Boris Johnson waffled,
his way to Number 10.
But once he’d arrived,
he bumbled and bungled,
coz he’d not a single ken!
He watched as Britain burned.
He fiddled like Nero of old.
And all the waffle and cavil,
could not resurrect the dead
he had spurned!
His repudiations of improbity were lies,
wrapped up in a web of deceit.
Ten centuries of courage he’s wasted,
Britain a joke on international retreat.
I could easily write herein that “Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War is an excellent book," and "that I strongly urge that you should read it!” and that would be an accurate if somewhat short summation of my feelings about the novel. However, such short-hand recommendation would not be doing justice to either the book or Mr Powell – and so - without giving any plot lines away, I shall attempt to give you some better reasons to part with your hard earned money and purchase this extraordinary novel.
Firstly - the book.
‘Embers of War’ is a thoroughly modern book, and that is an important distinction. Too many contemporary sci-fi authors are stuck in the past; which is kind of ironic, considering most of the stories they write are set way, way in the future.
By this I mean, I read a lot of books, and in my own personal opinion, too many authors these days follow a rut in the road, up an ever steepening gradient, laid down by those golden authors of Sci-Fi such as Asimov, Clarke, and Aldiss.
This is not a bad thing, and is no criticism you understand. I myself, having had practically no formal schooling worth a damn; am often asked – “But how then did you learn to write books?” and I always reply with the simple truth of - “By learning from the best!” As an autodidactic this has always worked for me, but I recognise the trap of predictability one can fall into when writing, and all too often when reading a new novel I find that I can already guess the plotline well before I get to the meat of the story, (mainly because somebody – usually one of the abovementioned smartarses – has already been there and done that). ‘Embers of War’ does not possess this failing!
For certain there are a few familiar Sci-Fi tropes contained within its pages. The laws of physics for example, do not give a hoot about an author’s artistic narrative, and these laws must be gotten around with believability for the reader, or the story collapses, becomes just another nickel and dime novel that you can throw away without compunction.
What Gareth L. Powell does, and very cleverly too I might add; is to take the greatest limitation of the Laws of Physics when writing a space opera, ‘the speed of light’, and turn it into a major part of the plot.
I won’t go into detail here; I do not want to spoil your surprise. But you only get a real sense of the power of this intrigue in the second novel (which I am currently devouring) and that in this writer’s experience is new.
The first novel ‘Embers of War’ could stand alone - and does, even if you never progressed to book two, you would be satisfied. But within its cleverly crafted pages, the story sets out a plot which is only ever hinted at, but never explored; even whilst it pursues its current story with thrilling vigour, leaving us thirsting for more. It is a desert in need of hydration and, as I am currently discovering, it is a thirst quickly quenched as book two's plot thrusts you straight into the meat of the story, with something akin to savagery.
What is particularly fun in ‘Embers of War’ (for me that is,) is it that Mr Powell has mastered something so many current author’s fail at - the art of dialogue.
Too often I find characters in modern (and some classic) novels to be stilted in their language, their interactions with others trite or too explanative. It is as though some authors imagine the reader to be too dense to understand, that not every single thing needs to be spelled out. John Steinbeck was a master of this, as was Raymond Chandler.
Mr Powell too avoids these traps with easy grace, and a subtle humour. His writing style reminds me greatly of one of my all time favourite authors, the late Julian May - who sadly passed in 2017; but that is opinion only. What I can say for certain, what is not opinion, is that Gareth L. Powell is a great writer, far better than I, and somebody as an autodidactic I in turn will be learning from.
His prose is easy and loose, yet he olds tight to his story. There is a steady feel of accomplishment to the work that sucks you in. I am particularly pleased by the fact that unlike some, he is not afraid to say the word “Fuck,” when the story calls for it, but never over does the expletives for the sake of shock.
