Ironclads by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Book Review

 

Blurb:

Scions have no limits
Scions do not die
And Scions do not disappear

Sergeant Ted Regan has a problem. A son of one of the great corporate families, a Scion, has gone missing at the front. He should have been protected by his Ironclad – the lethal battle suits that make the Scions masters of war – but something has gone catastrophically wrong.

Now Regan and his men, ill-equipped and demoralised, must go behind enemy lines, find the missing Scion, and uncover how his suit failed. Is there a new Ironcladkiller out there? And how are common soldiers lacking the protection afforded the rich supposed to survive the battlefield of tomorrow?

A new standalone novella by the Arthur C Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time

 

Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Publisher: Solaris

Release Date: 31/12/2017

Pages: 160

Genre: Science Fiction

My Chosen Format: Kindle

My Rating of ‘Ironclads’: 5 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon UK, Amazon US

 

Review:

I’d like to thank both Solaris and Netgalley for getting the chance to review this ARC copy of Ironclads.

Ironclads revolves around Sergeant Ted Regan and his squad of battle-hardened soldiers. Their mission: Go behind enemy lines to see what happened to a scion that went missing. Scions are essentially rich kids, sons of the wealthy and the powerful behind the world’s big businesses, clad in iron-hard battle suits. They are the elite of the elite and one of them has gone missing.

Told in Ted Regan’s voice, Ironclads is a story set in the not so far future (despite the tech being ridiculously advanced) where corporations run the world of war and simple soldiers are the pawns on the chess board used to soak up the bullets and do the jobs the rich boys are too important to dirty their hands with.

In Ironclads’ world, England has all but had it, crippled by leaving Europe (if I remember correctly) and European countries (mainly the Scandinavian ones) are the baddest of the bad. It’s a strange setting (one that includes all manners of tech from microbots to experimental human-hybrid weapons) but one the reader quickly adapts to.

The camaraderie between Regan and his squad, and the various new additions to their group that they pick up along the way, really help to make the reader feel attached. Those parts are well written and well thought out by the author.

Tchaikovsky’s ability to create a complex plot within a plot is sublime. I couldn’t help but feel on the edge of my seat as regards to figuring out what was going to happen next. I even found myself loving characters/factions I wouldn’t expect myself to.

This is my first book/novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky and I very much doubt it will be my last if the character work and overall storytelling is as high a standard in the rest of his work.