Adam

This is a compilation of the first few 24 comics that bring a few short stories to the series and add to the overall lore and background of the characters. All three of the stories are actually quite good and since each one was originally published separately so the art and writing can be a bit different from issue to issue. The weird part about the comics is they have the running clock, just like in the show... but it's kind of a featureless thing, because the time doesn't matter on such a short story scale like this.

24 One Shot
I think this was one of the weakest of the stories out of the three, but this was also the first one published, so that makes sense that they would improve over time. This story seems to take place before the first season and it's kind of just an extra mission that CTU ran. It involves the IRA (yes, the Irish group) and centers around transporting a key witness. It's pretty interesting to see Walsh, Jack and Nina working together before everything went downhill in the first season. I just thought it was weird that they needed to transport this witness to a safe house, outside of CTU? Other than that, the art is pretty solid and the story is a pretty good action tale overall.

Midnight Sun
Midnight Sun was a really cool story, it was written and drawn by the same team that wrote One Shot, but they've clearly improved from just writing the first story. One of the things that makes this story great is that it takes Jack out of Los Angeles, curiously he's wound up in Alaska. Basically, Jack is undercover as an Environmental Terrorist as they try to break into the ranks of this group that is clearly escalating their activity. Having a mission with Jack undercover was pretty nice, because at this point in time the show mostly just alludes to the fact that Jack has done undercover missions in the past. As with the first comic this was an exciting adventure and everything a 24 fan would expect. The only thing that I can't really tell is where this story takes place is it after or before Season 1? 2? There's no way to tell like we could with the first comic.

24 Stories
Unlike the first two installments this has a different artist, however, they stuck with the same writing team, which was a good move. The art direction tries to have a high degree of almost photo-realism, and the artist manages to achieve this pretty well. It feels less like your normal comic art, which works really well in this kind of a setting. This story takes place a little bit before Season 2 and is a tale about when Jack was undercover with the Salazar's before he turned them in. It's a pretty decent story and they did a good job overlapping it with an event that occurred with CTU Los Angeles at the same time. So Jack is basically sent to LA on a mission for the Salazar's and while there a totally separate hostage event takes place that puts Jack in the middle of the whole thing, but he can't blow his cover! There's a lot of cloak and dagger aspects to this story and I'm actually surprised they managed to fit it all into such a small space and still had it be coherent and exciting. This one was just as good if not better than Midnight Sun in my opinion.

I walked into this first novel with almost no expectations other than a Lara Croft adventure a la Indiana Jones in style. I played Tomb Raider when it was first released ages ago and didn't like it, but back then the graphics were pretty poor and games were not necessarily very well designed. I just didn't have the drive to move on with some of the older games and after that I hadn't run into a Tomb Raider related product until I saw the movie starring Angelina Jolie. I still like those movies, even though they probably ignore a ton from the games and kind of seem to be their own thing. They're cheesy action flicks really. So, with that background take my review with a bit of a grain of salt as I am not up and up on the true Tomb Raider lore or how it ties into the video games. In fact, I didn't play through a Tomb Raider game until they effectively re-launched the character. I will say it was sort of strange to finally pick these books up off my shelf only to find out the author had recently passed away.

I will start by saying, this is supposed to be video game tie-in novel. It's not supposed to be some ground breaking work, you should expect certain things to be cliché and at times I expect bad writing ideas to show up. I love a lot of the franchise novel stuff and usually they can hit the three star range pretty easily if they get the characters right, but I think Resnick went the extra mile in this story to really put the reader in the places he describes. Now, I've seen reviews that complain that this book gets the bridge between the games all wrong and I suppose I would be more frustrated at that if I had actually played the games, so the fact I haven't played these earlier games seems to be a boon for enjoying this novel.

If you want a random Lara Croft adventure Resnick absolutely delivers. He clearly has done exhaustive research into the region Lara is placed. This book picks up where the video game The Last Revelation and according to the back of the book it's supposed to lead into Angel of Darkness. I guess at the end of The Last Revelation it was left unknown if Lara was actually killed when she was in the collapsing Temple of Horus in the town of Edfu, Egypt. Well, naturally, she survived and she was rescued by the song of a well known archaeologist Kevon Mason, Jr. He was, in turn, looking for a different artifact originally from the Sudan, the Amulet of Mareish.

However, there are others looking for this amulet and they are willing to kill for it and for some reason they think Lara has it. The book starts off with her waking up in the hospital then it's a non-stop chase to try and find the amulet. It's a story that feels a bit like 24, where the main character just can't catch a break. Everywhere they turn they are being pursued and enemies are everywhere. Sometimes it's exciting sometimes it's a bit too ridiculous and far fetched, which is often how I feel when I read these types of stories. Overall, it was a good story in this regard and there's enough excitement to keep the pages turning.

I think Resnick did a good job of capturing Lara's character. She's sassy and confident, but I think the only thing he kind of missed out on is that I think she would have generally been more respectful of other cultures. Certainly, she would be loathe to deal with any kind of patriarchy, but I get the impression that she also has an appreciation for cultures beyond the standard imperialist British sense of their way being the only way. Honestly, my only real gripe with her character in this book. It's not that she was going around being mean to everyone, once she had teamed up with Omar and his friends that was more what I expected from Croft.

