The Combat Codes (The Combat Codes Saga Book 1)

Read for 2021 SPSFC

Overall Thoughts:
A note here: This book was a finalist in the SPFBO contest for 2020. A lot of people seem to like it. I managed to miss this fact until after reading the book, so you can feel safe this has not biased my thoughts while reading!
This book had a lot of potential, but in the end, I wasn’t as excited as I wanted to be about the story. There is an interesting concept here, that in the future (maybe? As far as I can tell?) people have stopped fighting wars and instead have a specific class of people called Grievar who beat each other up in MMA fights to solve disputes. I’ve taught karate for almost fifteen years, so I was looking forward to what the book held. I was engaged while listening to the audiobook, and the narrator did a great job. The book follows a progression like “what if the Ender’s Game challenges were all MMA fights,” which is quite exciting at the beginning, with a steady progression for the underdog. There is some mystery surrounding where the main character came from, but I figured it out fairly easily so the reveal wasn’t a big surprise for me in the end.
The prose is good, but there are definitely some quirks that started to take me out of the story. Almost every fighter is described as having “cauliflower ears” which, yes, I understand that happens to people who get hit in the face a lot, but it could have been a blanket statement. There was also a lot of “show and tell,” meaning there would be an evocative description of something, followed by an unnecessary following clarification telling what was meant. It slowed down the story for me.
TL:DR I thought it was pretty good, but it’s so far not the top of my list.

Plot
Alright, let’s get into the details here. The plot was good, and followed an unsurprising structure of an underdog learning how to win at fights. He has an older retired mentor who still follows the old ways of doing things, unlike the negative changes that have been happening from higher up, removing the eponymous Combat Codes, which means more combatants get injured or killed. There were a lot of really good lessons from martial arts in general, about how to hold oneself, how to keep the mind centered, and how to prepare against challenges in life. It’s clear the author knows a lot about MMA, and has practiced a lot. I use many of the same philosophies myself. This is the start of a series, but in the end, I wasn’t really convinced to keep reading. There’s not a very clear overarching story going on yet, aside from one thing at the end which seems to forecast events in the larger world. Overall, I actually got a little tired of descriptions of fights by the end of the book.

Setting
I was not as happy with the worldbuilding as I wanted to be, mainly from a couple factors. One was the very liberal use of current-day MMA jargon in the fights. A lot of the terms are unique to grappling specifically, and while I recognized them, using our current-day terms for techniques, even down to Japanese names and saying “OSS” as a positive response, really popped me out of the story. I imagine it would be confusing if one wasn’t familiar with the terms. Adding to that was a lack of information about where the story was set. There were multiple mentions of “Mercury” (as far as I can tell, listening to the audio), so I was confused whether this was literally planet Mercury in our solar system, or another far away planet, or a renamed Earth or what. A couple other countries are named but nothing to really set where or when this takes place, or even what the world is like. But there were a lot of cool aspects too, such as the different classes of humans (worker, fighter, and scientist/engineer), the fighting rings made of different metals which affect the combatants’ mental states, and the little floating sparks that seem to have some influence over people and fights. Not much is uncovered about them in the first book, however.

Character
The characters in the book are well portrayed, and three dimensional. Although I thought the main character was a little older than eventually revealed (13), he’s got a lot of dedication to succeed and it makes you want to win along with him. He finds a crew of other students to help along the way, and his older mentor is a gruff mountain of a man who follows what he knows is right, even though no one else does so any longer. On the other hand, the antagonists are less developed. Most are spiteful or evil but there’s not a lot of reason given why, except that they’re bad sports. Generally, all people from the upper classes are kind of snooty, while all the lower-class people are “salt of the earth.” That leads me to my other main problem with this story. There’s very little diversity. As far as I can tell, there’s no LGBTQ content, which is especially strange, as it seems about 99% of Grievars are male. I think I counted four females in the story altogether, and only two with more than a line. It seems like both are set up as potential romantic interests for later books. Both are also very Hermione-like characters, who want to use their smarts to get ahead. Just for reference, I’ve taught many female martial artists over the years, and many are very competent fighters, no matter their size. I would have liked to see a few more included here.

Score out of 10 (My personal score, not the final contest score)
Temporary score until more books in the contest are read: Decent writing with some annoying quirks, some interesting characters, though a lack of inclusion, Worldbuilding was spotty in places. 5/10.