Rating: WORTHY!
I've read many of this series, which is a follow-on to an earlier series about a different generation of the Longknife family, and one which I haven't read. I fell in love with the Kris Longknife novels, and read them avidly, but this was before I blogged reviews. My plan this year is to read the entire series, including two or three volumes I've acquired more recently, but not yet read. I'll be doing at least one per month, and posting a review for each one. I'll probably blow through this series rather quickly if the time it took me to get through the first novel is any gauge! For me they're very readable, despite an issue or two I had with them. I think it helps to go into this thinking of it more as a movie than a novel, because it reads like a movie script that's been fleshed out into a novel more than it reads like a novel that's written in the hope it might make a movie someday.
The first volume introduces a new member of the Longknife family: Kristine, who has recently joined the navy, which of course in this case is the space navy. I have to say this makes little sense to me, although it is a trope which pervades virtually all space operas that have a significant military component. I was surprised to discover that there's rather more of the David Weber touch in the Longknife novels than I remember from the first time I read them - and I don't mean that in a complimentary way, although I was a fan of Weber for a while.
Like in Weber's novels, the space fleet is very much a branch of the navy, a tired cliché in which far too many sci-fi writers indulge. They have fleets of ships which seem constrained by the maneuvering capabilities of sail ships from Georgian times, cavorting on a two dimensional ocean, rather than powerful craft traversing a three dimensional vacuum. I know a lot of sci-fi readers love it when authors gaze into their naval, but I don't. To me this approach is short-sighted, uninventive, and rather a lazy way of writing. It's also very Americanized. It's the US (although in this case named United Sentients, which is really clunky!) navy, not any other navy, despite the supposed homogenization of assorted planets, including Earth. In this case it's not even Earth, but an entirely different planet, yet these are American writers who can't seem to avoid Americanisms, American bureaucracy, and American historical references. There's even a reference to radio Shack! That's like a contemporary novel referencing a store form medieval times. It's rather blinkered and too often smacks of jingoism.
In the sixties, and after a rocky start, the US became without question the leader in space travel and technology, but that impressive lead bled dry over the next four decades. Now it's the Russians and the Chinese who are, if not exactly blazing trails, at least riding them, while the US sits without any means to put people into space. Even private industry is taking over, and after filling the astronaut ranks with white male military personnel, the diversity amongst astronauts is increasing significantly. Satellites aside, there is no military presence in space, so whence this impetus to have space navies in the future? Whence the sad bureaucracy which accompanies it?
Out of curiosity, I looked up the original seven Mercury astronauts, thinking they were largely air force personnel. As it happens only three were air force per se. Another three were navy, and the final one was a marine, but with one exception, all of them were primarily aviators. Even the exception, while beginning his career as a regular Navy officer, moved into aviation, so none of them were traditional navy personnel in the old fashioned sense. This was primarily a flying exercise not a naval exercise, yet now we're awash with navy references in sci-fi space operas. How weird is that?
I know that David Weber deliberately set out to replicate the Horatio Hornblower novels, which provides a root cause at least, if not exactly an explanation for his tedious by-rote naval parallels, but why anyone else would choose to go that route is a mystery and a disappointment to me. I honestly wonder why spacecraft are referred to as ships rather than as some sort of flying machine? Naturally they're not airplanes, since there's no air in space, but there's no water either, so why ships? Is it for no other reason than that they're simply larger than any airplane? Ships were what we had before airplanes, so even the pilot is a captain, but he's still a pilot! I guess old habits are really hard to break, and people don't like to think of large aircraft as anything other than ships.
Even if we let that go, there's still the bureaucracy. Shepherd employs the same US bureaucratic and stagnated institutions which Weber uses: Bureau of Personnel, which he refers to as BuPer(s), just as David Weber does. There are other such bureaus. too, such as BuShips, and so on. It's tedious and unrealistic. I think Elizabeth Moon does a far more realistic job in her Vatta's War pentalogy, which I recommend, and will also get around to reviewing at some point. I have mixed feelings about the Star Trek universe, but I think they got it right - or at least closer to right than too many sci-fi authors manage. Yes, they still start with the captain and descend through all the other such naval ranks, but the ships are not primarily 'war ships' - not the ones featured in the series. They're spacecraft of exploration so we don't get the same bureaucratic tedium and military saber-rattling in which other stories wallow.
That said, let's set it aside and get on with a look at the story itself, because the nicest thing about this series is that it isn't a space-naval-opera. I understand in the early editions of this book there were misspellings and grammar issues galore. In the paperback I read there were very, very few. Kris is a navy ensign, and she's depicted in some scenes aboard the navy craft, but most of this first story finds her on the surface of one of three planets. We meet her as she's leading a mission to rescue a kidnapped girl, and the mission almost falls apart. It is Kris's expert flying skills which save the mission.
