Ruabon

I love the way in which each the four Lost Tales of Solace novellas (Ruabon is the fourth) allow me to explore minor characters and side events. They add such great depth to Karl Drinkwater's main Lost Solace novels, but without slowing those works' exciting pace. Chronologically, Ruabon takes place during Chasing Solace and gives readers a glimpse onto the colonised world of Tecant. I got a good idea of this rather dreary, industrial-feeling environment.

Indigenous Tecant people are now reduced to very limited career options - minimally skilled roles within the UFS military or working in Tecant's mines - so for Ruabon, this one afternoon's chance to make a name for himself and actually become a known individual, is too good to miss. I could completely empathise with his drive to shine even though, by doing so, he might also reveal too much about a clandestine side project he has underway. These robot personalities are a fun idea. Getting to meet each one through private messaging conversations allowed me to swiftly feel as though I knew them and I could also further understand Ruabon himself through the artificial personality traits he created.

Ruabon, the book, is an exciting story that I comfortably devoured in a single afternoon partly because it is less than a hundred pages anyway, but also because I didn't want to put the book down. I enjoyed seeing how this narrative fitted into the overall Lost Solace series story arc and being now able to fill in detail around unexplained moments in Chasing Solace. I think, however, that new readers could enjoy the novella as a standalone tale without full knowledge of the Lost Solace universe behind them.