On that note, I really did like a lot of the companions she picked up along the way. Omar and his friends were great. I thought they added a lot of things into the book, which made it a lot more fun to read. When she finally makes her way out of Khartoum she runs into her old friend Malcolm Oliver and he was really great to have around. I really did like the fact that she wasn't just some lone traveler being generally super human. The only thing that was a bit off was that she was usually the only woman in any of these areas. Perhaps Resnick figured it was just a part of that region of the world? I'm not sure, but some gender balance would have been nice... maybe in future novels.

Resnick's research into the region really brought it to life. The areas and their histories referenced are all real. The history of Chinese Gordon is all there and the history of Khartoum is laid out for the reader, which I appreciated. One of the major things I appreciated, that I feel like isn't touched on as much, is the scene where Lara spends a good deal of her time reading old books to try to solve the mystery of where Gordon hid the amulet. I feel like this kind of hard work is left out of video games and movies a lot, even though in an Indiana Jones movie they try to point out that most archaeology research is done in the library. Hey, they tried... As with most Indiana Jones or Lara Croft styled stories there is a hint of ancient magic that always shows up, kind of to lend a bit of “truth” to the ancient mysteries of course. So, the amulet in question is indeed magical and it summons sand demons to talk to Lara and everything.

The ending of the book was really just okay, which is what dropped the star mostly. It's very abrupt, this novel is such a long grueling chase and then at the end the find the amulet, as you expected... but they mostly just go and pick it up? The whole finding the amulet part of the story is a scant few pages. It felt somewhat anti-climatic. The one thing I truly hated about this ending was that they killed Oliver. There was really no point to him dying at all, and so suddenly either. I like that he tried to fight her for the amulet, but for the amulet to call up sand demons and kill him? It was really just annoying.

All in all, it was a quick and fun read. I'm curious to read the next book, even though it is not written by Resnick, in fact this is the only Tomb Raider book he wrote. I feel like this was a bit outside of his normal writing, but I found it a fun read. Who knows if he had ever really played the games, so if you go in with a lot of expectations about the games, you may be disappointed. If you go in wanting a generic, but fun, Lara Croft adventure I think Resnick pulled it off pretty well.

This is the second time I've read this book, I was just a fool the first time around and didn't write a review for it and by the time I was looking at it I had, basically, no memory of this thing. So here we go, round two! This probably sits more in the 2.5 range for me, there's stuff I liked and things I didn't like, but if you've read my other reviews this is, pretty much, standard fair for these early Star Trek works.

So, this is a story centered around Tasha Yar and Data, seemed more like Tasha than Data for the majority of this book. Her character was far more fleshed out, but while I'm sure Data is a character the author liked, Lorrah still did a horrible job portraying him. Which has been fairly consistently true in these early TNG novels. At the time this novel was published I would think it's conceivable that she had seen at least an episode of the series since this was technically published after the first season aired altogether. But who knows how many contracts were commissioned back in the 80's for authors to write books who were only given a rough overview of the series? So, I am somewhat willing to give a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, the popular theme of the novels so far is to send a couple characters away from the Enterprise and then you can develop their background more or something. It's sort of getting a bit tiring and feeling a little formulaic. Data and Yar are sent to observe a planet that has asked to become a member of the Federation. The bizarre part in all this is that at one point the author says that Data and Yar are technically not qualified for this... and literally the only reason they are sent is because they will be able to spurn the sexual advances of the current leader. What?! This was pretty bizarre, even by Star Trek standards. On that note, almost everyone is sexy by the way. Data gets hit on and Data hits on people with his “flirtation” program that he made etc.

I think a lot of the motivation for this was because this takes place after Yar and Data had slept together. But it's so overt it's almost entirely ridiculous, but the ideas aren't terrible. There was a later episode where Data ended up dating that one character and he wrote a special “relationship” program for her. So, the premise isn't that outlandish really, but the whole playing Data off as having thriving “sex appeal” was fairly off putting. The other nail in the coffin for Data's character was that he basically had full on emotions and talked about being frustrated etc. One character even came right out and said he clearly had feelings and Data did nothing to deny this. This is entirely out of character for Data. At the end of the book “he learned something about his feelings” and it's just not true. Oh well, this is why I question when this novel was actually written versus when it was actually published.

Yar is a little better, she does seem a bit over impulsive, even compared to who character in the show. Lorrah did a decent job fleshing her out and when she talked about Yar's background on her home planet there were a few things that would contradict later episodes, such as no mention of Yar's sister. This novel also basically outright said Yar was raped when she was younger, but I don't think that was ever stated in the show. Other than that Yar's story arc was by far the best. It talks about her rescue by Starfleet and her falling in love with the man who rescued her when she was old enough, this is pretty tropey, but whatever. Darryl Aiden, who they call Dare, was a prominent figure and lover in her life until it was found out that he allegedly betrayed the Federation to a people known as the Orions (a species made up for the purposes of this book). Naturally, Yar's loyalty to the Federation won and Aiden and her split up as a result.

Now, moving onto the new planet. This being Star Trek, it comes as no surprise that something is amiss on this planet and with their leader. There are two warring factions that are both claiming rule over the planet and the idea of this is pretty good and showed up a few times in very good TNG episodes in later seasons. This was one of the best parts of the books when they finally got to the planet and were trying to find out what was really going on. Basically, the Federation is far more technologically advanced than this planets current society so Data is able to get access to their systems pretty easily, at one point the author tries to describe this... and it's just not how computers work really. It reminded me of that movie Hackers where they were literally “flying” around cyberspace to find the files on a server. But, I just tell myself this was the 80's and this stuff really wasn't common knowledge. Heck, this book may have been written on a typewriter!

