Yes, I realize that my reading list is far from recent.

I have read many of Tanya Huff’s fantasy novels, but this was my first of her science fiction. An Ancient Peace by Tanya Huff is the first novel in the Peacekeeper Trilogy.

My first impressions of this book was that it was dense. It felt like pretty heavy reading, as I was dumped into a complex science fiction world filled with multiple alien races, a crew with deep relationships and a general feeling of history. It wasn’t until I reached the end of the book and looked it up I discovered this is the second series starring the same main character: Gunnery Sargent Torin Kerr. Good news, I have lots more reading to look forward to. Bad news, it makes the start of the book rather challenging to get into.

While I still feel a little like I am missing something, it helped that most of the narrative focused around Torin. Grounded by the Gunnery Sargent, I was able to navigate the rest of the book. I found the story compelling enough I want to read the sequels. I like the strength of the main protagonist; Torin is a strong and respected individual. She is legendary within the military circles of the Corps. While Torin certainly kicks butt throughout the book, she also has an attitude and force of personality that make for a very strong character.

The technology and science fiction elements were interesting, particularly the concept of an evil, manipulative organic plastic. There are multiple alien races. They are not variations on humans either. In fact, some of the races are very different indeed, with at least one being described like a group of sentient giant spiders. More than different appearances the races have different common characteristics. This is often reflected in the dialogue. Huff uses different speech patterns and occasionally an invented phrase to help convey this information. For me the most interesting was the use of zi and zer as unique pronouns for one particular race.

The rest of the crew, a mix of different species and skills, was also interesting. There are five others in Torin’s current crew; three of them are also ex-military while two are civilians. I found Torin’s distinction between military personal and civilian personal interesting. She certainly has a sense that those who have been to war are expected to deal with violence, while civilians should be protected. This really helps to forward some of the conversation about the horror of war.

There are a lot of poignant moments, scenes that discuss the impact of war, discuss racism and deal with preconceptions. It is a strongly written science fiction story, not a light read, but certainly a good one. Easily worth a rating of 5/5 stars.