Death's Head [Hardcover]

Debut British author David Gunn's DEATH'S HEAD is a solidly built sci-fi military actioner.

Part cyber-punk, part military adventure, but all fun to read, Gunn's debut novel starts out with a one-two punch, delivering the reader almost instantly into this author's world of augmented men and women, robots, aliens, and more that may have all been done before, but Gunn still manages to add some panache to the genre with giving his own feel in the form of a deadly but funny gun. It is called a SIG Diabolo, (which gets some slaved-on additions about 3/4's thru the book), and it is an intelligent gun. Friggin' funny at times! (Judge Dredd's smart gun never talked.)

You can't help but see nuances of the King of this genre right now - Richard K. Morgan - but for a first-time novel, David Gunn manages to deliver a gritty and semi-vivid universe that is a rich mix of sci-fi series such as Warhammer and STARFIST. If you like Dan Abnett novels, then you should enjoy Death's Head.

Death's Head begins introducing readers to its antihero, Sven, who is the sole survivor of a fallen military outpost by intelligent alien beasts called ferox. (Very cool, but unfortunately like lots of things in this novel, never fully described.) The ferox interrupt Sven's beating on the whipping post and take Sven with them deep into the desert and into their subterranean cave home, where there he learns to communicate and live with them. He finds another human living among them, a female, who is very interesting to learn about and watch their relationship grow as prisoners among the aliens.

Sven is then forcibly taken from the ferox by his human rescuers, (or are they...?), and is served up to meet a high ranking military official who learns of his ex-military background and his ferox communications ability. (Something that has never been done before.) He then is shipped offworld to another ice planet that is a prison world, where he befriends some exiles and battles for space in the ice amongst other prisoners. After passing that test, Sven is then recruited to become an assassin. His job is to jump to a place called Farlight, hunt out a traitor, kill him and his entire family, destroy his palace, and of course if he is caught he will be denyed as being even known to have existed.

All this just to be inducted into the ultimate soldier program called - the Death's Head. What then follows is hardcore sci-fi military adventure with bullet-blasting, laser-blade slashing action as it is meant to be. And what makes it even more unique is the comically-funny smart gun, as well as the smartly funny bitter Sven that the reader follows as he runs through the galaxy battling everything from humans to aliens to cyborgs to a mix of all three.

Yeah, David Gunn surely borrowed from this and that from other books and genres, but still manages to skillfully create varied characters that - although not fully described like a lot of people, places, and things - still comes off as not being one-dimensional.

Although we didn't particularly go crazy over the last 1/3 of the novel, we still appreciated Gunn's writing acumen enough for a first-time novel to read his next book. If you like sci-fi adventure, then this one is for you.

Well done David Gunn!

...All within the first 50 pages! What more could you want?

This may be David Gunn's first novel, but I have a sneaking suspicion he's a pen name for someone else. I just can't put my finger on exactly who, though. At any rate, this is a pretty terrific book. The background is far-future space-opera-y to the extreme, and the characters (from a mad emperor to cyborgs to hard-bitten mercenaries) are nothing we haven't seen before. But 'Gunn's' writing is deft and flows well - it made me burn through the whole book in one night.

The story is fairly light on the technobabble/space military jargon, which is a plus in my book, but it's detailed and intriguing enough to keep even the most jaded military scifi fans entertained. Gunn doesn't make an attempt to play his material strictly seriously; there's enough sly humor and almost-self-deprecation in the writing to make it evident to me at least that Gunn wrote this primarily for the love of story-telling, and that he expects his readers to have as much fun reading it as he did writing it.

So, very nice first novel (if first novel it actually is ;) ), and I'll be looking forward to seeing more from David Gunn.

Yeah, I wasn't looking for military sci-fi or a bunch of techno-babble, I was just wanting a good read. This does have the military stuff, but it's not overdone and there's enough heart in the hero that it's not all about his cojones and his big gun. I liked this book alot. Great creatures, great story. A bit short, but hey, it left me wanting more and that's pretty rare lately.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 35 reviews  4.1 out of 5 stars