inverarity | Book Review: Iron Gray Sea, by Taylor Anderson

In the seventh Destroyerman book, alt-World War II is raging.

Roc, 2012, 448 pages

In Taylor Anderson's acclaimed Destroyermen series, a parallel universe adds an extraordinary layer to the drama of World War II. Now, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy, the crew of the USS Walker, and their allies battle an ever-growing host of enemies across the globe in a desperate battle for freedom.

War has engulfed the other earth. With every hard-won victory and painful defeat, Matt Reddy and the Allies encounter more friends-and even more diabolical enemies. Even, at last, in the arms of the woman he loves, there is little peace for Reddy. The vast sea, and the scope of the conflict, have trapped him too far away to help on either front, but that doesn't mean he and Walker can rest. Cutting short his "honeymoon," Reddy sails off in pursuit of Hidoiame, a rogue Japanese destroyer that is wreaking havoc in Allied seas. Now that Walker is armed with the latest "new" technology, he hopes his battle-tested four-stacker has an even chance in a straight-up fight against the bigger ship - and he means to take her on.

Elsewhere, the long-awaited invasion of Grik "Indiaa" has begun, and the Human-Lemurian Alliance is pushing back against the twisted might of the Dominion. The diplomatic waters seethe with treachery and a final, terrible plot explodes in the Empire of New Britain Isles. Worse, the savage Grik have also mastered "new" technologies and strategies. Their fleet of monstrous ironclads - and an army two years in the making-are finally massing to strike.

The tale of the Destroyermen, World War II sailors pulled from our world to an alternate Earth populated by sapient lemur-people and dinosaur-people, has become a global war on this new world. With more factions being added in each volume, it's becoming as big as the real WWII, spanning from North America to Africa and Asia (I don't think we've reached alt-Europe yet). The heart of the series is still Captain Matthew Reddy and the USS Walker, but many chapters are told from other POVs in other parts of the world.

So to recap: we have the Grand Alliance, made up of Americans from Earth, mostly drawn from our World War II, the Lemurians, and the pseudo-British Empire made up of descendants of the East India Company. They have been joined by a handful of Japanese defectors and captured or rogue Grik.

Against them is the Grik empire, vast and stretching across most of India and Asia. They are being advanced both technologically and socially by Japanese soldiers also pulled from our Earth's World War II. When we first encountered the Grik, they were mindless monsters. Then we learned that Grik elites were intelligent. Now the Grik elite are learning to actually train their warrior hordes to function like a disciplined army. With ironclads, zeppelins, gunpowder, and vast numerical superiority, they now pose an existential threat to humans and Lemurians.

On the other side of the world is the Dominion, descended from an Inquisitorial Catholic Church fused with the Aztec religion. Long the enemies of the Empire and posing a lesser but still significant threat, the Dominion barely appears in this book except for a couple of short chapters featuring a Lemurian and an American destroyerman who were captured by them in the last book.

Iron Gray Sea features the Grand Alliance growing and learning the difficulties of managing a multiple theater war. Both Lemurians and humans make mistakes and find themselves for the first time experiencing conflicting goals, much as happened in our World Wars.

The book builds up to a couple of climactic battles. One is strategically insignificant but since it's Matthew Reddy and the USS Walker, it's obviously the most dramatic. Reddy has been hunting another rogue Japanese destroyer, the Hidoiame ("Terrible Rain") since the last book, so the cat and mouse game between them takes up many chapters in this one before the final battle.

The other battle is the big one between the human-Lemurian fleet and the new Japanese-Grik ironclads, led by the mad Japanese captain Kurakawa, who has become the scenery-chewing villain of the series, so evil and megalomaniacal that even the Grik are starting to think there's something wrong with him.

There are also some side plots involving yet more "refugees" from different time periods of Earth, and even hints that maybe not everyone is coming from the same Earth.

This series is long, and each book makes only a little bit of progress in the timeline, but I've stopped complaining about the grind, because there's enough meat in each book to make it interesting, even though the characters are often just archetypes whose major personality traits are repeated to us over and over.

Also by Taylor Anderson: My reviews of Into the Storm, Crusade, Maelstrom, Distant Thunders, Rising Tides, and Firestorm.

My complete list of book reviews.