Travel Documents 91: Gladiators: The Dakotaraptor Riders Prequels
Genre: Far Future, SF, Space Colonization, Social Change, Social Upheaval
The Dust Cover Copy
Far-future gladiators compete on the backs of dinosaurs aboard orbital space colosseums!
2000 years in our future, an empire’s holiest festival is celebrated with dinosaur races and gladiatorial games on the backs of armored titans. These gladiators and the dinosaurs they ride become a visible display of the Republic’s power, captive fighters adored by millions yet compelled to battle not only the tyrannosaurs and other genetically engineered beasts of the arena, but also the loneliness in their hearts.
Yet Empire is a fragile thing. Tonight, on the red sands of the arena and inside the hollow asteroid where the dinosaurs are grown, the secrets these gladiators discover will shake their entire world. Join us aboard the orbital colosseums and meet Egret (Livia Tenning), Jaguar (Nyota Madaki), and Timberwolf (Mai Changying)!
The Scene
Worldbuilding
With the elegance of a page out of The Art of War, this book has already enmeshed you in a world of watchful cameras, painfully unequal power structures, and genetically modified entertainment that is the prequel to the Dakotaraptors Series. And that’s all before you meet the protagonists.
This is one of the signatures of Stant Litore’s writing: through his use of language, he wraps you in moments. He turns a concept that would be clunky, camp or just plain weird in other hands into something as natural as feeling the stretch of your own muscles when you move. His focus on the personal aspect of tech in the lives of his characters gives the entire world an intuitive gravity of reality.
Oh, and by the way, did I mention the science used in here rocks? The genetic modifications to animals and plants fit the varied terraformed environments discussed in the book, and the technological augmentation made to the main character has an appropriate metabolic cost in the form of calorie requirements.
But Litore isn’t writing hard sci-fi: no info-dumps on what that thing that jumped out of the water or buzzed in the bushes was. Occasionally he even goes out on a limb and throws in names for animal species you have absolutely no reference for. Here, that actually works, because you’re already in the place: salt spray in your face or the smell of loam in your nose. At that point, a reader’s mind runs over the phrase ‘you will defend your family when the soar-whales leap over your boat’, says ‘soar-whale? Well of course there are alien whales here,’ and pictures whatever they like to fit their dream of the seas on Titan. There’s a magic in world building that leaves you a little room to do some of the dreaming yourself.
The Crowd
Characterization
And once the world has grabbed you, you begin to know the people. there’s Nyota. There’s Jaguar. There’s a girl so honed by the whims of others that she has to be forgotten on a world filled with monsters to remember who she is.
Nyota’s story is given depth when we read the tale of of her trainer and elder sister in arms, Mia. Timberwolf. Such control, masking such roiling fire, is something that you’ll have to read to truly believe. And counterpointing each of them is the eerie, crystalline thinking of Egret, and the deeply wounded child she once was subsumed by the cold and driven woman she has become. Through the eyes of these three women, we can truly see all facets of the control measures an empire uses, and all the glittering facets of the human soul.
The Lingo
Writing Style
If you enjoyed Cloud Atlas, you’re going to like Gladiators. It has a similar blend of high dreams and gritty reality. Most of this story goes on inside the heads of the Daughters of Liberty as they navigate their personal circumstances. Sound boring? Not a chance. With the clear poignancy that cuts like a knife and cleanses like water, we watch these girls come through one shattering revelation after another and grow with each. And man, do they ever get shattered.
The higher musings are grounded nicely in the very visceral things each character thinks about as she fights to survive: I hate the taste of this meat, I love this tree, I need to run faster than my sister, this dinosaur hide is thick, I stink and I need a bath, I’m lost and that pisses me off, I’m going to be eaten by the nanites inside me if I don’t find food right f$%# now. This keeps the story real and allows the dreams each character has has a solid foundation on which to stand. The slow realizations about the culture the girls belong to are a powerful but not preachy social commentary, reminding us that words and concepts can be the wool pulled over our eyes. In this book we watch slaves worship Lady Liberty and cheer when blood is shed on her altars. In this culture, people destroy one another in the name of the Goddess Love. It’s a powerful image. Through these womens’ musings, we also get a clear look at what we really are as a species when all our tech and toys and social norms are stripped away. We’re hungry. We’re frightened. And we’re longing for something or someone to share life with. We need to bond so badly that we’ll form emotional ties to anything: a tree, a spear, a dinosaur. We want to love.
The Moves
Plot
The revelation of each character in these interlinked tales goes on through the eyes of each central character, which has a wonderful and sometimes painful result. As Nyota grows in herself, each of the other characters grows and takes on new dimensions of complexity in her memories of them. Mai Changying begins as a stern trainer, respected and feared in Nyota’s mind. She grows into something evil, a purveyor of punishment, a jail-keeper with poison in her hands and steel in her eyes. Ultimately, she is only a woman, as helpless in the face of the system that created them both as Nyota was and just as determined. Nyota’s own father goes through a similar transformation: from simple memory of comfort to an inspiration, a bereft victim, a leader, then a horror. Eventually he too is only a man doing what he can. The same experience is had through Mai’s eyes and emotions, and Egret’s clear, distant perspective gives us the final polish on these interlinked gems, letting us truly and clearly see how it would feel to stand staring at a crowd who believes they adore you, and see the entire system teaching them to scream for you as a gigantic machine in which all people are cogs. It will send a shiver down your spine. But Mai’s ferocious discipline will show you honor, and Nyota will show you the power of connection and love in the face of overwhelming odds.
Overall Rating
It’s easy to forget the deep urges that drive us to do all that is good and all that is evil, but this book reminds us. At rock bottom, humans possess just five things: Fear, resolve, anger, wit, and empathy. By the end of the story, these Daughters Of Liberty hold these things in balance. I was glad to write this review, because it let me stay in this world a little longer. This book needs to be on the shelf of anyone who dreams about the future, the past, or the possibilities. Give the little kid who loved dinosaurs and space ships in you a treat.