2013 military SF, eleventh of the Kris Longknife books. Kris has a
planet to defend.
It's all getting too much for me. World-ships with billions of
people on board, and missiles that can destroy them with a single hit.
A faceless enemy that refuses to talk, and commits suicide rather than
be captured, so all you can do is fight them, none of that effeminate
diplomacy stuff. Our Heroine winning a space battle though
comprehensively out-numbered and out-massed, because she's just such a
great tactician. Her political masters are becoming increasingly
incompetent, presumably so that she won't feel bad when she has to
overthrow them in a few books' time. (I'm just guessing.)
And everybody thinks and talks like a middle-aged military-fanboy
white guy (who has recently discovered sex).
Everybody is sexually active (to the point of changing the shipboard
fraternisation rules because "it's going to happen anyway") but nobody
has ever heard of being gay.
The hardscrabble human colony on an alien world runs to a large
tropical luxury resort which has no lack of custom.
SmartMetal™ not only lets you reconfigure your ship, it now lets you
combine or bud off ships on demand. This doesn't appear to cause any
difficulties with naval organisation.
Around them, all hands beat to quarters. The Forward Lounge became
suddenly empty.
No, Mike, the phrase "beat to quarters" indicates the call to
action—originally given on a drum, thus the command to the drummer
"Beat 'To Quarters'", then later a bell, and these days by an
electronic alarm and tannoy announcement. It does not indicate the
process of moving to your battle station. Am I correcting a guy who
"grew up Navy" (but was never actually in) on a matter of naval
detail? Yes I damn well am. I mean my goodness if I'm not reading for
the cardboard characters or the predictable plot or the ships-go-boom
action or even, now, the technical detail, what's left? The adolescent
sexuality?
The last couple of books, getting away from Kris Longknife Perfect
Commander and dealing at a more personal level, had reversed the
general downward course of my enjoyment of this series, but now we're
right back on the slide and gathering speed. I'm going to stop here. I
really enjoyed Mutineer, the first in this series, but it seems to
have been the one book Shepherd would write in that style. (Given that
Shepherd continued to publish with Ace Books until 2016, clearly there
are many people who do not share my tastes; if you like this series, I
wish you all the best.)
This is also the point at which the universe starts branching off into
multiple sub-series with a single continuity, so while there are in
theory eight more books of Kris Longknife herself (at the time of
writing) there are as many more about other characters, and I just
lack enthusiasm.