Review: The Warrior Kind, 5-book series, is great fun
What a fun action/adventure, scifi, fantasy Christian world this is!
Guy S. Stanton III is a man to watch. I’m not sure where these books came from. His Website is fascinating and strong. As far as I can tell he released nine books in the past year or two. They are unashamedly, outrageously Christian. The romances are strong and compelling. The fighting is graphic and necessary. The technology is wonderful and artfully used. The worlds seem supernaturally real. I meet these books through a review on Peter Younghusband’s book review blog. It is a great resource for reviews of Speculative Fiction.
The first book starts out like a Conan the Barbarian type of adventure—a world of slaves, gladiators, and real evil in a country/sort-of-democracy that reminds me a lot of modern America. Yes, it is that interesting and complex. The final one finishes with what is nearly a space opera. The meld of technology, computers, and space travel is truly fun. But the characters, the action, the stories, these invented worlds are all wonderful. The Earth [in a couple of the middle books] is presented near future, dystopian, yet very recognizable as possible, spiritually dead, and very dangerous. The common apocalyptic prophetic reality is simply ignored. This is fantasy created with a different purpose.
Is it Christian?
Basically, I’d have to say yes though it is certainly reworded in most cases. There’s a lot of violence. The created universe stretches the imagination and pushes the bounds of reality to an extreme, but basically we are left with the assumption that man, pre-flood, was still coming down from the perfection of Adam. It’s obvious that the world from Adam to Noah was lead by people with immensely long lives, with a mind that was created perfect, and mankind had not devolved to what we must deal with today. The evil was intense enough to cause God to wipe it out. My studies suggest that the world at the time of the flood possibly had many of the same over-population issues with technological and spiritual pressures similar to what we are facing today as we approach the end of the age. To say that a group [or two or three] developed a technology which enabled a pre-flood escape from earth is certainly not biblical, but it is presented plausibly and you quickly accept this new universe as fact while you’re living in it. But all of this is merely an excuse for some excellent stories of wildly speculative fiction with technology/magic afoot.
This is escapism, pure and simple
But it is an escape into a world where the good people are wondrously good with strong faith, moral character, and a devotion to the Lord that is admirable. But there be violence, and testosterone-driven heroes; yet all within the bounds of righteous, strongly vigorously loving marriage and what can only be described as wonderful, godly leadership. It will rock the socks of many insular, powerless believers. The Pharisees will howl. But then, this book is not about purity of doctrine—but the lives of heroes in fantasy. These are presented as complex, strong, righteous men and women fighting devastating evil and coming out victorious after brutal warfare.
By the time we arrive in A Warrior’s Revenge [the fifth book] things have become fairly predictable, but the ride is great fun. I do not hesitate to recommend this entire series. Currently, it is all free—I have no idea why. I got them on iBooks, but they are all on Amazon also.
The negatives: auto-editing homonyms
The books were well and professionally done except for the strange occurrence of many homonyms. Several of them are so strange that it seems obvious that they were added by auto-editing software. They need to be fixed, but that may be the reason why we can currently get them for free. I had no trouble reading them, and found them only slightly irritating. They were simply a strange anomaly though strangely plentiful.
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