Breach the Hull edited by Mike McPhail – review

Fans of MilSF, Breach the Hull (Defenders of the Future: Book 1) is for you! Before I even began reading the first story, I knew I was in for a treat just by perusing the list of authors’ names. For starters, there are two short stories by the famous Jack McDevitt (“Cryptic” and “Black to Move”), which I could sense boded well for the rest of the collection. I haven’t read much that McDevitt has written, but I did read and review The Devil’s Eye for this site.  Continuing to look down the list, I saw two stories by John C. Wright. I hadn’t read anything previously by him, but his name was familiar, and after thinking about it for a while, I figured out why:  he’s the husband of L.Jagi Lamplighter (I had the pleasure of both reviewing her novel, Prospero In Hell, and interviewing her; click here to read the interview). Then there is a story by the editor of the anthology, Mike McPhail (“Wayward Child”), who has written many great MilSF stories, and there is one by his wife, Danielle Ackley-McPhail (“In the Dying Light”), whose work I have reviewed and whom I have also interviewed here. Another name that jumped out at me was C.J. Henderson (“Shore Leave”), whose books I’ve reviewed at this site before(Brooklyn Knight and Central Park Knight) and who I also interviewed here. Possibly, there really is something to this whole synchronicity thing….

So, “Sure,” you may say to yourself, “there are some MilSF stories in the anthology by some well-known authors. But, everyone has an off day now and then–are the short stories themselves any good?” Well, Kemosabe, my short answer to you is: “Heck, yes, they are!” While I’m not going to go into every story in the anthology, I’ll touch briefly on a select few of them to give you an indication about just how good this 16-story anthology is.

Jack McDevitt’s two short stories, “Cryptic” and “Black to Move,” are both very good. “Cryptic,” about SETI receiving alien transmissions that might indicate an interstellar war has been going on, was originally published quite a few years back, in Asimov’s, in the April 1983 issue. It’s a classic tale to start off the collection, though it just hints at a possible war that’s going on elsewhere rather than being hard MilSF.

The first-person narrator of “Cryptic” is the new director of SETI, and he looks back and examines transmissions that a past director had noted had been transmitted between them a couple of years ago. He comes to the conclusion that the previous director likely knew full well what the transmissions indicated, but kept his knowledge to himself. After all, what could be done about it if the war came here, to Earth, anyway, with America on the decline, like Rome in Gibbons’ The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire?

I liked “Black to Move,” originally from the September 1982 issue of Asimov’s, also. It’s relatively short, even for a short story, at around five pages.  A crew of humans are traipsing about space, trying to locate any planets they can with life on them. They have difficulty finding one that even has a blade of grass on it, though–until they come to a planet that looks almost like an Eden, with one huge city in it, and no signs of habitation anywhere else. The place appears like it was only recently abandoned, though the roads are in disrepair. Going to an art museum, the first-person narrator (Mark), a symbologist, sees a watercolor that strikes him forcefully. Cat-like humanoids are playing a game that looks very similar to chess, and it causes Mark to ponder the painting’s meaning–or warning. Another spaceship spotted what they believed to be a UFO that took evasive action and sped away. Mark wonders if the cat people will ever come back, why they left their magnificent city, and if the reason might be related to the chess game depicted in the painting.  It is Black’s turn to move, and the board displays the Benko Gambit–Black is about to sweep in and wreak havoc on White’s world. Mark worries that perhaps the cat people are planning to do the very same thing to Earth. It’s a short but fascinating story that I really enjoyed reading, probably because I love both MilSF and chess.

Now, I’ll move on to a couple more of my favorite stories in the anthology, the ones by John C. Wright, “Peter Power Armor” and “Forgotten Causes.” As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t read anything by John previous to these two stories, but I was blown away by their inventiveness. “Peter Power Armor” was a bizarre little gem, one of the best stories in the collection, IMHO, though the whole anthology is replete with great writing by masters of their craft.

“Peter Power Armor” (try saying that three times fast) is a post-apocalyptic tale, one that takes place after the end of a Second Civil War in America, not fought over slavery, but between (loosely speaking) the West and the East states, the Knowns and the Unknowns, the rich and the multitudes of the poor and middle class people. The Unknowns are those who are so rich that they can switch identities without much effort, hide their assets, and avoid the government taking over their property at will like it often does to the Knowns (asserting its right under the law of Imminent Domain in doing so).

