The Exiled Fleet

The Exiled Fleet is far-future interstellar military SF. It is a direct sequel to The Last Watch. You don't want to start here.

The Last Watch took a while to get going, but it ended with some fascinating world-building and a suitably enormous threat. I was hoping Dewes would carry that momentum into the second book. I was disappointed; instead, The Exiled Fleet starts with interpersonal angst and wallowing and takes an annoyingly long time to build up narrative tension again.

The world-building of the first book looked outward, towards aliens and strange technology and stranger physics, while setting up contributing problems on the home front. The Exiled Fleet pivots inwards, both in terms of world-building and in terms of character introspection. Neither of those worked as well for me.

There's nothing wrong with the revelations here about human power structures and the politics that the Sentinels have been missing at the edge of space, but it also felt like a classic human autocracy without much new to offer in either wee thinky bits or plot structure. We knew most of shape from the start of the first book: Cavalon's grandfather is evil, human society is run as an oligarchy, and everything is trending authoritarian. Once the action started, I was entertained but not gripped the way that I was when reading The Last Watch. Dewes makes a brief attempt to tap into the morally complex question of the military serving as a brake on tyranny, but then does very little with it. Instead, everything is excessively personal, turning the political into less of a confrontation of ideologies or ethics and more a story of family abuse and rebellion.

There is even more psychodrama in this book than there was in the previous book. I found it exhausting. Rake is barely functional after the events of the previous book and pushing herself way too hard at the start of this one. Cavalon regresses considerably and starts falling apart again. There's a lot of moping, a lot of angst, and a lot of characters berating themselves and occasionally each other. It was annoying enough that I took a couple of weeks break from this book in the middle before I could work up the enthusiasm to finish it.

Some of this is personal preference. My favorite type of story is competence porn: details about something esoteric and satisfyingly complex, a challenge to overcome, and a main character who deploys their expertise to overcome that challenge in a way that shows they generally have their shit together. I can enjoy other types of stories, but that's the story I'll keep reaching for.

Other people prefer stories about fuck-ups and walking disasters, people who barely pull together enough to survive the plot (or sometimes not even that). There's nothing wrong with that, and neither approach is right or wrong, but my tolerance for that story is usually lot lower. I think Dewes is heading towards the type of story in which dysfunctional characters compensate for each other's flaws in order to keep each other going, and intellectually I can see the appeal. But it's not my thing, and when the main characters are falling apart and the supporting characters project considerably more competence, I wish the story had different protagonists.

It didn't help that this is in theory military SF, but Dewes does not seem to want to deploy any of the support framework of the military to address any of her characters' problems. This book is a lot of Rake and Cavalon dragging each other through emotional turmoil while coming to terms with Cavalon's family. I liked their dynamic in the first book when it felt more like Rake showing leadership skills. Here, it turns into something closer to found family in ways that seemed wildly inconsistent with the military structure, and while I'm normally not one to defend hierarchical discipline, I felt like Rake threw out the only structure she had to handle the thousands of other people under her command and started winging it based on personal friendship. If this were a small commercial crew, sure, fine, but Rake has a personal command responsibility that she obsessively angsts about and yet keeps abandoning.

I realize this is probably another way to complain that I wanted competence porn and got barely-functional fuck-ups.

The best parts of this series are the strange technologies and the aliens, and they are again the best part of this book. There was a truly great moment involving Viator technology that I found utterly delightful, and there was an intriguing setup for future books that caught my attention. Unfortunately, there were also a lot of deus ex machina solutions to problems, both from convenient undisclosed character backstories and from alien tech. I felt like the characters had to work satisfyingly hard for their victories in the first book; here, I felt like Dewes kept having issues with her characters being at point A and her plot at point B and pulling some rabbit out of the hat to make the plot work. This unfortunately undermined the cool factor of the world-building by making its plot device aspects a bit too obvious.

This series also turns out not to be a duology (I have no idea why I thought it would be). By the end of The Exiled Fleet, none of the major political or world-building problems have been resolved. At best, the characters are in a more stable space to start being proactive. I'm cautiously optimistic that could mean the series would turn into the type of story I was hoping for, but I'm worried that Dewes is interested in writing a different type of character story than I am interested in reading. Hopefully there will be some clues in the synopsis of the (as yet unannounced) third book.

I thought The Last Watch had some first-novel problems but was worth reading. I am much more reluctant to recommend The Exiled Fleet, or the series as a whole given that it is incomplete. Unless you like dysfunctional characters, proceed with caution.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Reviewed: 2023-11-19