The Iron Tactician is the third novelette in the Merlin chronology, and is a fast-paced plot-driven story featuring space battles, moral choices, and some surprising royal ancestry.
Merlin’s syrinx is damaged. This is a navigation device left by the builders of the Waynet - an ancient network of inter-stellar conduits. Without his syrinx, and access to the Waynet, Merlin cannot continue on his long standing quest to find a weapon that will defeat the Huskers, who threaten to eradicate the whole of humanity.
Merlin finds out about a star system in which two factions have been fighting a long lasting war. One faction has a syrinx, and Merlin finds himself negotiating with them: he must help recover a stolen tactical computer - the Iron Tactician - in exchange for their syrinx.
There are themes here around the morality of attempting a short, sharp military victory - along with some exploration of whether that’s ever really possible. There are echoes of the previous story, Minla’s Flowers, here, where similar themes were explored. And, of course, these questions are pertinent to real life conflicts that have happened in recent memory.
However, the story primarily revolves around some plot-heavy military conflict, and it’s exciting stuff. When a book gets particularly exciting, I have an annoying (to me) habit of starting to skip forwards - so keen to find out what happens next. And I found myself having to control this habit several times as the pace picked up in the second half of the story.
The was an enjoyable episode in the Merlin series, although with more action and less depth than the first two stories, Hideaway and Minla's Flowers. And while Reynolds writes the action sequences very well, I preferred the more thoughtful content in the first two books. The series concludes in the next book, Merlin's Gun.
My rating: ★★★☆☆
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