If I had to give ‘Embers of War’ a mark out of ten – and I suppose I really must – I would have to give the novel a 9.5 out of 10. The remaining 0.5 of a mark I withhold, simply because the clever bastard might get big headed if I gave it the TEN it deserves.
Oh by the way –
"Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War is an excellent book, and I strongly urge you to read it!”
(a lament)
In Azovstal, Kalyna stands,
alongside his fallen comrades.
Yet unbowed, unbroken,
and faithful to his duty,
he remains until relieved.
For his is a heart
made out of the
purest Ukranium,
and upon this rock
the lifeblood of
Russia will crash,
and the white stork
will soar once more
across these fertile lands!
For all the heroes of Azovstal.
Sniper in the eternal night
you hunt your prey
and avoid the light.
Ready to fight
in any Oblast,
you squeeze your finger
and an Orc is past.
Sniper in the eternal night,
please end a Russian's
will to fight.
The amount of personal fear people are trying to disguise (with what they deem sensible arguments) for us ‘not fighting Vladimir Putin's Barbarians’ is understandable, but it is wrongheaded.
"We are all going to die."
The 'when & what' that kills us does not really matter; all that matters when the time comes, is the 'why and how' we face that moment!
Now some – perhaps many, will dismiss this idea as silly rhetoric, and that's okay, I don’t hold it against you, it's just fear talking. Fortunately, most of you have never faced imminent violent death, nor willingly and deliberately put yourself on the line for anything, after all - that's what you have us warriors for isn’t it? But sometimes the choice for war comes to your doorstep, unbidden, forced upon you by madmen and their almost inhuman wickedness.
This is one of those times!
"VLADIMIR PUTIN WILL NOT STOP UNLESS WE STOP HIM."
The sooner we do, the sooner we in the West stand and draw a proverbial line in the sand – and importantly - 'give Putin an out' - the less likely it is he goes nuclear – (or is allowed to by his Generals who remember - all want to survive).
In combat or when facing down evil, you know that not everybody will come out of it unscathed, or even survive. But you fight anyway and take your chances; not because you want to be a hero, or for some idealised notion of honour - but because to do otherwise invites disaster for your tribe.
The Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island understood that, and the whole of Ukraine, both civilians and soldiers alike - have learned that! For them this is a war of survival, a war about their right to exist at all.
Nothing is certain, but our fate is our own, it is not predetermined. We in the West can choose to run and hide or - like our fathers before us - we can challenge this Fascist who rapes women, who with wonton abandon murders children, destroys cities, who vanishes whole communities to his death camps in Siberia. A future under the dominion of such a man, under such an empire of evil, is not worth the living.
Our fathers fought Hitler's evil not knowing they would win. Not knowing they would survive. How can we ever hope to face their shade if we do not do the same as they, now that it is our time to fight?
This is not rhetoric; it is simple self preservation logic.
Had Britain and France acted after Guernica in 1937, actively opposed Hitler’s ambitions and stamped down hard on Franco’s cruelty, World War 2, might never have happened. Our inaction then saw 66 million people die later. This war in Ukraine is no different.
Vladimir Putin will not stop unless we stop him, and the longer we wait the more convinced he becomes that we are too weak, too self-indulgent to oppose his villainy. Already his voice boxes are daily calling for a purging of Europe and a literal destruction of the UK. How long before our Leaders take his word for it, how long before they believe him?
This war in Ukraine is not some localised conflict which does not, will not affect us here in the West. Ukraine’s harvest feeds over half of us. Do you seriously believe Vladimir Putin, whose own people go hungry because of his greed and mismanagement, cares one hoot about ensuring we are fed, when he needs to secure food for his own people before they turn on him en-mass?
This is not a localised war that we are not involved in, the consequence of which will leave us untouched. This is the Anschluss. This is the annexation of the Sudetenland, the annexation of Bohemia, the annexation of the Czechoslovak Republic all rolled into one. This is a re-enactment of ‘The Phoney War’ (unless you live in Ukraine where it is all too real), that moment that exists between Peacetime and all out Terror, and we are all of us - LIVING IN THAT MOMENT.
