20 Minutes into the Future, the Alien Invasion has happened, and Earth lost. But for the most part life goes on the way it did before: the Shil'vati Imperium mostly prefers to leave well enough alone, and is actually trying to help where it can. So this is not the story of La Résistance, bravely battling a brutal occupation against impossible odds.
No, this is the story of one Jason Linford, a university engineering student who, one fateful night, gets into a Bar Brawl with an off-duty Shil'vati soldier and knocks the seven-foot-tall purple alien woman on her ass. Video of the incident goes viral and Jason is, unsurprisingly, arrested, but not wanting to let a good man go to waste, the Shil'vati offer him an alternative to prison: Imperial Marine boot camp.
Making the best of a sucky situation, Jason puts his nose to the grindstone, just hoping to make it through his five-year enlistment in one piece. Along the way, he finds out that the Shil'vati reputation for promiscuity, while exaggerated, is not entirely undeserved—and that certain differences between Shil'vati and Human physiology give him advantages both on the training grounds and in bed.
Books in the series:
- Between Worlds (2021)
- Between Worlds Two (2021)
- Between Worlds Three (2022)
Tropes in the series:
- Adipose Rex: Discussed when Jason observes a male Rakiri noble whose harem has encouraged him to fatten up, an old-school symbol of wealth. His own Rakiri lover Yaro agrees with Jason's guess that it's unhealthy like it would be for a human, but says that tradition still sometimes wins out over sense.
- Aerosol Spray Backfire: Using pepper spray in a confined space is rarely a good idea. When Jason uses some against his attackers in the bar bathroom in book one, he catches some of the backwash, as does Freyxh when he sprays the two Interior officers she's fighting with. Though they're still able to move and think coherently afterwards, which you can't say for the attackers.
- Air-Vent Passageway: Jason makes use of this a number of times, which Shil'vati never see coming because they're too big to fit through their own ventilation (whereas it's just a tight squeeze for Jason).
- Armed with Pepper Spray: Tarcil gives Jason a can of "grinshaw spray" for self-defense when he goes out on the town with some of their squad in the middle of Between Worlds. And is deeply confused by Jason referring to it as "mace". Like any good Chekhov's Gun, he ends up using it on a group of Interior officers who roofie Nuiy and then follow him into a bar bathroom.
- Benevolent Alien Invasion/Vichy Earth: Depending on who you ask. At the start of the series, Earth is into year six of occupation by the Shil'vati Imperium, and much to everyone's chagrin the "Purps" are running the place better than the humans ever did. While they don't tolerate active resistance, they're also putting their technology to work solving some of 21st century humanity's problems like homelessness and global warming.
- Boldly Coming: Shil'vati females (most of the species) are stereotyped among humans as being promiscuous. While Shil'vati (and aliens in general) do have relatively fewer cultural hang-ups about casual sex than humans do, the stereotype of their promiscuity is exaggerated. What's really going on is that most of the Shil'vati that most humans interact with are young military personnel experimenting in an exotic locale (Shil'vati-occupied Earth) with equally young human men, and occasionally women, who are willing to take them up on it, similar to human soldiers posted overseas on Earth sleeping around with the local women. So the reputation mostly comes from those human males and females interacting with the mostly female Shil'vati occupation soldiers, most of whom are as young and interested in sex as young humans are. Of course, that also happens to comprise most of the Shil'vati and other aliens whom Jason interacts with.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: The technology difference between the Shil'vati and 21st century Earth meant the Alien Invasion didn't last long. One character remarks it was probably the first war in Earth's history where the commanders suffered worse than the front line soldiers, due to the Shil'vati preference for decapitation strikes and Orbital Bombardment over set-piece battles.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Justified. Jason is sexually assaulted in a bar bathroom by a pair of Interior officers and Freyxh helps fight them off. She's far more pissed about it than he is: largely as a byproduct of his Earth upbringing where things usually worked the other way, Jason has trouble even internalizing that Attempted Rape is what actually happened there and therefore feels more weirded out than violated.
- Even the Guys Want Him: Late in Between Worlds there's a sex scene between Jason and his male squadmate Tarcil. Jason isn't attracted to human males, but for reasons even he isn't sure of, it doesn't seem the same to experiment with a Shil'vati male (though they don't repeat the experiment).
