Review: Orders of Magnitude by Yuval Kordov
Blurb:
The Moon was once colonized. Now it lies silent—mostly.
When a mysterious radio signal echoes from the abandoned colony of Serenitatis, the Vatican dispatches an elite squad of space marines to investigate. Paladin-Captain Samuel Cohen’s mission is simple: locate survivors, uncover the signal’s source, and get out. But beneath the sterile domes, something ancient stirs—an adversary that challenges not only the mission but the very foundations of his faith.
A gripping new novella that explores the resilience of the human—and holy—spirit in the darkness of the void. For fans of Event Horizon and Richard Paul Russo’s Ship of Fools.
Review:
In one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy’s Watcher—Rupert Giles— utters the words, “There’s a demon in the internet.” Widespread access to the internet was maybe one of the largest societal upheavals wrought by the 1990s, and many writers of the era—like Ashley Gable and Thomas A. Swyden of Buffy’s S1E8 “I, Robot… You, Jane”—sought to put their own spin on how such a technology might impact a world that didn’t quite yet understand it. If the supernatural was real, could machines become possessed? What new frontiers in demonology might be opened up as the speed of technological advancement continues to increase? Could our sins follow us beyond this world? It’s an interesting notion that, at the time, hadn’t been seen much in similar genre fiction (Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 Event Horizon being the biggest contemporaneous exception, and if memory serves perhaps a couple episodes of Stargate SG-1). Exorcism stories of that time period and prior were typically a pretty simple affair: one or two clergymen in a single room with the possessed person; but now the internet was opening up the world, both for regular people and storytellers, to new possibilities—good and ill.
And as the world became more connected, globally and digitally, stories of the corruption of human souls continued to evolve, as new spins were put on the genre in ways that seemed to appeal specifically to me. I remember when I first saw the trailer for Neill Blomkamp’s then-upcoming 2021 film Demonic (a story about a woman who is asked to Neuromancer-style VR-explore her way through the mind of her comatose mother to figure out if her mother has or had been possessed) where there was this one line that stuck out to me more than any other: “The Vatican has been funding a black ops unit.” What an intriguing tease! Exorcists with machine guns and night vision goggles? Tactical vests with bulbs of holy water next to grenades? Sign me up! Unfortunately, in the final product, that little story nugget was deeply underbaked, leaving me hungry for someone else to pick up that thought and run with it; and it seems that Yuval Kordov read my mind.
But before we go much further, some brief disclosure: Yuval and I have both written for Incensepunk Magazine, with Yuval having just recently edited my debut short story for the publication. During that process, Yuval reached out to see if I wanted to read an ARC of Orders of Magnitude, to which I enthusiastically replied in the affirmative. I’ve loved all of Yuval’s previous books (the last of which—The World to Come—I reviewed here for SFF Insiders), and so had Yuval not offered an ARC to me I would’ve purchased it on day one anyway. And, like his previous works, this new novella more than earns the positive review you’ll read below. So let’s talk about it!
Orders of Magnitude is—as Kordov states in the Afterword—a sequel, directly and spiritually, to another Incensepunk Magazine short story: Jon James’ The See of Tranquility. The story of See involves an apparition of the Virgin Mary appearing to a nun living on the Moon; and the nature of the vision is dire: a warning for humanity to abandon the Moon, and all future extraterrestrial colonization. An evacuation is ordered, a solar storm hits the Moon, and life—for the evacuees—moves on back down on terra firma. Orders of Magnitude picks up in the aftermath of the evacuation. Someone remains on the Moon, which we learn because they’ve sent a mysterious signal back to Earth. The Vatican deploys one of their tactical units to investigate, and it is en route to the Moon that our story begins.
What follows over the course of the next 100+ pages is a propulsive journey into the heart of the lunar colony, fraught with horrifying discoveries along the way (we see the influence of Event Horizon more and more as the soldiers delve deeper into the colony). But while the journey of Samuel Cohen, the battle-hardened protagonist of Orders of Magnitude, is rife with external conflict, there is plenty of juicy internal conflict as well, as Samuel’s backstory is slowly revealed in the quiet moments between bursts of violence.
