{"id":901,"date":"2011-02-23T02:16:01","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T02:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=901"},"modified":"2014-06-24T18:17:51","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T17:17:51","slug":"deaths-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=901","title":{"rendered":"DEATH’S HEAD"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>David Gunn\u2019s debut novel, Death\u2019s Head<\/em>, isn\u2019t going to win prizes for originality. Its galaxy-spanning setting, cast of stock characters, and plot that has a super-powered hero planet-hopping to save damsels in distress and prop up tottering empires, rehashes every trope in the military sf armoury.<\/h3>\n

Too much of Death\u2019s Head<\/em> feels overly familiar, especially the jokes. The eponymous elite Death\u2019s Head regiment, in their sharp black uniforms and skull insignias, feel like an extended riff on that Mitchell and Webb sketch where two SS Officer examine their uniforms and wonder: \u201cAre we the bad guys?\u201d Then there\u2019s the spaceship so utterly black that you can\u2019t read the lettering on the controls \u2013 Douglas Adams would be proud. There\u2019s even a talking gun with a wise-cracking artificial intelligence that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in early Jon Courtenay Grimwood…<\/p>\n

Not that the reader has time to worry about any of that. Death\u2019s Head <\/em>moves so fast and peppers its target with so many shots that some readers won\u2019t mind that the vast majority of them scatter wide of the mark. Shit happens. Protagonist, ex-legionnaire and general tough-guy Sven Tveskoeg is dragged from a sweat box and sentenced to death, gets whipped beyond human endurance, watches his fellow legionnaires get massacred, is adopted by the fierce alien Ferox, discovers he (uniquely) can communicate with them, meets a human girl, shags her, eats her (for dinner), watches the Ferox get slaughtered, is \u201crescued\u201d by elite Death\u2019s Head troops and gets sentenced to death, again. All in the first fifty pages!<\/p>\n

Death\u2019s Head <\/em>continues at a similar pace but it all too soon becomes wearing. Places and events flash by so quickly that Death\u2019s Head<\/em> feels more like an outline for a larger work than a finished novel. There are moments when Gunn\u2019s writing seems to fail him. He invests little energy in describing this universe at the best of times but there\u2019s a particular failure aboard the Death\u2019s Head\u2019s all black mothership (yes, he really calls it a mothership) when the word obsidian gets used a lot without real purpose.<\/p>\n

Sven is all-but-indestructible and his hard-luck background, hard-bitten attitude and devotion to his squad draw on the blandest of mil-sf stereotypes. The \u201cadventure\u201d is divided up into three, barely-linked, segments spread across numerous planets, with various people passing through Sven\u2019s life in a rush of names but with precious little characterisation. It\u2019s a fractured structure that sacrifices both tension and credulity and it is made worse by a denouement that teeters on the brink of deus ex machina<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are other problems. To call the book\u2019s attitude to women Neanderthal would be a disservice to our low-browed ancestors. There really is a prostitute with a heart of gold who is amazed by the size of Sven\u2019s knob (p96) and pretty young cousins (they could<\/em> have been twins \u2013 p129) who are only too happy leap into bed with him. Yes, there are tough women soldiers, but they\u2019re defined by how much Sven wants to shag them.<\/p>\n

Violence is a given in this type of mil-sf, but Death\u2019s Head\u2019s <\/em>detailed description of each act of murder or torture stand out because they\u2019re the only time Gunn\u2019s writing seems to come to life, the only time he really appears interested in language. Sadly, even here, the repetitive descriptions of bone-crunching and blood-letting soon lose their shock value.<\/p>\n

As a first novel Death\u2019s Head<\/em> probably deserves some slack but it is too blunt to succeed as a comedy while as an adventure it lacks both compelling characters and narrative cohesion. I was glad to finish it and the promise of sequels leaves me cold.<\/p>\n

David Gunn \u2013 Death\u2019s Head<\/em>
\nBantam Press, 2007, 368pp, ISBN: 978 0593 058336<\/p>\n

(Originally published in Vector <\/em>253, July 2007)<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Gunn\u2019s debut novel, Death\u2019s Head, isn\u2019t going to win prizes for originality. Its galaxy-spanning setting, cast of stock characters, and plot that has a super-powered hero planet-hopping to save damsels in distress and prop up tottering empires, rehashes every trope in the military sf armoury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":903,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8,15,10],"tags":[69,43,46,71],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/deathshead.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-ex","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":905,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions\/905"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}