So, I can't dive into my next bit without spoilers:
It turns out the leader of the side that contacted the federation, Nalavia, the one overflowing with sex appeal, was basically drugging her population into submission. This is pretty much a retelling of [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SY75_.jpg|3204877] except set in Star Trek. She essentially uses a drug like Soma distributed through the water supply, for all your fluoride conspiracy theorists out there. This is really just within the city proper, the more rural areas have their own water so they are really the opposing faction and Nalavia wants the Federation to help with them. As is common in Star Trek these leaders misunderstand the Federations willingness to help in a conflict. However, Yar and Data wind up helping the other side to free the people from Nalavia anyway, because they really had no back-up. Helping the other side is Tasha's old flame Darryl and he's still very hot, in case you were at all wondering. They end up patching things up, as is expected at this point. Finally, towards the end the Enterprise shows up to save the day, because of course they do.

Tasha and Darryl's story was the best part of this book and, honestly, what bumped it up for me. The other main thing I didn't like is they kept bringing the Orion's in over and over. Darryl fought the Orion's before meeting Tasha, then in Tasha's final test at the academy the Orion's showed up again! By the end it was just too much. I understand the author probably liked the alien species, but it got really repetitive by the end. It was like that 24 Season where Jack's dad was the bad guy and just when you thin he's dead... oh no! It's Jack's dad again, he's back!

I read the book [b:On Basilisk Station 35921 On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington, #1) David Weber https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390456253l/35921.SY75.jpg 965345] quite a while ago and I was pretty surprised to see it get the graphic novel treatment. So, when I saw this hitting the comic book stores I started picking up the issues. Given the space opera nature of the original series by [a:David Weber 10517 David Weber https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1227584346p2/10517.jpg] I thought this would actually translate into comic book form pretty well.I'm finally sitting down to read these quite a few years after these were originally released and they clearly had some pretty big plans, even an Honor Harrington movie. Unfortunately this would be quite short lived, because the company dealing with all of this went out of business, so they didn't get very far. There were plans to do the second novel, but they never got that far.“On Basilisk Station” is the first book in a space opera series following Honor Harrington. The book was originally published in 1992 and seeing a strong female lead character in charge was still quite the rarity. It still kind of is today, but it is becoming a bit more common, still this is written by a male author in the end and back then female sci-fi authors was still even more rare! However, this in no way detracted from my enjoyment of her story, which, I think, David Weber did a great job telling in the grand scheme of things.Honor's tale begins with her being given command the star ship Fearless. It goes through the story of her learning to trust her new crew and vice versa. They basically get stationed in the middle of nowhere and a place that has been rather lax in security, so when Honor shows up and doing her actual job she uncovers all manner of problems. It's actually a great story with some rather hard sci-fi aspects rather on par with BattleTech and stuff like that. It has a degree of interstellar politics going on behind the scenes a bit, but I'm sure that gets expounded upon in future volumes.The really strange thing about this comic series is they decided to start the series off in a very strange way. In the beginning we see Honor being tortured by the Havenite empire. I was initially very confused, because I didn't remember this happening, but it turns out this happens in the seventh book [b:In Enemy Hands 77740 In Enemy Hands (Honor Harrington, #7) David Weber https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1321561738l/77740.SY75.jpg 2684782]. I guess the approach was to tie this in with the more recent novel and have Honor “reminisce” the first books as they wound their way through the series. It wasn't a bad idea, but the whole part of jumping back and forth (while probably realistic) was annoying from a narrative stand point. I wish they had just started off with her being captured then remembering the first novel in full and then open up the comic series for the second novel with her still being captured. Instead they wasted time covering this thing.Their retelling was pretty good overall, but it did get annoying by issue 4 where they devoted about 3 or 4 pages to a recap of what they had just done... then opened issue five with another recap (albeit shorter). It was really weird to see them waste so much time on this kind of stuff, especially when one of the issues they complained of running out of paper.Overall, the art was pretty good, it felt overly digital though. Like the way they posed the characters and sometimes the way they held their arms seemed very unnatural. So, it was like they were working with a 3D frame generated by a computer, rather than an artist drawing the characters themselves. The digital aspect of this really made the scenes with ships and stuff in space look awesome, but it clearly had a hard time holding up with humans, which felt unnatural at times.In the end, I did like reading the series and it did have a few flaws, but I think I would have stuck with it had the company continued to exist and publish more installments. Another aspect that I think this suffered from was the constant need for narration rather than scenes and character interaction. It's definitely a careful balance, and I do realize Weber created a semi-complex world so some narration is needed, but it would have been better if they could cut some out, because at times I felt it would have been easier to just read the novel and this started to feel like a Spark Notes rendition with pictures. Now the original novel is certainly better and if you like space opera sci-fi I highly recommend it.

