The novel “Embers of War” by Gareth L. Powell was published for the first time in 2018. It0s the first book in the Embers of War series.

A short but brutal war, effectively ending with the destruction of a sentient forest, left heavy consequences on many of the protagonists of that terrible battle. Trouble Dog was a warship, but for the artificial intelligence that runs it, that destruction was a crime. It decides to join the House of Reclamation, which aims to rescue spacecraft in distress, an organization in which it finds people of various species with a difficult past.

Captain Sal Konstanz commands the Trouble Dog and is sent to rescue a civilian spaceship that went missing when it was in the Gallery, a system disputed by various species. On the route, Ashton Childe also joins the mission, a secret agent in charge of saving the poetess Ona Sudak, who travels on the spaceship in need of rescue, but his superiors haven’t explained their interest in a poetess.

“Embers of War” is set in a future in which humanity has become part of an interstellar civilization made up of several sentient species. This doesn’t prevent wars between different species or between factions of one species. It mixes space opera and military science fiction, but the protagonists include a sentient spaceship from the House of Reclamation and its crew. From the beginning, we see the clear choice to offer a brutally realistic vision of the war actions and the devastation they produce, also in the minds of the survivors.

What looks like a normal rescue mission soon turns out to be much more complicated than expected. At first, the situation seems in some ways incomprehensible since the spaceship to be rescued carries tourists, including a poetess. Slowly, revelations and twists allow us to understand what’s really going on. That’s true for the protagonists as well as they started the mission receiving fragmentary information.

The story follows various points of view, narrated in the first person, a choice that offers even more the idea of ​​what people who participated in particularly bloody battles can feel. Some of them are misfits precisely because of their past. “Embers of War” is a strongly character-based novel, and the discovery of the protagonists’ past and motivations is a crucial part of it.

The main problem in my opinion is that only some of the important characters are well developed. In some cases, they have characteristics that seemed exaggerated to me that make them constantly over the top but not very credible. A member of the Trouble Dog crew is an alien and Gareth L. Powell expresses his point of view with a construction of the sentences I could define imaginative and is supposed to give the idea of ​​an alien mind, but honestly it leaves me more than anything else perplexed.

Besides the elements connected to the war and its consequences, there’s the mystery of the Gallery, a system whose planets got transformed into sculptures by an unknown civilization. Initially, it seems like a marginal element but becomes significant over the course of the novel. The plot ends up becoming quite complex due to the links between various past and present events that make sense only after some revelations.

Overall, “Embers of War” seemed to me a good novel despite its flaws. The ending offers a conclusion to the main plot but is very open in regards to other parts of the storyline. If you don’t mind a character development with little or no nuance, in my opinion, it’s worth reading.