The only author I can think of right now who writes smoother prose that's easier to fall into than Michael Gear is Seanan McGuire. Both of them write so much and so well that's it's become as instinctive for them to pour out a story onto the page as it is to order food for dinner. It almost scares me, because every novel I read in this series feels like an episode of a TV show I don't want to stop watching and that makes me want to tune in next week for the next five hundred page episode. Given that even Gear can't write that quickly, I'm wondering about whether I should dive into his 'First North Americans' books, written with his wife, Kathleen O'Neal Gear, and there are 27 of those now. I have too many books on my TBR shelves to try that right now.

For those who haven't been reading this series, well, go and do that. This is book five and the worldbuilding that Gear appeared to nail in book one just keeps on getting better and deeper. Long story short, we've made it into space and we've colonised a planet called Donovan. It's a heck of a long way away, so we have to do weird things to space to get there and that's not working too well. The initial colonists expected regular supply ships that did not show up and they found their own ways to move forward. When one finally did show up, it generated a clash between the people who run the place now and the people who were supposed to take over. Further ships have made it through, but none as expected.

This book follows quickly on from 'Unreconciled' but shifts perspectives. Gear, worldbuilder supreme, is seriously getting his teeth into Donovan—or vice versa—and gifts us with a trio of plot strands, each of which expands on the planet and its fascinating—and fascinatingly dangerous—indigenous wildlife.

The first is what the cover art ably illustrates. We have maritime scientists now, who arrived on the Ashanti but were sidelined in the previous book, as we dealt with the Unreconciled, the devolved religious zealots who were sealed on to deck three and turned cannibal. These folk survived on barely sufficient rations with the captain in the main bulk of the ship, so arrived malnourished and in need of serious recuperation. They're ready to go now and they're out in the ocean in a high tech pod to investigate the maritime life on Donovan. Given that close to everything on the planet is deadly and things tend to be bigger in the sea, you can easily imagine how well that doesn't go.

The second is allied but initially separate. With not a heck of a lot to do on the Ashanti, as it continued in regular space for the last six years of its four-year trip that took ten on its way to Donovan, they had some kids, who have yet to see a planet or indeed anything beyond the inside of a spaceship without enough food. They're on the pod too, studying rather than investigating, but, like kids everywhere, they don't follow instructions and, on a planet like Donovan, that can be deadly. They touch some mysterious algae while somewhere they shouldn't be, so they can't tell their parents about it. Which is a shame, because it gradually takes over their bodies, so transforming them into... well, I'm not going to tell you that much, even if the blurb on the front flap hints a little more than I did.

Let's just say that the first plot strand eventually gets subsumed by the second, but the third is kept separate, at least as much as really matters. They do come together eventually, because the community on Donovan is small, but the main thrust of it is completely separate. This one follows Derek Taglioni, who used to be an insufferable rich kid back on Earth but who got a serious wake-up call on the Ashanti. He's become someone very interesting indeed and that was before he got infected with quetzal TriNA. He starts this book by surviving against all odds in the Donovan wilds but he isn't entirely human anymore and he doesn't have the grip on it that Talina Perez has, so, when he starts to prove dangerous to Port Authority, she takes him out into the bush to find out what's truly inside him and how that changes who he is.

As a writer, Gear does most things well, but there a few things he does with effortless skill and they happen to be the ones he needs to nail to build a series like Donovan. Perhaps his most natural talent is to build communities, which goes beyond the usual worldbuilding that's so popular on convention panels. Donovan is a world unique in my experiences with science fiction and we keep learning more about it in each book, without ever thinking that we're close to knowing it all. However, the societies Gear builds on the planet, which may be recognisably human to us but are alien to Donovan, are even deeper, especially given that each book seems to involve new arrivals to shake up what the latest status quo has become.

We don't spend a lot of time at Port Authority in this one, so the primary characters there don't grow too much, but we learn about a new society out there in the pod on the Donovan ocean and, because Corporate Supervisor Kalina Aguila is having the worst time of it in this book, we learn a bit more about the folk she administers up at the Corporate Mine. Both are in crisis, the maritime unit because it's under attack by ocean life they and we've been hitherto unaware of, and the mine because one of their tunnels has collapsed, trapping a couple of miners and stirring up the whole area in response.

Gear also builds characters, not just in bulk in a community or society but individually, and we learn more about Talina Perez here, probably my favourite character in the series from the very beginning in book one, and plenty about Dek Taglioni, my newest favourite character. He's going through what Talina went through, but, because he had a very different background and has come to Donovan in a very different condition, he's going through it differently. Aguila's absolutely right about people coming to Donovan to leave, to find themselves or to die. We met a bunch of the people who needed to leave in previous books. We've certainly met a lot who die, and there's no shortage of those, here too. The most interesting, however, are the ones who find themselves and Talina and Dek are two of the most obvious; with Aguila not far behind them.

I can't complain about anything that Gear has provided this far in this series. It's science fiction, it's horror, it's adventure, it's fantasy, it's thriller, it's... a heck of a lot of different things, all woven seamlessly together. It's a substantial effort in worldbuilding that keeps on growing. It's a collection of quick reads, even though each one of these books runs well over four hundred pages and this one nudges past five. They're not cliffhangers, per se, but they have the same effect on me. I want to keep turning those pages and find out what's going to happen in the next chapter and the next book and, damn it, I've run out of books. We can't be done with Donovan, so I can be pretty sure that book six will show up at some point, probably next year to extrapolate from the current rate of production. But I can't wait. I want book ten and book twenty and book fifty, dammit! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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