I'm back tracking a little bit with this novel, I never thought I would track down a copy at this point so I'm diving in after reading Stackpole's Warrior trilogy. The reason this book is so hard to locate is because it's the only book in the BattleTech universe that wasn't re-printed. So now it costs hundreds if you want to get a copy, luckily I managed to track it down for a semi-decent price. But, I'm happy to say I finally got a copy so I have more complete view of the BattleTech universe.This was the first book commissioned by Fasa and it was clearly intended to be the first novel in the universe. Sadly, there were clearly some issues and it came out about a year after it was planned, if I remember correctly. So [a:William H. Keith Jr. 20444 William H. Keith Jr. https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343233912p2/20444.jpg]'s series get split up in the release schedule and it put his novel [b:Decision at Thunder Rift 553596 Decision at Thunder Rift (Saga of the Gray Death Legion, #1) William H. Keith Jr. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1589502064l/553596.SY75.jpg 540825] to be the first published.Within the universe this is also considered one of the worst books in the series, so I had semi-low expectations going in. However, it was a bit better than I thought it would be, even though it did start off pretty horribly. First, I would like to applaud Fasa for commissioning a female author to write a science fiction book, no less the first novel intended to kick off their tie-in novels for the game. It has always been clear that this genre could use a great deal more diversity and to push for that in the 80's is pretty impressive.This is the story of when the Capellan Confederation installed a double of Hanse Davion to disrupt and take over the Federated Suns. This is a story that BattleTech fans already know about in the universe so I don't feel bad throwing that out there. This book lays the foundations of details involving the treaty between Davion and Steiner and sets up future books that will involving the wedding between Hanse Davion and Melissa Steiner. For those just jumping into BattleTech and are rightfully disturbed by the massive age difference between Hanse and Melissa, the general concept of the setting was to take the trappings of medieval royalty and transport them into the far future as part of the decline of human technology similar to the technological decline during medieval times. Marriages of age differences were common with these ridiculous age ranges... however, I still think it's super unrealistic that humanity would revert back to this nonsense coming so far into the future. Now, I'd believe they'd make political marriages and produce royal dynasties etc, but I don't think they would revert back to this exact same thing the way they have it setup here. It would have made way more sense to me if Melissa was twenty something and Hanse was in his thirties. I mean, I guess it's not so bad that they wait until Melissa is at least eighteen? The age difference is still creepy to me.In any event, even though even though these political things are moving around this primarily centers on the story of Ardan Sortek who is instrumental in thwarting Maximillian Liao's plot to take control of the Federated Suns. Overall, I really did like the story and I quite liked Ardan and his team of MechWarriors throughout the book. Sadly, at times there is some objectively bad writing going on at moments of this book, but overall the story was pretty cool.The book starts off pretty rough, part of the problem is because Mayhar insists on trying to make this a sort of “hard sci-fi” book giving us calculations on how fast each machine is going during an air fight. This makes for incredibly tedious reading, but I'm happy to report that it was sort of the only time it happened in the novel. There were also only a couple ‘Mech battles, so if you're hear for that, this is mostly government conspiracy. The annoying part about the ‘Mechs is that she felt the need to always include their full model numbers... which was also a bit tedious. The writing was rather bad at times though such as these gems “Ardan closed his eyes. They sprang open again as if they were on springs.” It certainly gives it that pulpy sci-fi feel for sure.There's one massive gripe that we run into in this book. Well two, but first and foremost there's a moment when Ardan runs into basically the BattleTech version of Ewoks on a world when his ‘Mech gets destroyed and he needs to escape from the battlefield. I felt having creatures of this intelligence level where they had their own society and clear language and buildings was a bit beyond the scope of BattleTech where there weren't supposed to really be any aliens. Now for the second major issue. Now, I know BattleTech is supposed to be set at a time when humanity has lost some of the knowledge it gained, but not all, so they can't make some of the advanced ‘Mech materials they used to, but to forget that a double could be used by royalty? Come on, that's ridiculous. The whole plot where Melissa had to look into the archives of knowledge to find instances where a double had been installed during certain governments is just ridiculous. This would not be news.In the end, I am glad I read the book and I do wish I had read it before reading The Warrior Trilogy. It really fills in the gaps for that tale quite a bit, because the relationship between the Steiner's and Sortek is assumed pretty heavily. Also the way the Warrior Trilogy closes makes a lot more sense if you know this story pretty well. Having it fleshed out like this is so much better. I think the general idea is great and since this will never be republished I kind of wish they would commission someone else to re-write this story, but a bit more updated to make more sense in the BattleTech universe.

I haven't played through the entire game yet, but I decided to pick this up and give it a read because the game aesthetic was so cool. I usually find Dark Horse to be a top publisher in terms of their stories and franchises they choose to engage, so with that mark of quality I picked up the individual issues.

These four issues cover a short story involving a Trauma Team within the game universe. Now, Trauma Team is not a major aspect of the game itself, instead their more of a medical service offered within the game universe... at least for those who can afford it. The game universe every bit a capitalist dystopia in similar fashion to things like the Judge Dredd, Aliens universe, most of the books by William Gibson, Bladerunner and even the movie Fifth Element. Now, Cyberpunk the game hearkens back to the 80's so it's one of the earlier builders of the whole Cyberpunk aesthetic.

This also isn't the first comic book made for the Cyberpunk universe and there were a couple small series made in the 90's, but it doesn't look like that got much traction. Fast forward to 2020 with Keanu Reeves signing on to have a part in a major video game production and we immediately get tie in stories!

I had no idea what to really expect from this story and I was pleasantly surprised with the way Trauma Team played out. This being a rather gritty future Trauma Team is, basically, a militarized ambulance service. This follows the story of a Trauma Team operative named Nadia who was the sole survivor of her first team and convinces the company to keep her on. This is the tale of that new mission with a new team. Now, it's no secret that Cyberpunk is a gritty and violent universe, so expect a lot of action and quite the body count by the end of the story. It's not necessarily a happy story, and if you've played the game you certainly won't expect that. I think the way it was written was really good and I'm not sure I predicted every single turn of events, despite how much sci-fi I have consumed over my life.

