Emancipation: A Military Archaeological Space Adventure by Craig Martelle
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The sixth and final entry of Craig Martelle and Brad R. Torgersen’s Zenophobia series opens with a pre-prologue excerpt where Sankar, the Tigroid protagonist of the entire saga, recovers an old computer archive. The following prologue sees a robotic Swarm moving through outer space, with the main chapters seeing Sankar conversing with Colonel Callahan, a member of the fabled Ur-Race, who knows humans will be surprised by the existence of the zenos. Callahan provides his fleet of Confederation vessels, which Sankar’s love interest, Ausha, fears will conquer the zenos, regardless of whether they win the war against the forthcoming machines.
An outpost in the middle of space has zenos from the primary races in living conditions divergent from those on their homeworld, which the Devourers target. The adversarial Direwolf damages the Bilkinmore while the machines attack the Golongals on their homeworld. Sankar ultimately finds himself in alien surroundings, with a mystical cute responding to one’s genetic makeup introduced as a MacGuffin. A brief focus goes on an elderly Golongan woman named Bela (alternatively spelled Bella), who became tired of the Oligarchy and the Families, consequentially coming out of retirement.
Dekron becomes a notable enemy in the latter half of the novel as a female named Diio survives the wreck of the Direwolf when it crash-lands. Ausha, Sankar, and a random stranger named Zee find themselves in a collapsing building, having to deal with Dekron, who pleads for his life. One chapter features Maglor the Goroid surveying the decimated colony of Ommo and expressing his love for Olympus Alloy. On Golongal, Cho-Ma Continent’s Army contingent defects to the Golongan Peoples Revolution, while the stranded Diio tries to find help by taking another spaceship she happens to find.
Back to Dekron, he yearns to prevent his enemies from escaping, having his subservient robots chase them. Diio finds herself in the darkness, hearing a transmission implying that Ocklar could be going through torture. The fate of the Direwolf is settled, with Sankar and Zee rushing through the capital city of the planet Artemis IV, with Ausha’s life imperiled, but the cube is her possible salvation. A moment of limbo comes for Sankar, who eventually meets Pacjolal, after which the war against the machines concludes. The epilogue sees Sankar and Ausha on Earth, walking along a beach.
After finishing this series, I can honestly say that it fell short of my expectations since while I usually enjoy novels starring animal characters, all six stories suffer from most of the pitfalls that plague literature of its kind. That the collection doesn’t utilize the Kindle X-Ray feature greatly mars the experience, given the near-total absence of reminders of the species of the various characters or various terms and entities, along with the constant leap in perspectives within the same chapters. In the end, Emancipation is an appropriate title for the conclusion of the Zenophobia saga since I am glad to be free from reading it and will happily avoid anything the authors have written or will write in the future.
St. Gallen's Scribblings 