- Exotic Extended Marriage: Polygamy is pretty standard among the setting's aliens due to their typically high ratio of females to males, but it's normally a matter of the females sharing a subordinate male between them more than the male having a harem. By book three Jason is in a stable polyamorous relationship with Raisha, Kernathu, and Yaro, though Yaro breaks up with him at the end of the book.
- Fantastic Racism: Shil'vati nobles have a tendency to look down on anybody who isn't another Shil'vati noble. There's also plenty of systemic racism: despite the Imperium's attempts at egalitarianism, non-Shil'vati are still pretty much second-class citizens and it's rare for them to reach upper officer ranks in the military.
- Fantastic Rank System: Shil'vati military ranks are mostly given as their NATO equivalents, with the exception of "champion", to which Jason is promoted in book three. This is an NCO position roughly equivalent to a regimental sergeant major, tasked with maintaining morale and cohesion on behalf of the officers.
- Feudal Future: The Shil'vati noble class still holds plenty of sway and are a cause of much of Jason's misery in the series.
- First-Name Basis: Shil'vati customarily go by their first names, surnames being seen as generally unimportant except among nobles. This extends to military protocol: in the Marines, Jason is formally addressed as "Recruit Jason" or "Private Jason".
- Got Over Rape Instantly: Male victim. Jason is sexually assaulted in a bar bathroom by a pair of Interior officers, and is rescued by his squadmate Freyxh. He struggles acknowledging that it even was an Attempted Rape because of his Earth upbringing (unlike humans, female Shil'vati are generally bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than their males) and feels more weirded out by the experience than violated. Jason then spends the evening helping Freyxh wash off before having sex with her in the tub.
- Green-Skinned Space Babe: Inverted, due to having a more balanced gender ratio compared to other races and much greater stamina, humanity is basically seen as this to the galaxy at large
- Harem Genre: Justified by the various aliens' use of Exotic Extended Marriage. By the end of the first book, Jason has slept with nearly every other member of his training squad at least once, male Tarcil included, and at the start of book three he's in a stable polyamorous relationship with Raisha, Kernathu, and Yaro.
- Humans Are Warriors: Humans are less physically imposing than female Shil'vati, but have greater endurance and slightly better reaction time on average. Humans also tend to be more tenacious: La Résistance is still giving the Imperium headaches six years into the occupation, a point where normally the Shil'vati would have full control of the planet, and Shil'vati casualty rates are slowly increasing instead of going down.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Invoked in Between Worlds Two. Due to their larger size requiring more calories, the Shil'vati diet tends to be higher in fats and sugars, so a noblewoman whom Jason meets in Between Worlds Two thinks she can make a killing by importing honey from Earth. Her would-be customers are thoroughly grossed out when Jason explains that honey is technically bee vomit... which turns out to be the intended outcome for the trader who brought him along as her plus-one: she is able to buy up the honey cheaply and make a tidy profit from less squeamish customers.
- Interspecies Romance: By book three, Jason is in a stable polyamorous relationship with Raisha and Kernathu, both Shil'vati, as well as Yaro, a Rakiri.
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Played with. Shil'vati prefer laser weapons and their battle armor is impenetrable to firearms, but railguns are also relatively common: they require less power to fire and can be just as effective. The armor also doesn't react to slower-moving objects: Shil'vati have apparently been killed in skirmishes by humans with lower-tech weapons like bows and arrows.
- Make an Example of Them: The Shil'vati normally wouldn't have cared about the Bar Brawl that triggers the series because, frankly, the off-duty soldier whom Jason fought only had herself to blame. Jason is only put into the position of Trading Bars for Stripes because somebody filmed the fight and it went viral, and the occupation commander wants to warn other Earthlings off from trying their luck.
- Manly Men Can Hunt: Jason hunted with rifles as a kid, which endears him to Yaro (a female Rakiri, the local Cat Folk species): what turns into their first date starts as him tagging along on one of her hunting trips. He wonders if she plans to hunt with only her claws and teeth until she gets a rail rifle out of the trunk of her car. She certainly could (and ends up in a fight with a local predator that picks up their trail), but Rakiri don't feel any shame in hunting with guns: she compares it to the notion of Jason chasing a prey animal to death (the fact that humans evolved as persistence hunters had previously been brought up a couple times in relation to humans' greater endurance than most aliens).
