Child soldiers

This post was originally published back in May 2015 on the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog. It’s been lightly edited and updated.

The book was Warchild, by a debut author named Karin Lowachee. The place was YMCA Camp Abnaki, where I worked as a counselor alongside my friend Sam Gallagher. The year was 2002, and we were both teenage science fiction fans.

We counselors often spent our off hours playing Halo on a shared Xbox, or went to movies, burned our way through all of Babylon 5, or sat down for another quest in our long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign, but there was also a huge, shared pile of the books that we’d all hauled up with us in early June. That year, Sam had brought Warchild, Lowachee’s debut. I was immediately attracted to its excellent cover, and by Sam’s recommendation.

It was a smart choice. Something in Lowachee’s writing pulled me in immediately. Her story follows a boy named Joslyn Musey, who’s kidnapped when pirates board his parent’s merchant ship, the Mukudori. He’s taken as a hostage by the ship’s captain. Jos must try to accept that the pirate vessel Ghengis Kahn, captained by the fearsome Vincenzo Marcus Falcone, is his new home. But when the ship docks at a remote space station that soon comes under attack by an alien civilization called the Striviirc-na, Jos flees in the ensuing confusion, only to be captured again, this time by the aliens. Wounded, he is brought to the Striviirc-na homeworld, where he’s trained by a human sympathizer to become a sort of sleeper agent assassin, and sent back to human space to act as a spy.

Throughout, Lowachee emphasizes an all-too-real problem in our own world: child soldiers. Human Rights Watch estimates there are thousands of children currently living in war zones, conscripted into fighting. It’s a horrifying tactic, one that has repercussions that stay with the children for the rest of their lives. On her website, Lowachee noted, “the thought that as a society we can be judged on how we treat our children—the most defenseless and dependent of all—became a focal point of my desire to tell these stories, in my way, through the lens of a fictional future society.” It’s a choice that gives the book power beyond its effectiveness as a compelling adventure narrative.

Jos comes through the book terribly conflicted, battling the effects of each time he was kidnapped and brainwashed. His journey is one of self-discovery, of seeking out a place where he belongs, and a side he can believe in. Lowachee never pulls away from the difficult subject matter; many books about a 14-year-old boy might fall into the realm of YA fiction, but this one is clearly pitched at older readers. It never pulls its punches or shys away from the brutality inherent in Jos’ story.

Warchild is but the first of a trilogy. In the next two books, Lowachee does something interesting: she doesn’t continue Jos’, but instead, picked up with two characters that only briefly appear in the first novel. In doing so, she acknowledges that a single individual’s story isn’t exceptional, that the problems faced by one child are shared by others, in a variety of ways. In Burndive, she follows Ryan Azarcon, the celebrity son of Cairo Azarcon, captain of the Macedon, a ship that played a key role in Warchild. Azarocon suffers deeply from PTSD after witnessing a terror attack in the war with the Striviirc-na, and faced assassination and conflict, experiences that continue to exact a toll on him.

The final book of the trilogy, Cagebird, follows Yuri Terisov, a protégé of Captain Falcone. Imprisoned, he escapes with the assistance of a black ops agent named Andreas Lukacs, and is manipulating into infiltrate his former home. He’s a used man, forced to carefully navigate his own sense of morality, and his overseers, in order to survive.

With the Earthhub-Striviirc-na war as a larger background, Lowachee pulls together what she’s called a “mosaic” series, one which uses multiple viewpoints to tell a much larger story of war and suffering, one with roots in the world around us. The books have stuck with me for a long time, on stylistic and thematic levels, but also for a simpler reason: they’re outstanding, interesting novels, criminally under-read, and well worth rereading year after year.

In the years since, Lowachee has returned to the Warchild universe, publishing a collection of short stories set in the same world called Omake, and recently completed a fourth installment of the series, Martyoshka, which will follow a new protagonist, Jakob. I’m looking forward to reading it.