I don't think you need to play the game in order to read this comic series, however, it certainly helps. You definitely get a deeper insight into the world if you've played the game, but I don't believe it is required. The art and coloring is excellent. They did a great job of reproducing the weird blend of bright and glittery with dark and gritty, which puts the game universe in this weird head space as you journey through it.

I'm not sure if this will be the beginning of more series within this universe. But if Dark Horse is producing material of this quality I look forward to checking out any other journey they take into this universe. They tend to have good writers involved so we'll see where they go with this. Either way way this is a good action packed four issue series that gives you a story about something that was only sort of seen from the side lines within the game.

This book collects stories that were originally published as 48-page (about double issue size) comics. I read them as individual stories instead of the collected TPB. The first two issues focus on the most popular realms created by Dungeons & Dragons, namely Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. Usually these stories consist of epic journeys spanning a trilogy of novels or more, but somehow they managed to craft a story across two comic book issues?Forgotten Realms: Dark MirrorRather than explore other aspects of the Forgotten Realms, they launch this new series with another Drizzt Do'urden tale by R.A. Salvatore. I don't know if this is original to the comic, or a story pulled from somewhere else. However, I must point out that DDP has already been adapting the Drizzt Do'urdan saga from the beginning, so it's weird to even kick off with this, especially if it's an original short story.The story itself was okay, it's certainly not very grandiose and it happens well after the original trilogy. However, it's kind of boring. It's pretty much the same rut of a tale R.A. Salvatore keeps throwing at us if you've read his novels, of which I've read quite a few, easily 20. Compressing the story into such a short format is somewhat unsatisfying, but Salvatore tries to convey that usual tale of not judging someone by appearances etc. This time it's just not Drizzt who is being misjudged, but instead a Goblin slave that Drizzt feels compelled to help. This one is a bit of a tragic tale, but there are a number of tragic characters in the R.A. Salvatore universe. Frankly, I think he should stick with writing longer form stories. Or they stop re-launching this material with the same story told over and over.Dragonlance: The LegacyThe Dragonlance story, on the other hand, was very good. But that is because it was already written in 1987. Now, the unfortunate part of this is that this story requires you to have read the Chronicles Trilogy and Legends. If you haven't this story will feel weird and nonsensical. The story was published in [b:The Second Generation 668860 The Second Generation (Dragonlance The Second Generation, #1) Margaret Weis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388463860l/668860.SY75.jpg 89589], which is sort of collection of short stories updating readers on the aftermath of the other two trilogies.This story is the tale of Caramon's son taking the test for magicians and it even brought Raistlin back up even though he had passed by this point in time. I forget the overall outcome of this book, because it's been so long since I read these stories. Either way, sticking it in this comic, which seems to be designed around garnering interest to new readers was, simply, a bad move. I liked the story and thought the adaptation was awesome, but this is a really strange place to put this story. Only people familiar with Dragonlance would truly get this.Eberron: The Weight of WaterThis is just a one off story and I believe it is published in this TPB. It was originally published in Issue 5 of the comic, but for some reason found it's way into this collected volume, probably because there was no place else to really put it.Eberron is just boring, I'll say it straight out. I'm not familiar with this setting and I realized they tried to launch this whole new idea, but it never really gained much traction. The setting was born in 2002 and “...an avenue for any D&D fan to experience swashbuckling adventure and explore mysterious new territories.” This short tale had none of that. In another book I looked up, apparently there's supposed to be airships and lightning trains! I wish that was in here... but no, this basically feels like your standard fair medieval tale that could be set on Earth or in any other Fantasy setting. The story centers around an ambush and using “unsavory tactics” or something... it was pretty ho-hum if you ask me.

