Review: Gun Runner by Larry Correia and John D. Brown

Take the setting from Avatar, the toys from Evangelion, and the plot of “The Train Job” from Firefly, and you have GUN RUNNER.

Mecha tends to be more popular in visual media, and thus doesn’t get as much play time in literature. So when a good one comes along in print it’s worth exploring. Such is the case with GUN RUNNER by Larry Correia and John Brown.

Set in a not-too-distant future when interplanetary travel becomes common enough for the skies to resemble the Old West, humanity is back to its old tricks. There are power brokers and turf wars and unlikely heroes rising from the ranks of scrappy workers, fighting for their small corner of the galaxy.

The Characters

One such hero is a young man named Jackson Rook, known in propaganda as “Sergeant Jack,” who rose to prominence during a civil war on his homeworld of Gloss. In this future, cybernetic enhancements are the norm, but not everyone takes to them equally. Jackson’s rare ability to sync seamlessly with giant machines makes him an excellent mech pilot, and at the same time makes him vulnerable to hacking.

Having been hacked before—and forced to execute several of his comrades—he’s not keen to fully meld with machines ever again…so you know things are going to get to that point, because hey, Chekov’s gun. Now he just operates machines manually, and he’s still good at it, good enough to make a living in the skies.

Opposite Jackson is potential love interest Jane, a skilled hacker with a secret past of her own. She was able to stop Hacked-Jack without killing him, something that has endeared her to him, and he spends a fair amount of time pining for her as the story goes on. When she's not working on jobs for their captain, she's building mechanized mini-monsters that help with various missions, including a microbot called Fifi.

The Plot

The eponymous crew of gun runners take jobs from brokers for different governments—some of which are even legitimate. When Jackson’s crew gets hired to steal a state-of-the-art mech and take it to the planet Lush, they end up getting too close for comfort with the local warlord…and Jack starts to see things on the ground that remind him too much of the civil war on Gloss.

And thus, things get interesting.

The plot is fairly straightforward, and a number of the beats are even a little predictable, but still satisfying. The world is believable even if the tech level is advanced beyond our own. In the digital age of the 21st century, it’s easy to see how tech entities would use that kind of power if they had it; at its core, GUN RUNNER is showing how mankind would keep doing everything in the future the way they’ve done it in the past, with populations grappling for control of valuable resources, dividing into sides, and carving out their own security along the way.

The world

The settings range from a zero-G spaceship to an orbital station called Swindle, to the violent surface of the planet Lush where everything vies to be an apex predator, and everything wants to kill you. There's not a whole lot of handwavium when it comes to technology, beyond the "hyperdrive" that takes them from planet to planet. It’s grittier than a Star Trek escapade without being so dour as the setting of The Expanse. The characters carry the story well and have their own intriguing backstories, which beg further exploration in sequels down the road. Of the many Correia-related stories that would adapt well to the screen, this has to be among the most colorful of them, and would do well visually what with the giant machine and giant monsters duking it out on the surface of Lush. Correia’s gaming background comes through strong in the worldbuilding.

And Brown’s own influence is there too, showing the same imagination that made his Dark God series a success. When two epic authors team up to write a story there’s a tendency to overstuff the word count, but GUN RUNNER doesn’t lag or stare at its own navel as it moves through the plot. This is the kind of adventurous sci-fi that keeps the pages turning.

Content warning

Put this one on the milder side of an R-rating as far as violence goes. There was little (if any) profanity, save for a few in-world terms that are harmless slang to the reader. Other than a couple of pool parties and some crew members eyeing the local womenfolk, there was no sexual content.

What makes this worth reading?

We as readers got into science fiction because we wanted to have fun, and GUN RUNNER delivers that in spades. It gives you the science side and the human nature side--the basic given facts about space travel, the behavior of smuggler crews and smalltime warlords, underground rebellions, and terrifying wildlife, as well as the near-future integration of computer tech and the human body. And then it just has fun. You want to see big mechs? Small mechs? Fancy mechs? Construction mechs? What about mechs patched together from junkyard scraps, duking it out with a wide array of monsters in a savage alien jungle? Because it's all there, and it's not afraid to feed your imagination along the way.

As a bonus, the audiobook version is an excellent production, narrated by the talented Oliver Wyman. Go check it out.