2017 space-marine SF, side story in the Poor Man's Fight series.
Alicia Wong keeps getting tapped for special missions that she's not
allowed to talk about…
…and it's filler. With the exception of the climactic moment,
this feels like material that could have been cut from the main
series – most crucially for me, it doesn't have the focus on the
economic aspects of the war, on what actually makes a nation or a
company give up the fight and try to make peace, that made the trilogy
worth reading.
So it's basically just space marine action, with a strong side note of
"military good, civilian intelligence services bad". It's pretty good
space marine action, and well written, but nobody gets any character
development beyond what we see of them in the main books, and all the
sympathetic characters are ones we know will survive into book 3
anyway. There is an incident which becomes so widely known that it's
rather odd that nobody mentioned it before (even if Alicia wouldn't
have been able to admit that she was anywhere near it). And… that's
it. It also only just breaks 80,000 words, when the rest of the series
has been 130-170K, which doesn't help me get over the feeling that
it's trimmings sewn together to make a book to satisfy readers who
wanted more after the story was over.
Not terrible, but there's a reason this stuff gets cut from the main
books, and I found it something of a disappointment after a solid
initial series.
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