This is the third and final volume of these strange publication that introduces readers to the various realms created within the realms of Dungeons & Dragons, except Planescape, which doesn't seem to have gotten a re-launch. Now, I might be wrong, but I don't even know if this volume got published. In 2008 DDP was really struggling and they had to lay some people due to the financial crisis at the time. This financial crisis seems to have been the nail in the coffin for all D&D related licensed projects. So, I imagine this was supposed to collect tales from issues #6-8, however, issue 8 never made it to the printers. So the story from R.A. Salvatore called “Guenwhyvar”, I've never had the pleasure of checking out. Instead, I've only got the first couple issues that were supposed to be gathered together.Dragonlance: Raistlin and the Night of SolamniaEven though this was a quick story, I actually quite enjoyed it. Of course, it's just as the kill the publication that they really start to get the hang of writing a shorter story in this setting. Now, it says the story is by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, so it might be from an excerpt in a novel, I just can't remember. This story takes place when Raistlin and Caramon were doing mercenary work to make ends meet. I'm thinking of something like the novel [b:Brothers in Arms 29160 Brothers in Arms (Dragonlance Raistlin Chronicles, #2) Margaret Weis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1329102608l/29160.SY75.jpg 29629], at the very least it is during this time frame.In any event while Raistlin and Caramon are looking for work, they stumble into a situation where a Knight of Solamnia is tasked with relieving an ancient curse. The knight is prejudice against Raistlin, but it is pointed out that the knight will need the mage in order to free the curse. So, this quick tale covers their journey. This was actually pretty good, it's more like a short chapter out of a book instead of a full story and if this was fleshed out in a novel somewhere, it's heavily abridged here.Dragonlance: Definitions of HonorThis story was not very good. It's written by Richard A. Knaak and, once again, doesn't say if this is taken from a novel or if it's an entirely new tale. This story deals with more topics of prejudices based on race and people not being who they really are based on their looks. Pretty much the R.A. Salvatore story that was shown in issue 1. I understand making things more realistic by not demonizing races or not trapping characters by even their culture or looks etc. It's not a bad idea, but it only made for an okay story this time around. Basically, a Knight of Solamnia hears rumors of a minotaur terrorizing a town, but things are not as they seem and people have run away with their prejudice. Instead of a minotaur invasion it's really just one minotaur in exile. So the knight puts aside his expectations and talks with the minotaur instead and it really changes the way he views the world. It was just an okay story, kind of overtold at this point.Dark Sun: Hunt's EndDark Sun is a setting that I believe Wizards of the Coast was attempting to relaunch around this time and I think the financial crisis also did this relaunch in. I know they printed three new novels in the setting and, basically, everything around this time is a low print run. It's very interesting how far the housing crisis reached into different areas. In any event, I've always found the Dark Sun setting pretty cool. It's sort of a shame that it is one of the lesser settings in D&D. Troy Denning's series “The Prism Pentad” is absolutely an excellent read and if you are interested in that setting I highly recommend it. It was certainly better than the Spelljammer or Al-Quadim settings.“Hunt's End”, as an introduction to Dark Sun, doesn't really do a good job. However, if you sort of know what the setting is about then the story is pretty cool. I liked it, even though it's overly short. It introduces you to some of the unique races of the setting and how it's magic works, which is actually really cool. But you really only get a glimpse of the mechanics. In any event, I do recommend people check out Dark Sun, because it is actually a really neat setting with good stories.Forgotten Realms: The Great HuntThis story was stupid. It's about an elf and a half elf trying to escape from being hunted by Orcs. I have no idea who the characters are or where this story came from. All I know is that Elaine Cunningham has indeed written some Forgotten Realms novels, of which I haven't read. So, if this story is an adaptation from one of her stories or just a scene in a chapter, it needs to be fleshed out far more than it is here. I think it tries to dive into Orc culture a little more to make the more “humane” to make the black/white trope a bit more gray, but it just wasn't a great story even if it did achieve that goal in the end.

I'm actually surprised to see this adaptation hit the shelves. I really thought the original Chronicles Trilogy would have the traction to garner readers, so I was pleasantly surprised to see this published as well, especially after [b:Dragonlance Chronicles, Volume 3: Dragons of Spring Dawning 27037929 Dragonlance Chronicles, Volume 3 Dragons of Spring Dawning Margaret Weis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1445790100l/27037929.SY75.jpg 47078861] being such a great adaptation.As with the other installments this is a graphic novel adaptation of [b:Time of the Twins 29187 Time of the Twins (Dragonlance Legends, #1) Margaret Weis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390667790l/29187.SX50.jpg 852] originally published in 1986. When I saw this was only spanning three issues, I was a little worried, but I feel like DDP really figured out how to make the adaptations work by the third Chronicles book, so I went in hopefully. As with the Chronicles series, it's been well over 20 years since I've read these books and I didn't remember all that many details from this story. Well, I am very happy to report that this is more than just a “headlines” version and they did an amazing job adapting this novel. I think the fact that Time of the Twins is a much more hyper focused story when compared to the epic Chronicles trilogy.The Legends trilogy picks up shortly after the Chronicles trilogy. It sort of answers our questions about “what are the companions up to in the aftermath?” It answers these questions, but it also takes on quite an adventure with Raistlin and Caramon as the primary characters. By the time Chronicles ended there was still quite a bit of unfinished business between the twins and the Legends series seeks to conclude that remaining tension, especially unanswered questions about Raistlin's time in tower of magic that Fistandantilus used to inhabit.The story brings us on a journey back in time and a possible budding love interest for Raistlin. I remember reading the novel and being shocked at this, thinking that was very unlikely, but it was certainly an unexpected and interesting twist. This begins to set the stage for Raistlin's true bid for power and the story ends before we get to really see how this will play out.Sadly, this is the last adaptation DDP would make and I really wish they had been able to at least finish off the Legends series, because they did such a great job on this one. So, if you want to find out what happens to Raistlin and Caramon and the others, you'll just have to go read the original novel to fill in those gaps.

As we head into the final installment of the graphic novel adaptation, I have to say they finally did this book justice. This adapts [b:Dragons of Spring Dawning 68378 Dragons of Spring Dawning (Dragonlance Chronicles, #3) Margaret Weis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312062224l/68378.SX50.jpg 879061], which was originally published back in 1985. As with the other novels in the Chronicles series, it's been over 20 years since I've read them and if you've been following my reviews my one constant complaint is that the adaptations were too short. Finally DDP took this final installment to the next level and spanned it out into a 12-issue comic book series. This is nearly double the length of the prior adaptations. Even though it required us to spend more time reading, it really fleshed the story out far more fully than the prior releases. This was an excellent pace and it really gave the reader the experience they really needed to get into the story. I truly wish they had done this from the beginning, but I do realize that's a tall order from a publishing perspective. However, with a story as complex as this, it's somewhat needed in this case and Dragons of Spring Dawning is proof of that, it's just too bad that it comes at the end. For new readers they may find this installment more enjoyable, but I do worry that it is too late to grasp new readers in the sense that the prior two adaptations may have been rather confusing.In the end, I feel this definitely did a better job than just giving us the headlines of events in the Dragonlance universe. The art was similar to the prior installment and continued to be quite good. This is definitely the type of refresher I was hoping these adaptations would have been.