This brief introduction in the first few chapters puts her head above the radar when it comes to another mission - to go to a water-logged planet and distribute food. This occupies the bulk of the novel but by no means all of it, and some of it makes no sense. We're told that a huge volcanic eruption had clouded the sky, and continual torrential downpours are washing out crops and roads. We never do learn how it manages to be raining the entire time she's there. With that much rain, the ash and soot would be gone from the sky in short order and the rain would stop!
A better question is where is this rain coming from? If the rainfall is planet wide, then where is the water being evaporated to feed the continual rain? If there's a clear sky somewhere else, then why not move the people there? If they're moving equipment off planet because the acid rain damaging it, then it's going to be damaging the soil. People need to be evacuated off planet too!
I read a lot of negative reviews on this to see if I needed to take into account anything my positive outlook had not covered, and I failed to find any. A lot of the reviews mentioned inconsistencies and logic problems but not a single one of them detailed any! That's not a review it's just a complaint! Maybe these reviewers had a case, but if they did, they failed to make it. This is why I got into reviewing in the first place - to write more useful reviews and to discuss author technique and general writing style. Yes, there are problems with every book - plot inconsistencies and issues, which I highlight, but the issue isn't whether there are any (it's fiction, so there always are), but whether those problems and issues spoil the. For me they did not. This doesn't mean a book is perfect. None are, but the bottom line is whether the novel overall is worth reading. For me, it was. I enjoyed the story and the characters.
The book blurb is completely wrong in one regard. It says, "...she enlists in the marines" and she does not. She's in the navy. This is one excellent reason to ditch Big Publishing™ they're utterly clueless. The people who illustrate the cover and write the blurbs are usually in shameful ignorance of the actual content of the book since they've never read it. They're "just doing what they're told" which is pathetic and no excuse whatsoever.
I noted that some reviewers have chided this because it doesn't take place in space (at least not as much as they think it should), but it's not set in space per se. It's just a futuristic action-adventure story. I think those reviewers went into it after reading David Weber's Honor Harrington series. There is no rule that says this has to be a space opera, although in parts it read like one. I've also seen Mike Shepherd accused of trying to emulate David Weber, and while he does appear to mimic Weber for some of the space scenes and background military story, so does every author, as does Weber. To me, that stuff is boring, which is why I quit reading the Weber series. it started out well but went into the toilet.
Shepherd emulates him with regard to the space conflicts, but any story about a navy, on the ocean or in space, is going to be the same in many regards since most writers really aren't that original, but just because there are parallels doesn't mean the story is a copy. With regard to Weber v. Shepherd, Shepherd's background is the Navy, whereas Weber's is in games and sci-fi literature, so I'd give Shepherd precedence for knowing the navy! At least Shepherd isn't rooted in the nineteenth century as Weber is, which is patently absurd! That said, he could have done a lot better, because his "naval battles" are far too rooted in the same problems that Weber's are - battle ships in 2D on an ocean, not spacecraft in a 3D vacuum. he makes the same mistake that Weber does with regard to a complete lack of robots and drones. Any navy which sought to conduct itself as Weber's and Shepherd's navies do would get it's ass kicked royally by a realistic navy four hundred years into the future!
Kris is possibly an alcoholic. It's a mess and it's hard to decide if she really was one, or just a teen who drank too much. I suspect it was the latter, which excuses Shepherd in the way he addresses Kris's sobriety and her behavior around alcohol. On this same issue of Kris's personal problems, the stress on her tragically kidnapped brother is rather overdone. I can see it at the beginning, where she's in process of freeing a kidnapped child, but her feelings seem to be far too raw to be left from a decade or more ago. Military training doesn't seem to have helped. Novel might have done better had it skipped the large central section on Flooded planet, and instead follow Kris through basic training where she could have worked through her issues. That said, her Eddy fixation is really only dwelt on this rescue mission, so naturally her thoughts are with her brother then. Later, she's far less preoccupied by his, and this to me seemed realistic.
So none of this made sense, and the phrase "one of those Longknifes" is way-the-hell overused in this series, but the story wasn't so ridiculous that I could simply not stand to read it. I liked the story and went with the flow - literally in this section! I liked the way Kris was depicted here. She slowly grew into her shoes. She was no Mary Sue and she made mistakes, but she was smart and figured things out in her own way. She had a good attitude and a can-do sense of mission, and she sorted the place out in her own way. You'd think this part was the big story, but it was what happened after this which shows us why the novel is titled Kris Longknife: Mutineer, and again it's down to her smarts and quick thinking.
Despite some issues, the story was eminently readable because it was a good story. It held my interest, made me willing to overlook some issues, and it rather subtly laid some groundwork for a sequel, without hitting the reader over the head or leaving them in the slimy grip of a cliffhanger. Despite issues and personal preferences, I recommend this novel as a worthy read.