World War 3 has already begun, and too many of our Leaders are making all the same mistakes as Chamberlin. If we stand by and refuse to fight – to oppose the Fascists with all we have as we did after Guernica, the same outcome will befall the world now as it did then. Not everybody is fated to survive the war –but that is the choice that lays before us - and the Heroes of Snake Island knew that.
"Go tell to Sparta, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to her laws, we lie."
Across the golden fields
Of corn and wheat and rye,
Where the Dnieper runs eternally:
Comes a Ukrainian battle cry.
“Remember Bucha my brothers,
Let our legions unleash their wrath,
for all of our lost mother’s
in whose blood the Orcs have washed.”
And down in destroyed Mariupol
The Azov, they make their final stand,
Whilst the Russian Orcs rape Ukrainian women,
And torment the very land.
They burned a city and rejoiced
In their bleak and blackened hearts,
As NATO watched silently
Afraid to do its part?
Blood flows in the Dnieper now,
Turning its blue waters into red,
And all the heroes of Ukraine
Silently bow their head.
But soon they will rise, and Putin fall
And their flag will once again fly,
Across all Ukraine’s golden fields
Of corn, and wheat, and rye!
This is a Husband
This is a Man,
a Patriot, a Believer,
a Soldier who Stands.
This is a Hero,
Who refuses to run,
He prefers kind words
but will carry a gun.
This is what Love is,
through sorrow
and pain, and with him
as their Leader, Ukraine will rise
once again!
The streets of Bucha
echo now, to the caw of
carrion crow,
and the dead lie
in the gutters,
Russia's liberation
so we're told...
"is a de-Nazification"
carried out by
Putin's brand of the SS,
wearing Neo-Nazi logo's,
across their soulless
Nazi Chests.
This fool, this blockhead,
this halfwit dimmed.
This dunderheaded misanthrope
whose mind is full of sin.
This clodpoll, this nincompoop,
this schlemiel, this useless prat,
should surely sit in a corner
and wear the dunces hat.
This fathead, this cretin,
this clown, a disgusting liar too.
This ignoramus, this pilgarlic,
An object of ridicule!
Like a lie within in a falsehood
like a con within a scam,
he spins his blatant untruths
directly live to cam.
They never end, and
have no beginning,
but they make your
head spin round.
This bottled blondes falsehoods,
turn reality all round,
making what we universally
called up, and framing it as down.
And his pet reporters gurn with him,
letting the shyster off the hook,
because truth is past irrelevant
to those who don’t give a fuck!
Zelenskyy stands,
as a fixed point for good,
representing ‘human decency’,
and ‘Ukrainian brotherhood’.
The weight of all our hopes
we see squarely on his brow,
with resistance to the tyrant
his daily waking vow.
Zelenskyy’s choice is to remain,
to stand, and not to flee.
To face Putin’s deadly challenge,
in the name of Democracy.
Meanwhile in the west,
our leaders cower in fear.
“Please don’t hurt us,” they cry,
as the Russian bear draws near.
And across the steppes
the monsters eyes,
look ever to the west.
Up next Moldova? Slovakia?
Perhaps even Bucharest?
At what point
do we Resist?
When do was say “Enough!”
When will our steel legions
challenge this powder puff?
Putin is KGB not Spetsnaz.
He’s Lloyd Fredendall,
not Iskandar.
We must stand in courage
side by side,
with Crimea’s brave Tartars.
It is not jingoism,
to say “we must stand”.
It is a practical matter of survival,
and the question is nigh at hand.
Do we go into the night,
mewling like enfeebled dogs?
Or do we resist the Tyrant
and all his Demagogues?
And if this indeed be our end,
let them at least say we fought,
against the shadow of Vladimir Putin,
and his devilish cohorts.
