Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the final volume of this five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep on step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

It's taken Kylara three volumes to finally get her defense force up to a decent size where she can take on the pirates. Her first port of call is a shipyard where vessels are being built that the pirates intend to pirate and bring into their own fleet, Kylara meets them head on and denies them the success they expected, but loses her own spacecraft in the process. This defeat though enables her to sneak around while she'd believed dead and in the end, as you know would happen, defeat the pirates.

There were parts of this series that I didn't particularly enjoy: for example, Kylara's love interest did not inspire me at all. There were also some lengthy and tedious boring bits, but overall I consider this series to be a worthy read, and I commend it as such.

Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume four of a five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep on step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

Kylara Vatta started out as military, fell into disgrace, went limping back to her family's interstellar commerce, was successful, but was gradually forced back into military mode by piracy. This volume was a bit of a pause and a breath before the finale, since not a whole heck of a lot new happens. The villains who have taken down the purported galaxy-wide communications system have acted with speed and decision, and seem to be winning the battle. Everyone else has been wrong-footed and there seems to be little orchestrated effort to take on the pirates or to fix the damage they've done. This is the gap that Kylara is aiming to fill.

This to me is the biggest weakness with these space operas. You can't write about space in the same way you can, for example write about piracy on the high seas, yet far too many blinkered and short-sighted sci-fi writers (David Weber I'm looking at you) think you can translate 2-D Earth issues and events into outer space with very little thought or change. They simply do not get the massive size of space, and the fact that it's 3D. It results in stories which sound stupid and fake.

I for one have never been convinced that there would be a huge traffic in interstellar commerce and nothing I've read in a host of sci-fi stories has convinced me otherwise - not yet. They simply don't get the massive costs involved in interstellar travel even if warp vessels were invented, nor do they seem to appreciate the vast distances involved and the pointlessness of buying items from one planet that could far more easily and cheaply be manufactured on the planet where they're needed.

Yes, maybe a planet has something special that is found nowhere else, but would people truly want to pay the billions involved in having someone go there and bring that particular thing home? Often the thing is some sort of mineral or alloy, but the same elements found on Earth or in asteroids around the solar system exist throughout the universe. There's nothing out there that can't be found or manufactured here. There are no magical undiscovered elements, and any alloys or minerals can be recreated far more cheaply on Earth than the cost of flying interstellar distances to retrieved them. In short, it makes no sense.

That said, Moon tells a decent story and if you're willing to overlook some of the more incredible parts of the novel, an entertaining tale is to be had here.

Engaging The Enemy by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume three of a five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep on step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

Despite the title, this particular volume has Kylara running more than engaging. She is intent upon taking on the pirates who were partly responsible for her family's woes thus far, but she makes little progress and worse, has a falling out with a cousin who's annoyed that Kylara seems more focused on fighting pirates than ever she is on conducting business, which is an odd change for Kylara, since she was hitherto all about profit and trade; however, they come to an agreement where Stella is to run the business while Kylara is to focus on protecting trade routes. It turns out that Kylara (unsurprising trope!) isn't who she thought she was.

Engaging the enemy is a bit of a misleading title because while she does engage in some mild ways, she really doesn't in the way you might think - as in having a space battle - not until the end, and even then she ends up fleeing and licking wounds. That said, the story was still exciting and engaging, so I enjoyed it and wanted to continue reading the series.

Marque And Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

Also known as Moving Target in some markets, this is volume two of a five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep one step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

In this volume, Kylara has delivered a shipment to a planet and is waiting on a return cargo when she almost becomes the victim of assassins who bomb her spacecraft. She soon learns that she's not the only target: Vatta ships and berths have been attacked elsewhere resulting in many deaths in her family. As Kylara arms herself and her ship she learns of a cranial implant she needs to get which will give her the control codes for, and complete access to, the family business.

She's forced into forming interesting and unlikely alliances and hiring a paramilitary outfit for security as she tracks down the person responsible for the attacks, who turns out to be someone very close to home. Again, another fun and engaging adventure which I commend, although I confess I didn't much like Kylara's love interest who was brought back for an encore appearance in this volume and who is the trope bad boy from a wealthy or important family. Yawn.

Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

Here's another series, this one a part of a five-book set known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal (aka Moving Target), Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, the lone girl in a large family of sons, who is trying to make her way in the world.

She has chosen to join the military rather than go into her family's business. The problem is that she runs into a situation where she's betrayed by a fellow cadet, and it results in her being expelled from the military academy and heading home with her tail between her legs. In that regard (female soldier screwed over by male colleague) it's very much along the lines of David Weber's main character in On Basilisk Station which also kicks off a series, although this is much more of a rebel sort of a story than a ramrod up the ass senseless military procedural like Weber's books are.

Despite this setback, Kylara finds herself with a chance to start back on the road to redemption, as she gets the opportunity to captain a Vatta vessel. It isn't much, but it's better than nothing and she can maybe build on this over time. Her lowly assignment is to pilot an aging ship to the knackers yard, and her father is taking no chances since he crews the vessel with old hands as much to keep a weather eye on his daughter as to make sure nothing goes wrong.

The thing about Kylara is that she may be a girl and she may be lowest on the totem pole at that, but she's a Vatta, and when the lure of 'Trade and Profit' pops up, she sees an opportunity to pick up a shipping contract that's let lapse by another company. She undertakes to meet the challenge, seeing the chance of making some money along the way to dropping off this clunker of a ship at the breakers - unless of course, she can upgrade the ship and maybe make it her own into the bargain. She soon discovers that it's not all plain sailing and Kylara's military instincts and training come into full prominence as a simple delivery of agricultural equipment turns into a chore of becoming a prison ship, and enduring a sort of a mutiny among the prisoners.

I enjoyed this book. Despite it being a part of a series, it held my interest and made me want to read on. It was different, off-beat, entertaining, and featured a strong and smart female character. I commend this and the series.

Against All Odds by Elizabeth Moon

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.