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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.