This is the second game supplement book I've read in the BattleTech universe and this one is pretty different from the other one I read. Mercenary's Handbook is also, really, the first book published beyond the core game and this book is more a supplement to the Role Playing Game [b:Mechwarrior 6277318 Mechwarrior Evan Jamieson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333569604l/6277318.SX50.jpg 6460819]. I was never able to get my hands on the first edition of that rule book, but I assume this book builds on the content presented there.It seems the supplementary texts for the Role Playing Game are going to be pretty different from those designed the board game, such as [b:House Kurita: The Draconis Combine 936381 House Kurita The Draconis Combine Boy F. Peterson Jr. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601702290l/936381.SX50.jpg 921362], which is the first book I read. Where House Kurita was a deep dive into the history of that particular house Mercenary's Handbook is more of a game compliment. It's similar to those D&D books like The Sorcerer's Handbook, where it gives you some background on playing that type of character, but also has a lot of tables and additional rules to sift into the original rules set. Mercenary's Handbook is structured in the exact same way. There's a little bit of lore and some general discussion on how the mercenaries are setup within the BattleTech universe and what it would mean to run a game with them.The one interesting thing that BattleTech did with their RPG setting, was they integrated it with the main board game so that certain points in a game campaign can then be transferred to the board game for ‘Mech combat. It gives you a lot of rules for creating your own Mercenary Regiments and background information on a few examples to prompt building your own in interesting ways or a group you can play with right away.This is similar to the House books in the sense that it's layout and design is similar. It's got a lot of full color drawings that give you an idea of how the game makers thought things might look in their imagined future of humanity. I don't know how useful this book is in future iterations of the game, given the fact that this was published back in the 80's. The types of supplemental texts like the House books are a bit more timeless in their nature. But the RPG component of BattleTech has been re-written a few times since this was published, so this might be long outdated from the rules perspective.

I've finally reached the end of Michael Stackpole's landmark Warrior Trilogy and what a wild ride it was. The first couple books in the trilogy were certainly good books, but they weren't nearly as heavy hitting as the final installment. “Warrior: Coupé” was intense! The first couple books really set a great stage for all the world shaking reveals that occurred in this book. It's tough to think that things could get more outrageous after the close of [b:Warrior: Riposte 613509 Warrior Riposte (The Warrior Trilogy, #2) Michael A. Stackpole https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1176326553l/613509.SY75.jpg 599964] with the death of Michael Hasek-Davion at the hands of Maximillion Liao. This book, essentially, starts off with the repercussions of that event. However, the invasion of the Capellan Federation by the Federated Suns had already been well underway during the second book.There is, actually, quite a bit crammed into this novel and in most circumstances I would say there would be no way to make all these events happen without it being very confusing for the reader, but Michael Stackpole managed to pull it off an excellent fashion. I think nearly every single chapter is big reveal after big reveal. I can't remember the last time I read book where chapter after chapter I just said to myself “oh my god, I can't believe that just happened.” So, if you've been following the BattleTech universe, get ready for quite the ride. Between the political intrigue and the war there's a lot going on to keep up with.There's a few major story lines concluding here that were seeded throughout the first couple of books. The main, and most obvious one, is Justin Allard's story. I confess, I was not ready for this ending at all, but I absolutely loved it in all of it's shocking glory. My one regret is that there wasn't more of an epilogue to this characters tale in the aftermath. Usually I think authors can cut their books shorter, but this is one of the few times I could not have minded it to be a bit longer to give a more extended wrap up of all the characters. It's interesting to note that Maximillion Liao the unhinged ruler that killed Duke Michael Hasek-Davion didn't feel like the biggest threat to Justin's story. Instead that came from his equally unhinged daughter, Romano. Given how similar Romano is to her father, I was always sort of surprised it was her older sister, Candace, that was named heir designate. In any event, Justin and Candace's relationship blossoms further despite Romano being a thorn in their side for just about the entire book.We finally get some closer to the Kell Hounds story and Morgan Kell and Yorinaga finally face off in the battle they've been waiting for! I won't spoil it, but it was epic and I will say Michael Stackpole has gotten far better at writing his ‘Mech battles. They are falling into similar line was [a:William H. Keith Jr. 20444 William H. Keith Jr. https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343233912p2/20444.jpg], who I think I had a great format to convey these complex battles. I was not too shocked at the outcome, but I was sort of surprised about the aftermath. It should come as no surprise that the entirety of the Genyosha and Kell Hounds didn't face off, it was just their leaders. So both ‘Mech forces are still intact at the end of the book, but I don't think that's much of a spoiler.The third major plot going on involved the Steiner's. Even amidst the Melissa and Hanse being married the Archon still had problems of her own reaching a boiling point with Lestrade. It's interesting, in the prior books I thought of this character as being more of the classic bumbling politician that can't get out of his own way. In many cases this fits Lestrade's character, but some of the plans he put into motion and tried to execute got pretty far. This story closed out a lot of the lingering pieces involving Heimdall and how they crossed paths with the Kell Hounds too. There were allusions to some fighting between the Lyran Commonwealth and the Draconis Combine, but the book mainly focused on how the Isle of Sky was affected, which did involve the Kell Hounds. Again, some parts of these plot were absolutely shocking. Things happened that I never predicted, which was amazing to have so much unpredictability loaded into a single novel.There are a couple key things referenced in this novel that are discussed elsewhere so, if you read this and your ran into tidbits that never seemed to go anywhere, well they are probably full developed someplace else. If you remember from the prior book that Jaime Wolf showed up at the wedding and seemed to insult Takashi Kurita, well that clearly had some serious repercussions because there are a lot of allusions to the Wolf's Dragoons fighting with the Draconis Combine. This story is outlined in [b:Wolves on the Border 923376 Wolves on the Border Robert N. Charrette https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328036806l/923376.SY75.jpg 908394].In the middle of this book the NAIS is invaded and they reference the computer memory core retrieved from an old Star League site, which was found by the Gray Death Legion. This story was told in [b:The Price of Glory 36154 The Price of Glory (Saga of the Gray Death Legion, #3) William H. Keith Jr. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1464178559l/36154.SY75.jpg 36063], which is a great book in its own right.Throughout the series they sometimes make an offhand reference to Maximillion Liao's attempt to control the Federated Suns by getting rid of Hanse Davion and a major aspect of this shows up at the end of this novel. However, the story that outlines this is very hard to get ahold of, but shows up in [b:The Sword and the Dagger 1526404 The Sword and the Dagger Ardath Mayhar https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1282528844l/1526404.SY75.jpg 1518351]. Sadly, this novel is not really championed as being very good. So, perhaps just the high lights that Stackpole references is enough.In the end, if you are a BattleTech fan and have been keeping up with the history so far, this is an amazing book to read. This really isn't the type of book that has stand alone impact though. You really do kind of need to read it within the context of the universe the game makers are building, in my opinion. This doesn't mean you need to play the game to get it, you just need to know the historical system that has been constructed. Honestly, reading stuff like the House books from the game publisher really helped me dive deeper into the setup of these stories. Books like [b:House Kurita: The Draconis Combine 936381 House Kurita The Draconis Combine Boy F. Peterson Jr. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601702290l/936381.SX50.jpg 921362] were really a boon for understanding things a lot deeper, but you can get a lot of that info from websites if you don't want to read an entire game book! Anyway, Stackpole is a great author and I truly look forward to reading more books of his in this universe. For now, it's off to find out what really happened between Jaime Wolf and Takashi Kurita!

