2008 military SF, sixth of the Kris Longknife books. Kris is sent to
the back of beyond, in another vain attempt to keep her out of
trouble. Good thing she has a pocket warship and quite a few Marines.
This series continues to be military SF that accepts that
fighting action alone is not enough to sustain interest. Yes, it has
many of the usual mil-sf tropes (the bad guys have political officers
and secret police; senior enlisted are always right; good soldiers on
the wrong side will still be good soldiers, and tactical competence
and moral competence go together; any non-soldier who tries to tell
soldiers what to do is wrong), but it also has interesting people who
sometimes do things other than fighting.
"You do the humanity thing. We'll do the other stuff."
It also has consequences: the solutions to Kris's problems in earlier
books (particularly the most recent two) were not always clean, and
some of those ragged edges are still flapping around and affecting her
reputation and what she can get people to do for her now.
It also has two separate plots, and the one that takes up the greater
part of the book suffers from an obvious authorial hand on the scales.
Team Good turns up at a poor colony world, only to find a ship in
orbit and troops on the ground, clearly engaged in some sort of
looting and/or takeover. Team Good's ship is a bit more capable than
the other, and will clearly have to take it on at some point. But they
don't at first, because the bulk of the story is a ground campaign and
if they did the smart thing, of either scaring off or crippling the
ground forces' commanders and ride home first, there wouldn't be all
those battles on the surface because the ground forces would, with no
pay, no way off-world and no sympathetic locals, have to surrender on
the spot. As indeed they do when the space battle finally happens, but
this is only once the ground battle has got down to the heroic last
stand.
Diegetically it's a huge gap in everyone's thinking (Team Good is
doing its best to save lives, after all, even among the enemy, and
avoiding the ground fighting would certainly have done that), and
Shepherd has to make everyone stupid in order to cause the fighting
that's presumably the reason why at least some of the readers turned
up.
This is a shame, because the action's highly enjoyable, as is the rest
of the book. And Kris even manages to fail at something, not a thing
this series has offered much before: it may be not go as far as being
through her own error, but it's not because anyone else sabotaged her
either. That wouldn't be remarkable in many genres, but in one where
competence and success generally equate to moral virtue it's a bold
and welcome move by Shepherd.
As regular readers will know I get irked by turn-the-handle genre
milSF, especially the stuff that's just a pretext for the author to
rant about how wonderful the USA is. This isn't that, and I welcome
it.
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