The narrator is one of the last of the Unknowns, from the Western states, where people are still allowed to own guns, and he’s trying to rescue his granddaughter Ethene from a life where she is raised (as all children are) as a ward of the community. Machines and basically almost all aspects of their past are shunned as being evil.  The narrator gets a job as a lowly janitor, but he knows of a very special armored metal mechanical suit that he had as a child. The story is about the narrator’s trying to get Ethene into the Peter Power Armor suit and get her safely to the West, even if it costs the narrator his own life.

Wright’s second story, “Forgotten Causes,” is another pretty cool one, perhaps more of a traditional MilSF tale, but one that still has a definitely quirky side to it. The story opens with the narrator in freefall inside of a weighty suit of battle armor, who suddenly regains consciousness. He doesn’t remember who he is or what his mission is, and he’s under fire from enemy forces from the planet below him. He is still in communication with his ship, which informs him that he has been given amnesia drugs to wipe out parts of his memory related to his mission, so as to not compromise it. Still, he has formidable weapons built into his armor, and attacks the ships trying to blast him to pieces. His ship eventually tells him that the inhabitants of the planet were likely responsible for destroying the Earth’s biosphere, and if that’s the case, his mission is to destroy them in retaliation.  I won’t give away what happens, but the story raises the question of what sort of loyalty does one owe to a people, or a planet, that has long ago been destroyed.

Mike McPhail is known as being one of today’s best writers of MilSF and a friend to other MilSF authors, helping them out whenever he can. His story, “Wayward Child,” is about a female soldier (Morgan) who, in the heat of battle, delays in firing her weapon, which results in the death of her commanding officer, Sergeant Bauer. Instinct and training then kick in, and she kicks butt and takes names; but, she still experiences the guilt of being just a little bit too late and costing Bauer his life. Morgan is Irish, and I liked the little touches in this story when her heritage comes out, like when she swears by saying: “Damnu!” (There should be an accent mark over the “u” but I can’t figure out how to do this with my computer).

I’ll only mention briefly two other stories in the anthology, Danielle Ackley-McPhail’s “In the Dying Light” and the one by C.J. Henderson, “Shore Leave.”

I hadn’t read anything MilSF related from Danielle Ackley McPhail before, though I read/reviewed some of her urban fantasy novels.  “In the Dying Light” is primarily about the efforts of First Officer Ushimi Yakata to retrieve an obelisk-shaped object from space that seems to be headed towards her ship and what happens afterward. It’s a very suspenseful and haunting tale of obsession and possession. The artifact Yakata helps recover is one that was somehow responsible for her father’s death. All she has to remind herself of her father is his cracked helmet that was recovered after some mysterious calamity occurred. This story called to mind a combination of the movie Alien and Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Without going into it any more, I’ll just say that I really liked the story, and that Danielle definitely can write MilSF with the best of them.

Finally, I’ll give a few of my thoughts about C.J. Henderson’s “Shore Leave.”  The story is about–you guessed it–that blissful amount of time all sailors look forward to, when they get to leave their ship and come ashore. The shore leave taken in this amusing and humorous story is on an alien planet, and the tone of the story reminded me of old flicks where sailors take shore leave and end up getting drunk, causing fights, having dalliances with babes, etc. The two main characters of “Shore Leave,” Rocky (Chief Gunnery Officer Rockland Vespucci) and Noodles (Machinist First Mate Li Qui Kon) start off the story getting drunk and stomping some Embrians’ butts in a bar called The Cold Bone Cellar.

They take off before the MPs arrive, but nine other beings seem to be following them, alien children who have been bought from an orphanage for the purpose of being turned into food. Rocky and Noodles don’t want their shore leave to be ruined by alien children, nor do they wish to anger the powerful and wealthy alien who purchased the orphans, but they take the young aliens under their wing and help them out. “Shore Leave,” is a nice, off-beat story with both humor and heart that is like the cherry on top of the cake that is Breach the Hull.

If you’re a fan of MilSF, I urge you to add this anthology to your personal libraries!