- Oksy, Come Home
- However Many Must Die
- Drown Deep
By Phil Williams
I first came across the Blood Scouts through the prequel Oksy, Come Home that was a finalist in the SFINCS novella competition, and that I absolutely devoured.
Normally, I’m sceptical (at best) of prequels, but that one was a shining example of how it can be done right.
Oksy, Come Home is a self-contained story that shows off the author’s skill at writing and the type of stories they want to tell, and it works. The books isn’t beating me over the head with how cool and awesome the setting is, and it’s not promising grand and epic adventures to come. It’s a story all its own, and it doesn’t need a series of full length novels to motivate its existence.
In other words, if you’ve not yet been eyeing the Blood Scouts, start with Oksy, Come Home.
So, what’s it about, you might wonder?
To set the stage, imagine a grimy, dirty, World War 1 story. You’ve got endless trenches, ceaseless artillery barrages, and charging soldiers gunned down in the thousands by machine guns. It’s cruel, ugly, and bloody. Death is an ever present constant.
Now, take that image, keep all the time-appropriate tech, such as guns, explosives, and trains, and put it in a fantasy world. Add ogres and goblins and giants. Add greckels and grescinds. Add magic and monsters, monsters, monsters. Add a conflict between religious tradition and scientific civilisation. Add “human” rights violations in the name of progress and victory, and don’t worry about which side does it, because no cost is too high to gain an advantage and win the war.
Next, add the Blood Scouts – an all female platoon of soldiers in a world where women are expected to stay in the kitchen and make sandwiches and babies. The empire’s most shameful secret, as they’re sometimes referred to.
Got all that? Good.
You might think the top brass would keep soldiers like that far from the front line, out of harms way, where they won’t cause any trouble and won’t embarrass anyone. You’d be right in that it’s probably what they’d want to do, but it’s not what happens.
Instead, in the first book, However Many Must Die, the Blood Scouts gets assigned to the kind of wild goose chase that’s too stupid to waste “real” soldiers on: investigate the alleged existence of an impossible weapon at a rumoured research facility deep within enemy territory.
Without giving away any spoilers, I’ll say it turns out the way you imagine.
The second book, Drown Deep, is similar in concept: find out why the enemy has invaded a violently inhospitable region that no one wants anything to do with, and make contact with the unsanctioned irregulars opposing them.
Reading the Blood Scouts books is to ride along with Wild Wish, our main character (not Oksy), as she tries to keep her crew alive and complete the mission. It’s standing by her side as her friends die and her plans fall apart. It’s marching by her side as she tries to make sense of the chaotic world around her and the conflicting emotions within her.
It’s smiling all the wider the few times things turn out right.
What I’ll whine about
Names and sense of place. A world is a large place, and it has a lot of smaller places, such as continents and nations, within it. These, in turn, contain even smaller places, such as towns and lakes and mountains, and all of these place, small and large, have names.
There are a lot of names to keep track of and while they do add depth to the world, I found it a bit much. I couldn’t keep track of where all these places were supposed to be in relation to each other, and in that regard, the geography of the world didn’t make much sense to me.
In fairness, there’s a map at the start of each book, but I find that consulting a resource like that breaks my immersion more than wondering about where some river is located.
The same thing applies to a lesser extent to people and races. There are a lot of characters named throughout the story, and it’s hard to keep track of them all. Similarly, there are plenty of non-human species of varying intelligence, sentience, and hostility. Many are such that I’ve not come across them in other fantasy books, which is nice, but which also means I have a vague grasp of what they are – especially if I don’t remember the initial description when they appear later on in the story.
What I’ll gush about
Everything. If it’s not clear already, I’m absolutely enamoured with the Blood Scouts, and I suspect it will be my go to suggestion whenever someone asks me for a book recommendation for some time to come.
The setting. I’ve not come across a fantasy story taking place in a time period equivalent to World War 1 before, and I found it fascinating. There’s an awareness among the characters of the story that goes beyond what you’ll find among ordinary people in most regular fantasy books. It helps create the sense that outside of the story there exists a larger world with a long and complicated history.
Names. Yes, I complained about there being a lot of names, but at the same time, the names are created in a way that supports the world building and the history in a way that makes them work. It’s not just fancy fantasy names in a conlang designed to make internal sense, but names, often in English, that can be understood to have a meaning without needing an explanation. The naming conventions create a sense of familiarity that helps bring the place to life.
Writing. From a purely technical perspective, the writing is rock solid. The story itself may be gritty, miserable, and full of pain, but the writing is smooth as butter. There are no excess descriptions. There’s no missing information that prevents a scene from making sense. It’s a joy to read.
Writing (again). From an artistic perspective, the writing supports the setting. The way characters talk and think, and the way they look at the world, feels just right for the time period. It’s a detail that helps solidify the experience of the books.
Characters. Wild Wish and Oksy are both fully fleshed out characters with their own strengths and flaws, and reading their respective stories brings you very close to them. The same applies to a lesser extent to other Point of View characters. We don’t get as close to them, but they still feel like real people with their own wants and needs.
The war. Anticipation and uncertainty. War is cruel, chaotic, and stupid, and it shows. Death is ever present, and named characters we come to know and care for are killed off without mercy or hesitation. There one moment, gone the next. Even knowing it’s a story, and knowing stories have rules, there’s a definite uncertainty about who will make it and who will not. The author’s not afraid to kill off important characters over no more than a misunderstanding. People you care for will die, and knowing this, there were times I found myself momentarily reluctant to keep reading.
Heart. Despite all the ugly and the dirty, despite all the pain and misery, and despite the death and the suffering, there’s still a kind of warmth to the story. Hidden, sure, but still there. Wild Wish has dreams and hopes she lives for. She cares, and in doing so, she brings the story to life.
Final Words
Dirty, gritty, and ugly, The Blood Scouts is the WW1 inspired fantasy story you didn’t know you needed.
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