- Kroese, Robert.
The Dream of the Iron Dragon.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-9837-2921-8.
-
The cover
tells you all you need to know about this book:
Vikings!—spaceships! What could go wrong? From the
standpoint of a rip-roaring science fiction adventure,
absolutely nothing: this masterpiece is further confirmation
that we're living in a new Golden Age of science fiction, made
possible by the intensely meritocratic world of independent
publishing sweeping aside the politically-correct and social
justice warrior converged legacy publishers and re-opening the
doors of the genre to authors who spin yarns with heroic
characters, challenging ideas, and red-blooded adventure just as
in the works of the grandmasters of previous golden ages.
From the standpoint of the characters in this novel, a great
many things go wrong, and there the story begins. In the
twenty-third century, humans find themselves in a desperate
struggle with the only other intelligent species they'd encountered,
the Cho-ta'an. First contact was in 2125, when a human
interstellar ship was destroyed by the Cho-ta'an while exploring
the Tau Ceti system. Shortly thereafter, co-ordinated attacks began on
human ships and settlements which indicated the Cho-ta'an possessed
faster-than-light travel, which humans did not. Humans formed
the Interstellar Defense League (IDL) to protect their interests and
eventually discovered and captured a Cho-ta'an jumpgate, which
allowed instantaneous travel across interstellar distances.
The IDL was able to reverse-engineer the gate sufficiently to
build their own copies, but did not understand how it worked—it
was apparently based upon some kind of wormhole physics beyond
their comprehension.
Humans fiercely defended their settlements, but inexorably the
Cho-ta'an advanced, seemingly driven by an inflexible
philosophy that the universe was theirs alone and any competition
must be exterminated. All attempts at diplomacy failed.
The Earth had been rendered uninhabitable and evacuated, and
most human settlements destroyed or taken
over by the Cho-ta'an. Humanity was losing the war and time
was running out.
In desperation, the IDL set up an Exploratory Division
whose mission was to seek new homes for humans sufficiently
distant from Cho-ta'an space to buy time: avoiding extinction
in the hope the new settlements would be able to develop
technologies to defend themselves before the enemy discovered
them and attacked. Survey ship Andrea Luhman
was en route to the Finlan Cluster on such a mission when
it received an enigmatic message which seemed to indicate
there was intelligent life out in this distant region where
no human or Cho-ta'an had been known to go.
A complex and tense encounter leaves the crew of this unarmed
exploration ship in possession of a weapon which just might turn
the tide for humanity and end the war. Unfortunately, as they
start their return voyage with this precious cargo, a Cho-ta'an
warship takes up pursuit, threatening to vaporise this last best
hope for survival. In a desperate move, the crew of the
Andrea Luhman decide to try something that had
never been attempted before: thread the needle of the rarely
used jumpgate to abandoned Earth at nearly a third of the speed
of light while evading missiles fired by the pursuing warship.
What could go wrong? Actually a great deal. Flash—darkness.
When they got the systems back on-line, it was clear they'd
made it to the Sol system, but they picked up nothing
on any radio frequency. Even though Earth had been abandoned,
satellites remained and, in any case, the jumpgate beacon
should be transmitting. On further investigation, they discovered
the stars were wrong. Precision measurements of star
positions correlated with known proper motion from the ship's
vast database allowed calculation of the current date. And
the answer? “March sixteen, 883
a.d.”
The jumpgate beacon wasn't transmitting because the jumpgate
hadn't been built yet and wouldn't be for over
a millennium. Worse, a component of the ship's main drive
had been destroyed in the jump and, with only auxiliary
thrusters it would take more than 1500 years to get to the
nearest jumpgate. They couldn't survive that long in stasis
and, even if they did, they'd arrive two centuries too late
to save humanity from the Cho-ta'an.
Desperate situations call for desperate measures, and this was
about as desperate as can be imagined. While there was no hope
of repairing the drive component on-board, it just might be
possible to find, refine, and process the resources into a
replacement on the Earth. It was decided to send the ship's
only lander to an uninhabited, resource-rich portion of the
Earth and, using its twenty-third century technology, build the
required part. What could go wrong? But even though nobody on
the crew was named Murphy he was, as usual, on board. After a
fraught landing attempt in which a great many things go wrong,
the landing party of four finds themselves wrecked in a
snowfield in what today is southern Norway. Then the Vikings
show up.
The crew of twenty-third century spacefarers have crashed
in the Norway of
Harald
Fairhair, who was struggling to unite individual bands
of Vikings into a kingdom under his rule. The people from
the fallen silver sky ship must quickly decide with whom to
ally themselves, how to communicate across a formidable language
barrier and millennia of culture, whether they can or dare meddle
with history, and how to survive and somehow save humanity in
what is now their distant future.
There is adventure, strategy, pitched battles, technological
puzzles, and courage and resourcefulness everywhere in this
delightful narrative. You grasp just how hard life was in
those days, how differently people viewed the world, and how
little all of our accumulated knowledge is worth without the
massive infrastructure we have built over the centuries as
we have acquired it.
You will reach the end of this novel wanting more and
you're in luck. Volume two of the trilogy,
The Dawn of the Iron Dragon
(Kindle edition), is now available
and the conclusion,
The Voyage of the Iron Dragon, is scheduled
for publication in December, 2018. It's all I can do not
to immediately devour the second volume starting right now.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
August 2018 