A near-future military sci-fi that looks at how war is likely to be waged in the next several decades: with UAVs, spy drones, kamikaze drones, robots with mounted machine guns, augmented reality, AI, big data, and many other fancy technologies. The story follows a private military company as they take on a rescue mission using all their futuristic equipment, only to dredge up a painful mystery from the past.
The book mostly focuses on the high-tech action, with the central mystery driving the story forward. The characters are hit-or-miss: occasionally, they show some depth and interesting dialog and decisions, but mostly, they are pretty standard military tropes. For a short time, the book poses some fascinating, morally-challenging questions: should robots be allowed to kill? Can we trust AI to make decisions about human lives? Exploring these topics could’ve made for a unique and powerful read, but the book quickly abandons the ideas in favor of more action and shooting.
Throughout the book, the futuristic technology steals the show, showing both the beauty and terror of autonomous weaponry. It also feels fairly prescient: the book was published in 2017, and from what I’m seeing of the war in Ukraine, which started in 2022, a lot of that war is being fought with technology (especially drones) that is similar to the book.
It’s an especially interesting contrast with Linda Nagata’s other military sci-fi series The Red, which came out just a few years earlier, but largely focuses on augmented humans (e.g., robotic exoskeletons and brain implants) as the future of warfare. At this point, the autonomous warfare depicted in The Last Good Man feels like a more likely—and in many ways, more terrifying—prediction of the future.
