The Stars Now Unclaimed (Drew Williams)

The Stars Now Unclaimed
The Universe After series, Book 1
Drew Williams
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: One hundred years ago, the pulse washed across the galaxy, striking worlds with a lingering radiation that attacked higher technology. Some were barely affected, while others were thrown back to the Stone Age. In space, fleets of ships in transit scrambled to understand what happened - while others saw the opportunity they'd been waiting for.
Jane Kamali knows more about the pulse than most people. She was there when it was first unleashed. Now an agent for a sect known as the Justified and the Repentant, she searches the worlds for special children born in the pulse's wake, children with extraordinary powers who might guard against its return. But the Justified aren't the only ones seeking them. The warlike Pax sect wants the children as part of their plans for galactic conquest. For the most part, the galaxy is plenty big enough that the Justified and Pax don't cross paths too often. But Jane's latest job - picking up a telekinetic orphan teen girl, Esa, from a backwater planet - runs afoul of Pax forces, a precursor to an assault that might forever tip the balance of power and end all hope of freedom across the stars.

REVIEW: The cover promises a fast, fun story packed with action, and that's what Williams delivers in this space opera with the usual Western tinges. Jane's a jaded warrior with a checkered past, clinging to vestiges of morality in a life that demands slaughter - slaughter at which she excels. She, like most everyone in the book, is the product a violent galaxy with few clear-cut lines between good and evil; even the Justified and the Repentant have their sins to answer for, though the Pax are well and truly beyond redemption, zealots who break and brainwash every soldier into xenophobic killing machines. The girl Esa's had a rough life at an orphanage, but still has a lot of growing up to do in a very short amount of time once the Pax start bombarding her home... and things only get worse from there. Along for the ride is the mechanical being Preacher, a member of a legacy race of machines left by a long-lost civilization, and Javier, Jane's former lover and exiled fellow Justified agent. The shipboard AI, Scheherazade, is her own character, a sometimes comic counterweight to Jane's brutal efficiency.
This is not a book that drags its heels. Starting almost on the first page, it's packed with action and larger-than-life battles almost to the point of mental exhaustion, with gore and body counts and death-defying feats that grow numbing after a while. Even given the inherently violent nature of the galaxy, I could've used a bit a breather now and again; the timeline seemed cramped from start to finish, with crises piled atop complications ramrodded into battles both in space and on the ground, a near-nonstop deluge of bullets and missiles and laser blasts and fistfights and even attacks from bloodthirsty predators. Still, it does deliver its promised action and wit, and if a few developments are telegraphed, it was still fairly satisfying to read with a nice voice to it, enough that I might venture into the next volume of the series.

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