of the military blog Blackfive, expounds upon that point when describing the novel in its initial form, then titled The Amazon's Right Breast:



The chapters describing the training of Fuentes and her fellow recruits are among the grittiest, most brutal, but also most compelling passages that I have ever read.  Doubtlessly, Kratman drew upon some of his own Army Ranger training experiences when crafting them.  But the violence therein is not pointless.  As with all of Kratman's novels, larger themes are explored.  In this case, such themes include not only the aforementioned feasibility of women and homosexuals serving in combat, but also further ruminations upon the nature of timocracy (detailed even more extensively in The Lotus Eaters) and the value of loyalty and self-sacrifice, traits that have tended to wither in liberal democracies.

The tribulations of Fuentes and her Amazona compatriots are set against a larger geopolitical drama on Terra Nova, wherein a large and powerful confederation of nations called the Tauran Union (think the European Union with teeth) have occupied much of Balboa with the intent of controlling the Balboa Transitway, an above sea-level canal linking Terra Nova's two largest oceans, the Shimmering Sea and the Mar Furioso.  As for how the Amazonas fare in the struggle to rid Balboa of the Tauran presence, you will have to read the novel yourself.  But be advised, it's one hell of a ride.