Ruinworld is the seventh instalment of the Dropzone series of military sci-fi books. It continues from directly where Winter Station (Dropzone #7), Infiltrator (Dropzone #6), Notorious (Dropzone #5), Derelict (Dropzone #4), Shadow Puppets (Dropzone #3), Parasite (Dropzone#2) and Fleet Rats (Dropzone #1) left off, with the same characters.
The Dropzone series is set in the same universe as my previous sci-fi books – Conversations With Droids, The Kassini Division and Rise Of The Exiles – but it takes place in 2841, a half-century before the events of the other books.
Here’s the blurb for the latest instalment:
Death from above… a new moral low
The war’s last taboo is broken when a forbidden bioweapon tears through an Elemental colony. And now an Avion research team has been spotted in the ruins, hell-bent on gathering precious data to perfect their planet killer.
Battle-weary, licking their wounds and on the verge of mutiny, the Revenants are tasked with intercepting these mad scientists before they escape with the secrets of the ruinworld…
Join this adrenaline-fuelled journey through the Kassini universe as the action-packed Dropzone series nears its climax.
Reeling from the desperate rearguard action at the end of last instalment, the Revenants have escaped the orbit of one devastated planet just in time to be slingshot straight into the heart of another.
They’ve also found themselves subject to the gravitational attraction of their Coordinator’s demented scheming, their new role seemingly to perform whatever dirty work she deems necessary to help restore her reputation.
As the story arc of this 10-book series draws towards its close, in this episode I wanted to explore the darker side of the story, to show the way that the war between the three empires has begun to degrade and degenerate, to the extent that the use of banned weapons has been justified as a legitimate strategy.
Because this is still fast-paced, light-hearted sci-fi entertainment, I didn’t want to dwell for too long on the details of the grotesque aftermath of these weapons, so I decided to confine their horrors more or less to the reader’s imagination.
Above all, I wanted to present a world where a technological formula created in a sterile lab had been used to utterly and indiscriminately erase an entire colony of innocent citizens: the loss of their lives quickly forgotten, the barbaric war crime justified as collateral damage in the pursuit of peace by the politicians who ordered the strike.
As ever, I like to add a bit of background info on what I had in mind when conceptualising and writing each part of the overall story arc of the Dropzone series. Here are some of the indirect inspirations behind the book this time round…
1] Chernobyl Miniseries (2019)
The HBO miniseries dramatising the tragic 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine achieves its tremendous emotional power by focusing on human fallibility and by faithfully conveying the details of the ordinary, everyday world it occurred in.
In reality, the reactor failure was a scientific test gone disastrously wrong; in Ruinworld, the scientists are complicit in the destruction from the beginning.
2] Hiroshima John Hersey (1946)
US war correspondent John Hersey was one of the first outsiders to see the devastation caused by the US atomic attack on Hiroshima.
He was commissioned by The New Yorker to create an eyewitness report based on interviews that told the stories of six of the survivors; the paper eventually devoted an entire edition to the 30,000-word article he produced and its spare, unflinching prose has subsequently sold millions of copies, remaining an enduring voice in any discussion of global nuclear warfare.
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3] I Am Legend Richard Matheson (1954)
One of the first zombie tales, Matheson’s imagining of a New York City devastated by a human-made plague that mutates the population is timeless in its themes of post-apocalyptic survival and misplaced faith in science. It also perfectly conveys the simple yet devastating loneliness of its main character, slowly coming to terms with being the last person alive in a violent, transformed world.
4] Battlestar Galactica Episode ‘33’ (S01 E01, 2004)
The 33 episode that properly launched the remake of the BSG saga in the 2000s is surely one of the greatest pieces of sci-fi ever put together. The reason? For me, it’s because the characters are dog-tired, stimmed out and at the end of their tether after wave upon wave of cylon attacks, yet still have to deal with titanic moral dilemmas. None are as poignant as when they’re faced with the dilemma of whether to destroy the Olympic Carrier, a ship carrying 1,300 of the fleet’s citizens that has reappeared but may have fallen into enemy hands. Ruinworld has a scene that echoes the very same conundrum.
5] The Andromeda Strain (1971)
The masterful opening sequence of this film adaptation of Michael Chricton’s 1968 novel was burned into the retinas of everyone who saw it. Showing a research team examining the outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial organism in the ghost town of Piedmont, New Mexico, its pioneering cinematography revealed bodies cut down in the desert through a desaturated, otherworldly lens. The sequence is nightmarish and eerily atmospheric, even half a century on.
Here are some quick reads with more info about Fleet Rats (Dropzone #1), Parasite (Dropzone #2), Shadow Puppets (Dropzone #3, Derelict (Dropzone #4), Notorious (Dropzone #5), Infiltrator (Dropzone #6) and Winter Station (Dropzone #7). I hope you enjoy them… and if you’ve read and enjoyed my Kassini books, I strongly suggest you give the Dropzone series a whirl, as there are many shared aspects you’ll instantly recognise.
If you enjoy these or indeed any of my books, tell your sci-fi-loving friends and please leave a positive review on Amazon.
