Anthem's Fall, The Debut Novel by S.L. Dunn

Cover from Goodreads

Anthem's Fall is the debut novel from S.L. Dunn, and it's a pretty good debut. This isn't a straight sci-fi book. It's not set in the future and it's not about a technologically superior, space faring race. In fact, when I started reading it I forgot it was sci-fi at all. 

The story starts in New York City with a young woman named Kristen Jordan, an incredibly brilliant geneticist and a student at Columbia. She's working on a new technology that allows us to create synthetic cells that are exact copies of biological templates. The science is a little over my head, but you don't really have to follow it and Dunn doesn't spend whole chapters hashing out the science behind it like some authors do. 

The book then takes us to the planet Anthem, home to the Primus race. While they do have superior technology, that isn't really the thing this race focuses on. The Primus, you see, are vastly superior to us in strength. Dunn has created a race of people that don't need technological weapons, because none can hurt them. The only thing that can is their own prodigious strength, given to them by the Sejero genes they inherited 2000 years previously. This has led to the creation of a culture where might makes right. The strongest of their number advance the highest. Interestingly, the highest order of the Primus, the Royal blood lines, look just like humans. Humans with the strength to level cities. 

I thought the story was good. I was interested and engaged the whole time. Dunn wrote good action scenes, and the fights between the Primus are visceral and super human. It's a little hard to visualize clashes between people that are stronger than tanks, but the fights are described very well to help with that visualization. I also think Dunn hit the nail on the head when he described the way the population would react to what was happening. The total bedlam he described seems to me to be an accurate guess. 

There are a couple things I didn't like about the book. I wish Dunn would have explained Sejero genetics more fully. I wanted to know where it came from, what it meant, and what happened during the war with the Zergos in the distant past. I also wanted to know more about the link between the Primus and humanity and how Pral Nerol knew about Earth. I'm hoping those questions will be explained more fully in the later books. In term's of the writing, I had trouble believing the dialog between the two Primus soldiers on Earth. I just don't think that two people from a society so different from ours would speak in such a normal manner with each other.

Anthem's Fall is a genre bending book. There's aliens, but the fact that they fly around in space ships is minimized. No one uses technology too far ahead of what we have now, and the Vatruvian Cell technology the book focuses on seems plausible right now. The genre of the book isn't as important as the values the story is espousing. At it's core Anthem's Fall is a book about the morality of the strong dominating the weak because they can. It's a conflict between a society where the strongest dominate because no one and no technology could stop them and a protector who feels the strong have a duty to protect those at a disadvantage. It was a great debut novel, and I can't wait for the next one. Anthem's Fall is set to publish in July, so look for it soon.