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VALOR'S TRIAL

By Tanya Huff, Daw, 389 pages, $27.50

IN A TIME OF TREASON

By David Keck, Tor, 352 pages, $28.95

Tanya Huff writes unapologetic, quick-and-dirty science fiction and fantasy. Embrace this before picking up one of her books and you'll have some fun: Her stories are escapist, not intellectual. They're racy and wacky.

Escapist SF is the stuff you're embarrassed to be caught reading on the bus. It takes courage to read and it takes courage for a writer to crank it out – and Huff has 22 novels to her name. But it can work, and it does work, as the Space Channel or the Daw Books empires demonstrate.

See also the wildly successful and campy Xena: Warrior Princess or Hercules: The Legendary Journeys – Huff is a self-proclaimed fan of both 1990s TV shows. And see Huff's Blood Ties series, aired on the Lifetime network and produced with CHUM TV, based on her books about the vampire son of Henry VIII, and his love-interest, a blind private detective.

Valor's Trial, the final book in Huff's Confederation series, is romanticized military SF in the spirit of Battlestar Galactica or Starship Troopers. Huff loves exploring the codes of honour among soldiers, the private rituals of the corps and the pacts among buddies when death is just another trench away.

The bad guys: a coalition of giant insects and creatures called the Others. The good guys: the collective alien races (plus humans) of the Confederation.

Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr is our returning heroine, the nerves-of-steel Marine who beats lethal odds time and time again. She's Xena meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff, not Dirk Benedict).

Torin's exploits most often include either “kicking ass” or “hauling ass.” The troops call her “Gunny.” She insists, “An unarmed Marine in underwear can deal with anything the universe can dish out.” Later, she proves it.

Don't let that level of camp scare you off, because this book is pretty good. Like I said, these kinds of stories can and do work. They can be delightfully absurd, emitting a pleasing, cheesy aura – not a cheap, grocery-store cheddar but a nice aged goat brie or maybe a double-cream camembert. The kind you enjoy with nice wine and some strawberries before possibly getting lucky.

In Trial, Torin is trapped in an underground PoW camp where anonymous captors process dead Marines into kibble and gruel (à la Soylent Green). Torin hacks her way through a system of creepy tunnels to liaise with a party of pincer-wielding Others.

Does the amorphous but sentient plastic blob from the last book, The Heart of Valor, have any connection to the PoW camp? Gunny's gonna find out …

Let it be said that Huff needs a meaner editor to hack 50 pages from the story, and the copy is, uh, gently peppered with typos. But Gunny is such a dude, what are a few jumbled letters among Marines?

David Keck's In a Time of Treason also qualifies as escapist, but it too is worth the risk of being spotted reading it on public transit. Keck is a high fantasy writer: We're talking valiant knights, ladies in towers, demon birds, zombies and haunted skulls packed full of human souls transfigured into flies and worms. In this second book about a feudal land called Errest the Old, Keck shows bold literary chops and a vivid imagination.

Radomor, the Duke of Yrlac, has made a deal with devilish powers, a pair of sorcerers who take the form of ravens. Those sorcerers pine for the bad old days, when savage ghouls held the world in darkness and depravity. As Yrlac's army grows in strength, the countryside turns to rot and blight, demon dogs stalk the woods and the dead prowl the streets.

Durand Col is the strapping young soldier who serves Lord Lamoric, an ill-fated young duke tangled in the bloody, enchanted war against Yrlac and the forces of the hells. Durand's a brave, loyal chap – that is, when he's not snogging Lamoric's wife, Deorwen. Many a bodice-ripping tryst goes down in hidden rooms and haunted sanctuaries.

Deorwen could have been an interesting character, but all too often, she's a courageous but porcelain “girl” who needs saving by Durand. Yawn. Aren't we at the point where feudal fantasy can drop the medieval gender roles? Couldn't Deorwen's talents extend beyond intuition, emotion and loveliness?

There's much Tolkienesque in Keck's work: foul, pestilent agents of evil, besieged strongholds, impossibly long battles, ailing fathers whose pride leads sons to ruin. However, the women in Keck's stories don't compare to Tolkien's women, who were at least “beautiful and terrible.” Keck can write like the wind, but let's hope he steps up the women's rights in the next novel.

Rest assured, there will be a next. All is not well when we leave Durand after 352 pages of gory struggle. The hells are gathering their might for one final standoff, and a deity once promised him fame, fortune, love and glory.

Good luck, Durand – you're going to need it.

Kelly McManus is a Vancouver-based journalist who always gets caught reading science fiction on the bus.