Hearken now my brothers,
the sands of time ran out.
The devil is at our door,
And Democracy’s lights
he will put out.
Putin calls for a ‘Purification’.
And an end to all free speech.
He murders opposition, Journalists,
and babies in their sleep.
His darkness spreads ever west,
and as our leaders sit and dither,
Ukraine heroes stand and fight;
a people he cannot wither.
So like Zelenskyy let us stand,
and resist this dark mirror from the past,
Putin’s ‘Empire of Evil’
until our moments be our last.
The ROAD TO KYIV
Across the steppes they journey,
Through war, and toil, and sweat.
They kill, they lust, they perish,
A Russian Cataphract.
On distant shores,
In cerulean skies,
The burning lust
of wanton lies,
Set the one against the other,
To murder those
they once
Called brother.
For Rape and Death
Is their legacy.
Their conscience devoid
of simple charity.
They plunder, they sin,
Never counting the cost
Of the countries they’ve killed,
Or the men that they’ve lost.
They slander, and slaughter
For pecuniary gain,
Leaving the poor to suffer
And die broken, in pain.
And the men that return
Fragile souls they have flayed,
Cry out for some succour
In their nights like a shade.
“We are damned, we are lost,
Hear us," they cry.
And the night closes in;
And the men start to die,
Once more in their dreams
The gore thick on their hands,
Of all the mother’s children they’ve killed
In Ukraine’s sun uplit lands...
Albion Has Fallen.
We here in Great Britain once aspired to intelligent leaders; today we applaud the dullard, the stupid, the criminal, the morally corrupt, the liars and mountebanks, the buffoons, the perverts, the traitors.
How did we come to this? How did we - a nation that pretty much kick started the modern world - descend so rapidly into the vacuum of spineless imbecility? We have allowed ourselves to become a nation of recreant backstabbers, a country populated by idiotic poltroons, ruled over by elitists so privileged, so assured of their pre-eminence, that they no longer even bother with truth, or indeed any form of intellectualism. Instead our leaders rely upon that most base of all human control mechanisms, they rely upon lying, openly and absurdly. And they do these things in the full knowledge that we know that they are lying - but also that we will never, not matter what evidence of their many deceits is proven, ever rise up against their appalling betrayals, their corruption, and their perversions of truth.
I have long said that “We don’t have a Government, we have a Mafia,” and I stand by that assessment. With brutal malice aforethought and, by deliberate design, these Tories have undermined the very pillars of our society. They have, in collusion with a foreign power (Russia) sought to wreck a ruin upon the social structures of Great Britain, weakening our Justice systems, denuding our once mighty economy, enfeebling our military capability, and breaking down our social unity. Any unbiased appraisal of these four areas of our human endeavour would tell you that the Tories (Russia) have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and that Great Britain is now laid bare.
Today - we as a people are reviled across the world, and it is not because of our leaders are overtly criminal, that their perverted dominion rots our national soul like a cancer – no - instead we are detested as a people because despite being in full knowledge of Conservative Parties treacherous and criminal behaviour, people still voted them into power, baying like mewling dogs, begging their masters for some small scraps off their table of plenty. People everywhere do not look to Great Britain and think ‘there stands a nation of intellectuals, of heroes, of even law and order,’ hell people around the world do not even fear us any longer, instead they view us as a nation populated by intellectually stunted, mewling cowards, led by the very least amongst us!
The Tories have broken Great Britain, and I fear we can no longer rise again.
I
Ye who run before the fight
Who scurry away into the Night,
Like rodents in a stinking sewer
To hide, to fester, in uncontested manure.
II
Your morality is to run like dogs,
To let us be ruled by demagogues,
Who from their gleaming ivory towers,
Call the rest of us 'worthless showers'
III
And as they concoct a stinking brew
The Tory leavers let you stew
In a broth of outright racist lies,
And twisted truths of British tithes.
