Genre: Sci-Fi, Space Opera
Reviewer: Beáta
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About The Book
Running on caffeine and spite with nothing left to prove. GOLDEN GIRLS meets FIREFLY in this rollicking space opera adventure.
Maryn Alessi retired from mercenary service after her last assignment went horribly sideways and settled down on a quiet planet with the love of her life. Unexpectedly widowed, Maryn must fulfill a promise to return her mate’s ashes to zer home planet for funeral rites, but a brutal civil war has destabilized space travel.
Former Artemis Corps sisters-in-arms and their sassy ship, the Golden Girl, are up to the task, counting on luck and their rather sketchy cargo business to get Maryn passage through the contested star lanes. But when the crew of the Girl rescues survivors of a ruthless war crime, Maryn and her ride-or-die friends must take up their old profession to save the lives of innocents from a genocidal dictator.
Warnings: violence, genocide, aging, chronic illness, grief (death of spouse), PTSD
The Review
Whiskey and Warfare by E.M. Hamill
Retired mercenary Dr. Maryn Alessi gets sucked back into her old life, when her old friends and teammates offer to bring her and her recently deceased partner’s ashes back to said partner’s home planet. On the way, they just need to make one stop: To deliver smuggled weapons to the resistance fighting a genocide on the planet Quet. They quickly discover that the situation is even worse than it seemed, and the only ones in the right place to help the refugees are Maryn and her friends. Only that they are all getting old, and need to reckon with certain health problems, Maryn’s grief, and the past trauma, that has kept her on one single planet for so long.
Whiskey and Warfare is a fun space adventure, with the major appeal that it is starring elderly people. It of course comes without saying, that we desperately need older heroes in our stories, especially people with marginalized identities. The crew in this book is all-female and all-queer. But what really makes it stand out to me from other “retired hero needs to return to the calling they abandoned” stories, is the way that every single one of their life experiences are important to the mission – from Maryn’s childhood obsession with dinosaurs to Col’s work as an accountant, it all matters. I also liked the way that the story addressed declining health in old age and preparing to die with dignity.
The part that really sucked the enjoyment for me out of it is not really the author’s fault, and I hate to bring it up, but it really did hold this book back a lot:
Current events.
Had this book come out only two years earlier, it would have been a perfectly normal escapist space adventure. Unfortunately, it did not. Given everything that is happening in Gaza, the idea of a greed-fuelled genocide that no-one with the power to help even acknowledges as such, simply hits too close to home. Throughout the book, I kept seeing Gaza in Quet, and this made it completely impossible for me to relax into the escapism part. Unfortunately, Quet iswritten as a plot device, an excuse to get Maryn back to her space adventuress self, and so it is not deeply enough intertwined with the themes of the story, that it would work as an exploration of real events. And so the book is stuck in this uncanny valley in-between space, where it is neither.
However, holding this up against the author also feels wrong. After all, needing to save people from a genocide is a popular science fiction plot. And it takes a long time to write a book. I don’t know when Hamill started, but it may have very well been before the beginn of the genocide in Gaza.
And art lives long, longer than real-life atrocities. One day, the genocide on Quet will no longer feel like a reflection of things happening the very moment you are reading about it. That day, Whiskey and Warfare will nicely slide back into its original role of fun escapist fantasy providing some much needed later-in-life representation. May that day come soon.
The Reviewer
Beáta Fülöp is an aspiring filmmaker and writer. She identifies as aromantic and asexual, and has an autistic Special Interest in the representation of minorities. One day, she will use this knowledge in her own stories. Until then, she is happy to sit here and give her opinion on other people’s hard work.
