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Book Review: The Iron Children
Dec. 7th, 2023 08:31 amI first read Rebecca Fraimow’s The Iron Children just after it came out, and decided that I wanted to write a good, thorough, thoughtful review of an excellent and thoughtful book. Then, of course, as often happens when one decides that one must write a particularly good review, I wrote no review at all.
But recently I reread the book and decided, hey, a late review is better than none! So here we are.
Our heroes are a small band of soldiers who need to cross a snowy mountain range to join up with the main army. Their leader, Sor Elena, is a habited nun, “habited” in this case meaning “she has transmitted her soul to a suit of armor which can be damaged but not permanently killed.” She is assisted by Asher, a nun-in-training who still inhabits a human body. They are leading perhaps a dozen Dedicates, human soldiers who have been grafted into unremovable sets of armor, including a command chip at the base of the neck which connects to a command plate controlled by Sor Elena. She can send them commands telepathically, or move their bodies like puppets if necessary.
The book has three POVs. First we have Asher, a book-smart student who has thrived in her classes, but feels unsure of herself now that she’s out in the field. Soon, she finds herself in way over her head, after Sor Elena is damaged in an ambush, leaving Asher to lead a crew of Dedicates across the snowy mountains on her own.
Or not exactly on her own. Asher has the aid of Barghest, the world’s best sergeant. Barghest is simply trying to be the best Dedicate they can be, a Lawful Good character who is, perhaps, living up to a set of laws that don’t deserve that level of devotion.
(The Dedicates all use they pronouns. It appears that they give up gender as part of the Dedication process, alongside their own names and being able to feel the sun on their faces.)
And third, we have the traitor: a first-person narrator who has taken the place of one of the Dedicates killed in the ambush in order to betray them all to the enemy. (A serious security risk of having an enormous army of almost-identical soldiers!) The loss of Sor Elena ought to make the traitor’s task easier… but since it has forced the traitor to spend more time with the Dedicates and Asher, in fact it just makes it harder…
I know the author of this book, and when we talked about it, she commented that she was surprised to find that many readers didn’t like the traitor character, particularly in earlier drafts. After all, the traitor is the only one who thinks making children into cyborg soldiers is a bad idea! Surely this is the viewpoint that the audience will identify with?
And if you put the question to the audience in the abstract, no doubt it would be. But by the time we get our first traitor POV, we’ve already spent significant time with Asher and Barghest, and have therefore identified the Dedicates as Our Guys (gender-neutral). How can we root for anyone who threatens to harm Our Guys, no matter how powerful their moral arguments ought to be?
But recently I reread the book and decided, hey, a late review is better than none! So here we are.
Our heroes are a small band of soldiers who need to cross a snowy mountain range to join up with the main army. Their leader, Sor Elena, is a habited nun, “habited” in this case meaning “she has transmitted her soul to a suit of armor which can be damaged but not permanently killed.” She is assisted by Asher, a nun-in-training who still inhabits a human body. They are leading perhaps a dozen Dedicates, human soldiers who have been grafted into unremovable sets of armor, including a command chip at the base of the neck which connects to a command plate controlled by Sor Elena. She can send them commands telepathically, or move their bodies like puppets if necessary.
The book has three POVs. First we have Asher, a book-smart student who has thrived in her classes, but feels unsure of herself now that she’s out in the field. Soon, she finds herself in way over her head, after Sor Elena is damaged in an ambush, leaving Asher to lead a crew of Dedicates across the snowy mountains on her own.
Or not exactly on her own. Asher has the aid of Barghest, the world’s best sergeant. Barghest is simply trying to be the best Dedicate they can be, a Lawful Good character who is, perhaps, living up to a set of laws that don’t deserve that level of devotion.
(The Dedicates all use they pronouns. It appears that they give up gender as part of the Dedication process, alongside their own names and being able to feel the sun on their faces.)
And third, we have the traitor: a first-person narrator who has taken the place of one of the Dedicates killed in the ambush in order to betray them all to the enemy. (A serious security risk of having an enormous army of almost-identical soldiers!) The loss of Sor Elena ought to make the traitor’s task easier… but since it has forced the traitor to spend more time with the Dedicates and Asher, in fact it just makes it harder…
I know the author of this book, and when we talked about it, she commented that she was surprised to find that many readers didn’t like the traitor character, particularly in earlier drafts. After all, the traitor is the only one who thinks making children into cyborg soldiers is a bad idea! Surely this is the viewpoint that the audience will identify with?
And if you put the question to the audience in the abstract, no doubt it would be. But by the time we get our first traitor POV, we’ve already spent significant time with Asher and Barghest, and have therefore identified the Dedicates as Our Guys (gender-neutral). How can we root for anyone who threatens to harm Our Guys, no matter how powerful their moral arguments ought to be?