Aesthetically, Kordovs’s soldiers evoke the Space Marines of Warhammer 40K far more than Seal Team Six or the scattered moments of more contemporarily-space-suit-ed violence we’ve seen in recent works like For All Mankind or Ad Astra, where Kordov’s soldiers are adorned in heavy tactical armor emblazoned with giant, ornamented crests (the squad’s chaplain even has special armor with its own variety of ritualistic ornamentation). I love it. And we get all sorts of wonderful little sci-fi flourishes to add color to the story, like the idea that the Vatican soldiers aren’t allowed to connect their suits’ systems to the lunar colony’s systems because of the risk of digital corruption, which is—in this case—the potential for data corruption and spiritual corruption, since the Vatican doesn’t know who, or what, may have interfered with the colony’s computers in the days since the evacuation. They have, after all, brought an exorcist along with them on this mission. Why might that be necessary?
Like Kordov’s Dark Legacies books, Orders of Magnitude is not only full of pulse-pounding action, but also plenty of philosophical wanderings. In a moment of recollection, the childhood memory of Samuel Cohen asks his parents, “Where is God if not in the Heavens?” And it just so happens that this exact question has been on my mind for some time, well before reading the first chapter of Orders of Magnitude.
There is something about the vast reaches beyond our atmosphere that makes for an ideal canvas upon which to paint more philosophically-minded tales. Perhaps it is because the universe is, by its very nature, unknowable to us. We may understand parts or pieces of it in isolation; but the whole of the thing will forever be beyond our grasp. It is simply too large and too complex; and we are but one tiny sliver of it. Much of what we know about the cosmos is, in reality, how it existed millions or billions of years ago, as the light from distant stars is only just now reaching us (this idea is echoed in The See of Tranquility). It is remarkable that the lights we see in the night sky today may not exist any more. We might look into the night sky and see only ghosts.
But in that unknowable expanse is beauty and wonder and—in its darker, as-yet-unexplored corners—infinite possibility. There are many who look out to the stars and wonder if perhaps there is something supernatural out there, as Philip K. Dick wrote of—somewhat abstractedly—in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, knowing that what we find in the dark might not be the benevolent creator we’d hoped for. Or, more optimistically, we might look to the stars and understand the task of space exploration the same way that American poet John Magee did of traditional aviation, that through it we might be able to reach out and, “[touch] the face of God.” (High Flight, John Magee Jr., 1941). Yet, given the nature of this story, Kordov inverts Magee’s perspective, veering closer to malevolence of PKD’s Three Stigmata and the brutality of Anderson’s Event Horizon. Kordov’s chaplain makes the comparison, as the Vatican soldiers explore the quiet corridors of the lunar colony, that this place—built so far from Earth, in such harsh conditions—is like the Tower of Babel, potentially a curse upon humanity rather than an approach towards a deeper connection to the Almighty; a feeling somewhat confirmed when we discover about truth of the antagonist of the story, as how when they reached out into the black of the night sky, they did not touch the face of God… but found something else.
And for those of you who admire the craft of writing in addition to the art of storytelling itself, Orders of Magnitude is chalk full of the same kind of rich, evocative prose that those of us who’ve read Dark Legacies have come to expect from Yuval Kordov. Nearly every other sentence was some specific couple of words or turn of phrase that made me think to myself, “Oh yeah, that’s good.”
So do I recommend it? Absolutely! I think one of Kordov’s great skills as an author is how he’s able to construct these stories that are packed so tightly to the gills with enough action and horror to keep fans of both genres immensely satisfied while not sacrificing the philosophical journey that forms the backbone of the whole story. And if you’ve not read Dark Legacies, Orders of Magnitude’s comparative length makes it a great jumping off point into the fiction of Yuval Kordov. You won’t regret it.
