Book Review: CRUCIBLE by Moira Katson

I came across Moira Katson’s new novel CRUCIBLE: Book 1 of the Novum Trilogy in a book release announcement by Tammy Salyers. In her bio, Moira mentioned she lived in “the frozen North.” I got a good chuckle as I was watching it snow outside my window—in April. Feeling a literary connection to a kindred (frozen) spirit, I purchased a copy of Crucible.

Wow. Just wow.

As a writer, there are times when I feel envy for another’s abilities. This is one of those times. Katson writes with the kind of grace that makes me believe the phone book would sound lyrical if she wrote it. Her style reminded me of Frank Herbert’s Dune (the first one, not any of the follow-ons) in the way the words seemed to leap off the page and capture my imagination.

Crucible opens with the city of Guan-Yu under attack by unknown, but human, assailants. 40,000 souls are annihilated and the city is covered in radiation to make it uninhabitable.

The inhabitants of Guan-Yu are pawns in an interstellar chess game. An alien race called the Aireni, set themselves up as “angels” over an agrarian human colony. Using the natives as breeding stock, the angels developed super-soldiers, calling them royals and setting them at the highest tier of the Aireni-imposed caste system. The royals are the Aireni’s weapon against the Great Evil, a mysterious entity that consumed the Aireni home world.

The League of Human Nations finds out about the Aireni super-soldiers. A rogue war hero, realizing the potential danger to his race, commandeers a ship and destroys Guan-Yu in a suicide mission. But the crafty Aireni have a contingency plan. They send out three groups of refugees from Guan-Yu to make a home in the wild and preserve the bloodline until the “angels” return. Together they will defeat the Great Evil.

In my opinion, what Katson does best is point of view. She buries her reader deep in the head of her characters, creating intense, emotionally developed narrators for her tale. Anchoring the action to the points of view of three different Guan-Yu refugees and one of the attackers, she hops from character to character, telling the same story multiple ways. Yeah, that’s right, she has four main characters—and she totally pulls it off.

A caution (and a whole paragraph of mixed metaphors): Crucible is a slow-burn. Katson doesn’t rush her story; this is a marathon, not a 5K. We’re not making beer here, people, we’re making brandy, and good brandy needs to be aged. While this book is a complete novel, Katson clearly intends to play out the larger story over the entire trilogy, so you will want to read these books in order.

And, when Book 2 is available, I shall.

Read Crucible. Highly recommended.

David Bruns is a speculative fiction writer from Minnesota.  His latest novel, IRRADIANCE, the first book in The Dream Guild Chronicles, is available on Amazon. Check out his website for a free short story

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