Review: Forgotten Ruin

Forgotten Ruin by Jason Anspach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review. It is not a strong 4-star review. This book is definitely better than 3-stars, but not by a lot.

The premise of this book is that some sort of nano-virus has been released into the world. The virus causes technology to break down and humans to experience unexplained mutations. The news reports of the spreading virus are sparse, cryptic, and a bit scary.

The response is to use some technology located at the US military Area 51 to send teams into the future to restart civilization after the nano-virus has passed. Each team includes various flavors of US special forces along with a 3D replicator that has been hardened against the nano-virus. Our specific team of heroes has a couple of civilians along for the ride. One is to run the 3D replicator. One is a vaguely defined scientist. One is a politician/administrator who is just as demonstrably useful as one might expect.

It turns out that the time travel technology isn't very precise and the teams "land" anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand years in the future.

Our heroes are about 10,000 years downstream from their departure point. They discover a world that has transformed into some flavor of Tolkien-esque/Dungeons and Dragons reality that includes orcs, trolls, dragons, elves, and magic.

Conceptually, this is an interesting book. The characters and action certainly held my attention all the way to the end.

But....

The setting is largely derivative of Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons with a smattering of Stephen King tossed in for good measure. The setting doesn't seek to carve any new genre paths and instead overlays the narrative onto the existing understanding of the fantasy genre.

The narrative includes a fair amount of gun porn - rhetorically stroking the barrel, so to speak. Most of this is done early on and the later sections of the book are better once the fondling of various gun calibers has been concluded. As this is MilSF, one expects a bit of focus on guns, but perhaps a little less would leave more room for the story and characters.

The narrative includes a bit of Ranger porn - stroking the Ranger ego with Rangers doing Ranger stuff while Rangering. Eventually, the Ranger porn gets out of the way and we develop a relationship with the individual Rangers which improves the story in the later sections.

The narrative doesn't really reach for much in terms of plot or character development. I am a fan of Nick Cole's earlier solo works where he did reach for something extra. This new series seems to be coming from the Anspach/Cole MilSF Amalagamated Factory, Inc. - entertaining fiction cranked out for you!

It is a fine book that is reasonably entertaining. Worth the money you will spend. But it isn't really much more than utilitarian entertainment. I might return to the series, later on, to see how things shake out.

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