IV
So you sit there and ponder,
The words of these lesser men,
Whose faltering agenda
is not hard to ken.
V
Michael Gove offers us,
A vision of a golden age;
Where men can stand erect,
And earn a living wage.
VI
But do not be deceived, my friends.
For all his words are false!
He, like is fellow conspirators,
Has been bought by a nonce.
VII
Lurking in the background,
our true enemy gurns his smile,
And gloats as we buy
Into his stinking squalid bile.
VIII
That it is the 'Other' who is to blame,
The Muslim and the Black,.
The malodorous Brussels,
Full of its noisome bureaucrats.
IX
Over and over, ad-nausea
they tell us of Brussels foul odour;
As though they are somehow,
not part of that Elite order?
X
Their malicious policies have killed
Thousands of your countrymen.
But don't let their hatred of the common man,
Interrupt your corrupted ken.
XI
And now the hour closes
And that which us divides,
Was sown by amoral criminals
To gain Cameron's golden prize!
XII
These are not intellectual giants,
Nor be they men of valour.
Instead, they are dirty little whores,
And it's England they'll deflower!
XIII
Cast not away your ability
To think for yourself;
Stop listening to the coward,
The darker side of self!
XIV
You have to be better,
Than those who've sowed the seeds of hate,
who feed us all their malice
who seek a Fascist Sate.
XV
Instead awaken, look up
to an endless sky of hope,
Do not let these lesser men,
Take you for a dope.
XVI
Something wicked this way comes
And it is led by Michael Gove,
You say you want your freedom,
But he scheme's to take your trove.
XVII
He is a monstrous criminal.
A malicious force for ill.
And if you follow this evil man,
You'll find it a bitter pill.
XVIII
For they will sell off everything
that all our fathers fought for:
and the Golden Age they promise you,
is but a castle in the sky!
XIX
It's a dream of something that was once for them,
but in truth, it never was for us!
The garden of Merry old England ,
where the plebs know their place!
X
And thus they seek ever
To return us to that time,
Where the poor are made meek
And demanding equality is a crime.
XXI
Oh England do not be deceived.
By these criminal's intent.
They do not mean to serve you
And are not heaven sent.
XXII
They intend to rape you,
To impose a tyranny of their own,
And keep their beloved golden bitch,
Securely on her throne.
XXIII
It is hard to free fools,
from the chains they love.
But there is no freedom waiting
No freedom and no love.
XXIV
The other side of leaving?
It's not a golden door.
It's the death of a dream
And a dark chasm without a floor!
XXV
What fools are men,
Who swap one set of chains for another,
If you want freedom
Stand with your brother!
XXVI
But that is beyond you now,
For you've been sold the lie
That by leaving the EU
Despotism, it will die?
XXVII
Ah, do not make me laugh,
For their protestations are all false,
They are the tyrants, and we?
are the targets of their wrath.
XXVIII
Michael Gove and his ilk, they hate you.
Heed me, for these words I speak are true;
They want an England that once was,
Where its bounty is never shared with you!
XXIX
We come into this world
unknowing of the past,
Of whom and when, and where and what;
And how it came to pass,
XXX
That a privileged elite few?
raped the world, and ripped it all asunder
As they stole for themselves our collective wealth,
through war and bloody plunder!
XXXI
These men are not patriots,
They are pirates through and through;
Thieves, knaves, rapists;
And their prey my friend,
Is YOU.
XXXII
No tax levied
Ever made a Rich Man Poor:
That, my friend, is the true enemy
Knocking on your door!
XXXIII
These elitist rich boys
Tell you. "Trust me you'll all be fine."
'Give me all your power
and I'll make your money mine.' [sotto voce]
XXXIV
They do not love you
They hate you.
Your very existence is a threat,
To their dominion and the money
That they ill begat.
XXXV
And now the dance is nearly over,
The darkness awaits.
So make your mark, and prepare yourself,
To pass, through the devils unholy gate.
