The Combat Codes
Alexander Darwin
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316493000
Orbit, June 2023, 464 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another review. This month, it’s time to warm up your strikes and practice your ground game because we’re going to take a look at The Combat Codes, a story filled with action, intrigue, and a heart of gold.

The story of The Combat Codes follows the intertwined lives of Murray, a broken-down fighter now tasked with searching for the next big thing, and Cego, an orphaned youth who remembers a past far different than the life he currently finds himself living. Both are Grievar, born to fight so others don’t have to, but what that actually means for each of them is a journey neither can yet answer.

The first thing that struck me about The Combat Codes is that the worldbuilding is fantastic. Even though it takes place on an unnamed planet that (probably) isn’t Earth, Darwin does a wonderful job making everything feel at once familiar and strange in a way that perfectly suspends disbelief. There’s just enough normality lurking amidst the underground cavern city of the Deeps and the storm-blasted surface to set the stage for all the strange things that Murray and Cego consider everyday life. Nations settling their differences by having champions engage in one on one combat? Perfectly normal. Using that same system for the (underbudgeted) legal framework? Makes total sense. Training kids to beat each other to death in the hopes of rising high enough to serve their nation? Absolutely. It’s a mix of heady ideas that shouldn’t work together yet combine perfectly to make a greater whole.

The second thing that stood out is the violence, and hoooo boy is there a lot of it (so be warned). Darwin does an impressive job guiding the fight scenes, mixing in specific martial arts terms with broader descriptions such that even someone unversed in mixed martial arts can easily follow the action, while giving those who’ve practiced it a front row seat to the grisly details. That being said, I also never felt like the violence was gratuitous—the characters all know that their actions have consequences, and there are multiple times when they have to deal with those consequences (both physically and mentally). This is a book about violence, but it’s also about why and how that violence is used, and whether or not it can be justified.

This leads me to the third thing about The Combat Codes that I really appreciated, which is that for all the overtly physical violence of the fights themselves, the book is also just as concerned with the broader structural violence being waged on the less fortunate members of Cego and Murray’s society (with some pretty obvious parallels to our own world). The core principle of “we fight so others shall not have to” is examined from multiple angles, how violence can be used to protect and to subjugate. Both Murray and Cego are constantly challenged by what they’re capable of versus what they believe is the action that will embody their creed, which leads to an impressive amount of characterization and growth.

Overall, The Combat Codes appears on the surface to be a meathead book for meathead fighters to slowly puzzle out the big words, but like a feint leading into a heavy cross, once you start reading it will hit you from unexpected angles with unexpected force. I really hope people are willing to give this one a chance, because it has a lot of important things to say and it says them very well, on top of being one of the more unique science fiction books I’ve read in quite a while. If this is the start to Darwin’s trilogy, I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

Read if: you realize why grappling is important; you felt the Hunger Games wasn’t quite bloody enough; you like cheering for the underdog.