- Mars Needs Women: Gender-Inverted. Most species in the galaxy besides humans have significantly higher ratios of females to males, and most of them happen to find human males equally as attractive as their own.
- Mini-Mecha: Exos displaced both tanks and close air support aircraft in Shil'vati inventories a while back, and also have civilian applications (e.g. construction vehicles).
- Non-Mammal Mammaries: Halkem are (apparently) Lizard Folk and Triki are Insectoid Aliens, but both have curves in the standard places. Justified and lampshaded with the latter: Jason learns later that the bumps on his Triki superior Colonel Cleff are actually venom glands, not breasts."Which meant that the universe made some sense again - and that there wasn’t some mad god out there that insisted that all aliens in the universe be sexy curvaceous babes."
- Only Known by Their Nickname:
- "Cleff" is an Insectoid Alien whose real name is unpronounceable to most species.
- The "Roaches" got their name from the look of the Mini-Mecha they build to move about and interact with the world. Their own name for their species is "Ulnus".
- Orbital Bombardment: The side with orbital superiority typically dominates most battlefields, to the point that the primary job of Imperial Marines is acting as Target Spotters for the Navy. The Shil'vati are so used to using it that in Between Worlds Three the colonels of the first two Marine regiments are completely stumped by the campaign to retake Raknos-Three from the Roaches, where weather conditions prevent its use.
- Porn with Plot: Well-described sex scenes happen a few times a book, but the series is chiefly a Military Science Fiction Work Comedy.
- Puny Earthlings: Zig-Zagged. Human males are smaller and physically weaker on average than Shil'vati females, but slightly larger and stronger than Shil'vati males. Furthermore, what humans lack in relative brute strength, they more than make up for in staying power, which is attributed to having evolved as persistence hunters on the plains of Africa, where the Shil'vati evolved as ambush predators.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: At the end of book one, after handing a noble-born Interior officer an embarrassing defeat in a training exercise, Jason is given a "classified" assignment rather than being sent to vocational school. That assignment turns out to be the Marine detachment on a customs frigate on a nowhere ice world on the Imperial border.
- Rubber-Forehead Aliens:
- Shil'vati have skin in the purple to pink range and average seven feet tall in females and a little under six in males, but otherwise look wholly human aside from having small tusks on their lower jaws (giving them a resemblance to orcs).
- Halkam look like grey-skinned humans with snake-like scales.
- Jason compares the Nighkru to glow-in-the-dark drow: they're black-skinned Space Elves with patterns of bioluminescent microbe colonies in their skin and eyes.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: It's possible to pay an exorbitant fee to buy out the remainder of one's enlistment contract, a holdover from the days where nobles could pay their lieges enough to hire mercenaries rather than go to battle themselves. Jason does exactly that at the end of volume 3 rather than either go to the Space Cadet Academy or join the Imperial Princess's general staff, using the royalties from the mouse he patented.
- Trading Bars for Stripes: The first book starts with Jason being offered a choice between jail time or enlisting in the Shil'vati Imperial Marines after a video of him knocking an off-duty Shil'vati soldier on her ass in a Bar Brawl goes viral on the internet. Under normal circumstances the offense wouldn't have rated either penalty, but Vichy Earth's Imperial governor wants to make an example of him to keep the incident from emboldening La Résistance.
- Translation Convention: Most of the books' dialogue is in the Shil'vati Common Tongue Shil, which main character Jason was required to learn as a second language in school and is conversant in.
- Weird World, Weird Food: Due to their larger size, Shil'vati need more calories than humans do, so their typical diet includes a lot more fats and carbs. Jason takes to picking meals at restaurants by figuring out which menu options use the Shil'vati word for "fried" the fewest number of times.
- The Worm That Walks: The Roaches get their nickname from their insectile exoskeletons, which are really just machines they use to move about. They're actually colonies of amoeba-like organisms.
