#massif

Golden hour on the Monte Rosa mountain range- Alpine Haute Route, June 2021

I received a free copy from Harper Voyager via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Release date September 8th, 2026.

I've read a bit of Nix's adult fantasy and of course his children's novels ages ago, so I was curious about his foray into SF. In Massif, Parnell is captain of a ship attached to a mysterious, spacefaring Massif. When a routine battle in their endless war goes terribly wrong, Parnell is determined to rescue his lost pilot—but in the process, he must explore the deepest secrets of the Massifs...

Massif ran much more classically military SF than I expected, which is, admittedly, not my favorite genre. If you're going to spend half the plot in space battles, I need much more anti-war critique, in the line of Hurley's The Light Brigade. I thought the underlying premise was interesting—humans have discovered space travel, but they're completely dependent on the mountain-sized alien Massifs that move through space on set routes. But all the worldbuilding does with that plot is set up an eternal Earth-Mars space colonization war. Bang bang space marines space guns over the apparently infinite resource of barely colonized worlds. It didn't help that the characterization was relatively shallow, which is fatal with a plot revolving around crew comradery. We shan't even mention the half-baked romance.

I think part of my issue with this book was due to the structure. Effectively, the inciting incident only happened about halfway through the novel. And it feels like the point of the whole book was just to set up the big twist at the end. This is a structure for a short story, not an entire three hundred fifty page novel. But fundamentally, Massif is not focused on topics that interest me. The story is about survival and surviving bad orders, and it's fundamentally plot driven with relatively flat characters. While there's apparently an entire sentient alien measuring scale, we don't learn anything about alien cultures or civilizations. And while the ending obviously sets up a sequel, it seems poised to introduce merely a different kind of war.

And they keep. Somehow. Finding each other.

First session? Two vastly different combat styles?

They each take a side of the field, laughing and weaving their combat plans the whole way, finding they fill each other's weakspots

Second session? Similar survival thinking, bond over goading a cop into a fight, learn they're both fist to face types

Third session? Combat is complimentary yet again, cementing them as the sort of Vanguards of the group.

Fourth session? Explosions and revolutionaries, could there be anything more romantic? She also crawled around in my mech for a while to figure out the weird esoteric systems.

Fifth session? Accidentally cross her, call her a nickname that is a number, it turns into a squabble. Approach later and try to smooth things over for the sake of the party, turns into us learning they have similar ideas of conflict resolution. Promise to let her crawl around my mech again as payment. THE COP IS BACK and we goad him!

Sixth session? Tunnel time :) spend most of it apart until she comes to help me do an investigation and we have a silly moment where I have to pull her out of a hole

Seventh session? Stealing food for the survivors, short session, mostly combat, probably our most distant yet

This session?

Her mech gets destroyed, she escapes. She goes unconscious. She is in a field aflame. I am already losing parts and on fire. I walk through said field of fire, taking shots from Overwatch, and scoop her up, kill a man trying to block us, take her into my cockpit, blast through another guy, and complete our objective while on fire and falling apart, and just complaining that I wasn't faster

WHAT DO YOU MEAN

Agape, unconditional love born out of compassion for your fellow sentient beings.

Photo originale par Steph-photo