The Red Trilogy Offers a Thrilling Hybrid of Military Action and Cutting Edge SF

Set against an evolving story arc that began in The Red: First Light and continued with The Trials, Going Dark deploys one more array of manic set pieces. Nagata isn’t shy about dragging JamesShelley, her part-man/part-machine monosyllabic soldier hero, through a meat grinder of battles, injuries, and abuse, building to a “who do you trust?” climax that pushes him and his loyal squad to their emotional limits.
Nagata’s Tom Clancy-meets-Joe Haldeman military tech is dazzling stuff, and though I don’t have a clue how close it is to reality, it sure seems plausible: the nuts-and-bolts mechanics center on “Linked Combat Squads,” or LCS. All soldiers in a tight-knit LCS are connected via fancy skullcaps that link their minds during combat missions, with troop movements, vitals, and enemy info relayed on full-face visors. The skullcaps work with specialized brain implants, helping each soldier regulate and maintain their mental balance, and a digital Zoloft drip keeps them even-keeled even as their mission unleash all manner of Hell. Very special soldiers—like Shelley—have hardwired implants and internal skullcaps that further blur the lines between man and machine.

In The Red: First Light, we learned that Shelley’s mind has been hacked by The Red, a mysterious artificial intelligence that sees fit to use him as a puppet, feeding often life-saving advance directives directly into his brain like his own personal Jiminy Cricket (if Jiminy Cricket was a manipulative warmonger with a secret agenda). The explosive events of the first two books—ranging from nuclear attacks on U.S. soil, to showdowns with robotic beasts with guns for heads, to low-orbit assassinations, to conspiratorial military trials—are probably essential background if you want to make sense of this one, but if this sort of thing is your bag, you don’t want to skip them anyway. The fast-paced narrative has grown sequentially more complicated, and in Going Dark we find Shelley falling farther down the rabbit hole, joined up with the deadly ETM Strike Squad 7-1, an off the books black ops squad with the mantra, “no real allies, no fixed enemies, no certain battlefields” and a “trust no one” vibe that would make Fox Mulder proud.

The book kicks off with a mission to scope out a bioweapon lab on an Arctic oil rig with the potential to trigger a world war, and the global threats only get bigger from there, but the characters are lost in the commotion: throughout the trilogy, Shelley has been coming to grips with his own widening understanding of the world he lives in, and even when the bullets and grenades aren’t flying, he must grapple with the constant presence (or is it a threat?) of The Red worming its way into his mind, forcing him to do things against his will for the good of, well, someone…or something.
Fans of military sci-fi would be well-served to mainline this entire trilogy. The pacing is frenetic, the tech is fascinating, and the out-there concepts remain remarkably believable—even those robotic, gun-headed beasts.
The complete The Red trilogy is available now.