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Title:
Outpost
Series: Donovan #1
Author:
William Gear
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre:
SF
Pages: 445
Words:
133K
Publish: 2018
When
the “Donovan” series started coming out in 2018, it made a decent
sized splash. People were reading it, reviewing it and talking about
it (it
was Mogsy who brought it to my attention first with her Review).
It was touted as a trilogy and given that Gear had written the People
of Spider sf as a trilogy, that seemed par for the course. Then
the series kept going up until Book 6 in 2022. Then it just abruptly
stopped. I was interested but only having read one book by Gear back
in the 90’s, I wanted to read some of his earlier works before
diving into something new. That desire led me to read the
aforementioned People of Spider trilogy. I was less than impressed
but it wasn’t horrible. So when it became evident that Donovan was
on a permanent hiatus (or the publishing issues were sorted out), I
decided to add the 6 books to my tbr which brings you all up to
speed.
The
first thing I noticed was just how similar this was to his Spider
trilogy. I don’t know if he’s placing it in the same universe as
the Spider books, but if so, it’s much earlier chronologically, as
there is no triumvirate of superbrains running the government.
However, things are such that it wouldn’t take much for that to
happen. So either Donovan takes place in the same universe as Spider,
just earlier, OR Gear has one setting for any of his SF tales.
Neither option is preferable to me so that was a strike.
I
was doing ok with Donovan as a hostile planet that was slowly killing
off the settlers. Then a ship appears (gasp, just like in Spider) and
things change. Sadly, one of those changes was that Dan Wirth is one
of the main characters and he’s an evil, murdering, rapist
psychopath. I don’t mind reading about his campaign to create and
rule a criminal element on Donovan, but I did not appreciate him
being so much in the forefront of the story. I felt like I needed to
take a shower after every section featuring him. I knocked a solid 1
½ stars off just for him. And to make things worse, everyone just
lets him get away with what he is doing. And the author doesn’t let
Donovan have a go at him either. For a world that seems to be
actively trying to kill the inhabitants, there’s not much planet
killing going on around Dan Wirth. I didn’t like him and I didn’t
like having him be saved by plot armor.
What
I did like was Donovan. The whole world is literally out to get the
colonists and yet at the same time we hear about “wilders”,
people who seem to have made peace and are living on their own. Gear
is a big “nature is wonderful if you just live with it and accept
it” kind of guy and it really colors his story telling. While I’m
not a fan of that philosophy, he is pretty consistent in its
execution (except when it comes to Dan Wirth, booo!) for good or bad.
The little glimpses we get of Donovan are wonderfully wild and
dangerous and I wish there was more of that and less of the
politic’ing that goes on.
On
top of all of that, you have the mystery of faster than light space
travel. I DEFINITELY picked up “Event
Horizon” vibes. This part of the story was more about adding
addition pressure to everyone and not an actual plot point in and of
itself. But the dead ship that ports in during the story had a death
cult on it, before everyone died and they built a shrine, a wall, a
something, of bones and that is the cover picture. It’s really the
only reason I’m even mentioning that aspect, because it doesn’t
affect the citizens of Donovan at all.
After
this book, I’ll be taking this series one book at a time. If at any
time I’m not pleased with something, I think I will be dnf’ing
the series. It’s on a hair trigger right now.
★★★✬☆
From
the Internet
The
Core Premise & Setup
For
thirty
years,
the colony town of Port
Authority
on the resource-rich but highly lethal planet Donovan
has been left entirely to its own devices. The Corporate supply ships
simply stopped arriving. Over unmatched attrition from predatory
wildlife (like flying quetzals,
stealthy nightmares,
and constricting gotcha
vines),
a population of thousands has dwindled down to a gritty, fiercely
independent group of roughly 300
survivors.
The
novel kicks off when a new corporate starship, the Turalon,
finally drops out of faster-than-light travel into Donovan’s orbit.
The ship is led by Supervisor
Kalico Aguila,
a young and ambitious corporate bureaucrat eager to claim credit for
a functioning mining operation. Instead, she finds an independent,
hardened settlement that has overthrown original corporate contracts
just to survive.
The
Three Primary Interlocking Conflicts
1.
The Clash for Political Control
Planetside,
the colony is ruled by a triumvirate: Yvette
Dushane,
Shig
Mosadek,
and Talina
Perez.
Talina is a lethal huntress and a de facto law enforcer who made
brutal, morally gray choices to keep the colony from starving or
being eaten alive during the abandonment.
When
Kalico Aguila lands with her ruthless security enforcer, Captain
Max Taggart,
they demand strict corporate accountability and threaten to try the
colonists for corporate treason. A tense, ideological standstill
forms: the corporate authorities want to re-establish a profitable
hierarchy, while the "Donovanians" refuse to give up their
freedom to an entity that left them to die.
2.
The Psychopath in Paradise
As
part of the Turalon's
manifest, a massive wave of new contractors and criminals are brought
to the planet. Among them is Dan
Wirth,
a brilliant, completely unhinged psychopath facing a delayed death
sentence back on Earth. For Dan, the lawless, chaotic frontier of
Port Authority isn't a nightmare—it's an absolute playground. He
immediately begins a stealthy, bloody campaign to manipulate, murder,
and corrupt local factions, aiming to seize complete criminal control
of the settlement from the inside out.
3.
The Reappearance of the Ghost Ship
Just
as political tensions on the ground reach a boiling point, an eerie
astronomical event occurs: a lost corporate vessel, the Freelander,
abruptly materializes in orbit after being missing for two years.
When
a team investigates, they find a horror scene: the ship is
functional, but the entire crew has died
of extreme old age,
their skeletal remains arranged in what looks like a bizarre
death-cult ritual. The ship’s spatial equipment appears trapped in
a temporal anomaly. This reveals a terrifying truth to the
characters: the other missing resupply ships weren't destroyed by
colonists; space travel around Donovan is fundamentally broken, and
any attempt to return to Earth might mean certain death.
The
Biological Twist: Donovan's Agenda
While
humans fight over politics and power, the planet itself acts as a
silent character. Early in the novel, Talina Perez survives a brutal
encounter with a quetzal.
However, the attack alters her. It is revealed that she carries a
unique biological marker or change in her blood—a side effect of
surviving the world's ecosystem—that hints at a deeper, symbiotic
connection between the planet's collective consciousness and certain
colonists.
Climax
and Resolution
As
Captain Taggart and Supervisor Aguila spend more time planetside,
they realize corporate bureaucracy is useless against wild predators
and a lethal ecosystem. Taggart’s rigid military mindset cracks as
he develops an uneasy respect for Talina and the colonists' way of
life.
The
book wraps up with the corporate leaders forced to abandon their
corporate handbooks just to stay alive, making a fragile alliance
with the locals to fend off the compounding threats of Dan Wirth's
criminal uprising, the looming mysteries of the Freelander and a planet that actively tries to purge foreign invaders.
