Rating: WARTY!
I really enjoyed Moon's Vatta wars pentalogy, and searched in vain for something else by her along similar lines, but alas! It seemed that all her other material (at least that which I happened upon) was fantasy, which held no interest for me. I was thrilled, therefore to come across this one on a close-out - which of course, given my luck happened to be the last in a seven book series which begins with Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, and Winning Colors, as part of the Heris Serrano trilogy, followed by the Esmay Suiza dilogy (Once a Hero, and Rules of Engagement), and ending with the Suiza and Serrano dilogy Change of Command, and Against the Odds, which is the book I started with, ass-backwards as my reading habits can be.
It began very much along the lines of the Vatta wars - talking about shipping, trading, and smuggling, and so on, but then it seemed to quickly segue into a David Weber knock-off which from me, is not a complement, but how else am I to interpret Heris Serrano, if not as a Honor Harrington clone? Once Moon began switching between different story lines, I started becoming both confused and annoyed. Perhaps having read the earlier stories I would have been spared the confusion somewhat, but even then I still would not have escaped the annoyance I always feel at being unceremoniously flung by an author away from an interesting story that I was getting into, and landing in the middle of one about family politics and carping and whining, and family crisis issues, which doesn't interest me very much.
Fortunately, it didn't stay on that topic for too long, and when it came back to it, the story was nowhere near as absurd as Weber's writing, but this back and forth became a real problem. The story was unevenly balanced and bounced around like a rabid pinball, with too-long interludes of extraneous detail tossed in randomly as cushioning. It didn't work. This is how you get a seven book series, folks - ramble mindlessly instead of writing crisply focused text, tightly aligned with story and plot. I didn't like this, and if this had been a first time writer, they would have been pilloried for writing like this. So much for Big Publishing%trade;
As I said, the military action really turned me off as it started to sound like Moon was chanelling Weber - trying to translate 2-D antique marine combat ethics and actions into 3-D space. One phrase of advice: IT DOESN'T WORK! And the harder you work at trying to make it work, the more ridiculous it reads. Horatio Hornblower did not have robots, nor did he have cruise missiles, nor did he have drones, but if he'd had those things he sure as hell would never have confined his thinking to a planar ocean when he could have used the third dimension of sky and the submarine areas.
Fortunately, Moon is nowhere near as obsessed as Weber is in pursuing the entirely futile pretension that this vision of space warfare is not only realistic, but exciting. She moved on and the story became interesting once more because of it. The idea of trading over interstellar distances still remains ridiculous in sci-fi as well as in reality, but I did enjoy the Terakians, which immediately brought to mind the Taarakians of the 1980's movie Heavy Metal. I found the capture of the two maiden aunts(!) amusing and interesting as one of them feistily planned to turn the tables on the rebel captors.
I noticed some critics have accused this series of genderism, but they gave no examples, and I confess that nothing outrageous leaped out at me other than the usual stuff you find in novels. Maybe I was too focused on trying to figure out who was who and what was going on, and trying to decide if I wanted to keep reading it. One thing I did notice along these lines though, that no one else has mentioned, was the use of two honorifics: 'ser' for men and its obvious derivative, 'sera' for women. Que sera sera. To me, that's gender to me, and it makes no sense. It's highly pretentious and really silly to make up stuff like this, especially when it has no precedent. No one uses those terms or anything like them, so why would they magically spring-up and why would there be different ones for men and women in the future in a free society? It makes no sense, especially since none of the rest of the English language has changed at all, right down to the point of junior officers addressing senior female officers as 'sir'. Why this one change (ser and sera) and no others? It makes no sense!
I also found it absurd to learn of a contract being sealed with a blood sample and a hair sample - two of the easiest things to get hold of if some fraud was being perpetrated. I guess DNA isn't hard to get hold of either, but I found it hard to believe they had nothing better than this several hundred years into the future. Again it's a common failing of sci-fi stories to rely on the past.
At about the halfway point, the book just became lost in endless back and forth and rambling. It never recovered, and the end fizzled. Maybe if I'd read this after completing the previous six volumes, I would have viewed it differently, but if the series is anything like this sample, I would have ditched it long before I ever got anywhere near book seven. I cannot recommend this volume, but I might go back and try to get hold of volume one to see if the series begins any better than it ends.
