I think I saw the hardcover of this listed in Previews and without knowing much of anything about it, decided I had to buy it. A dystopian future story with an emphasis on air battles instead of car convoys and forever trains. Road Warrior in the sky? Sign me up.
So, an Earth scarred by radiation and pollution. A few people are able to survive in airships, what's left of everyone else toils away on the surface, hoping they'll get a chance to live in the clouds. There's one airship everyone is after, The Dawn. Solar-powered, so it doesn't have to worry about fuel like everyone else. Raicht lays all this out in the first few pages, as well as that the greatest threat to the Dawn and her crew is the "Judge", commander of a fleet of ships.
The two main characters are Cola, a hotshot pilot who flies that orange plane in the lower right, and Tug, a miner she recruits as a "gun". "Guns" are people who use very-limited fuel jetpacks to land on enemy craft and wreck stuff up close. Not a great survival rate, hence the vacancy that got Tug the job.
A lot of the story deals with the differences in perspective at different levels. Cola's mother is the Dawn's commander. She and Cola butt heads, or more accurately, Olivia yells at Cola for not following orders. Frankly, her threats to ground Cola seem like a bluff when she's yelling about them being down a plane. You're going to put yourself at even greater disadvantage? But the point is supposed to be Olivia is thinking of a big picture, of trying to keep the Dawn airborne, while Cola is more focused on the dogfight she's in, or on protecting her gun or her friends.
Likewise, the story spends time with the Judge and his crew. Why he takes the approach he does, what he hopes to accomplish. He's contrasted with a young doctor on his ship, Dr. Stephens, who struggles to understand a man who in one breath, punches a pilot in the stomach with a broken glass for disobeying orders, and in the next tells her to make sure the pilot doesn't die because they already lost three pilots today. All lives, including his ultimately, are worth burning up for this goal.
It's a little funny they're fighting over the Dawn, because honestly, it doesn't look like much. Howard and Daniel take the approach towards the airship and technology in general that suggests improvisation, or maybe practicality is the word in this world. Kind of like the Nostromo in Alien, the Dawn isn't built for comfort. It's a lot of hard edges and halls lined with dirty pipes. Reminds me of the interior of a battleship or aircraft carrier (on purpose, no doubt). I like the designs for the planes - bit of a mixture of WW2 prop fighter and more recent jet attack planes - but again, they're well-worn. The paint's chipped off in places, it's basically a matter of keeping the functional. No time or resources to waste on "pretty".
Likewise, the characters themselves are scuffed up and dirty. Granted, it's movie dirty. The day-old stubble doesn't look like a mess and the clothes might be dirty but they still fit and make people look cool, but you can see the years on some of them. This life, whether stuck down in toxic air mining, or up on a solar-powered airship everyone wants, is a constant fight to survive, and it burns them out.
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