This is the graphic novel treatment for the classic Dragonlance novels and as with [b:Dragons of Autumn Twilight - The Graphic Novel 68480 Dragons of Autumn Twilight - The Graphic Novel (Dragonlance Chronicles, #1) Margaret Weis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1170692421l/68480.SY75.jpg 23644942] this installment comes off as very confusing, especially if you had not read the novels prior. I couldn't help but notice some bad reviews for the overall story of these classic Dragonlance novels. I feel like people aren't aware these things were written in the 80's. Furthermore people complained that the stories feel like reading a Dungeons & Dragons game session... yeah, that was kind of their ENTIRE point. So, it sounds like these stories succeeded at what people think is a “failure” for some reason. The Fantasy genre has changed quite a bit since the 80's and, I think, for their time these were great stories of high fantasy. The on criticism I do agree with though is that there were entirely too many characters. I remember when I first read these books in middle school it was really hard to keep track of what was going on with all the crazy names. In any event, Dragons of Winter night Graphic Novel is a good refresher for those of us who liked the story, but don't remember the exact details. Again, I can't imagine someone who hasn't read the novels keeping up with this though. I think part of the problem is outright page count. There just aren't enough pages to cover all the character development or any nuances. Even though this was published over four issues, I think the page count was similar to the eight issue style of the first novel... who knows how they will handle Dragons of Spring Dawning...As before, I read this as individual comic issues.

This is the sequel to Scalzi's [b:Lock In 21418013 Lock In (Lock In, #1) John Scalzi https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438701397l/21418013.SY75.jpg 26115712] book and I was sort of surprised a sequel was going to exist. I suppose the popularity of the world Scalzi created and perhaps his own interest in it lead to a sequel. The way this reads is more like a sequel was really unplanned, given the way the first book ended, but Agent's Shane and Vann are good characters so reading another adventure starring them could have merit.I will say, I enjoyed the book, as I do with most Scalzi titles, but I didn't like it as much as the first book. I think part of the problem, for me, is that I just don't care about sports and sports was the major background for the motivator for the story. The only sports story that I've ever really enjoyed was the movie “The Last Boyscout.” I thought the game created for the book, Hilketa, wasn't that interesting. So the pages devoted to this weren't very interesting to me. Now that I think about the two FBI agents do have a pretty typical setup for the “buddy cop” style that was popular in the 80's/90's. Vann is the grizzled and hardened senior officer and Shane is the naïve and new recruit. Vann definitely embodies the Bruce Willis style character portrayed in “The Last Boyscout,” but Shane isn't so much a Damon Wayans... as many of those movies I've seen, I can't think of a character reference at the moment.As you can tell this book involves a game invented by Scalzi using threeps. The game is a pretty standard fair basher game where the players beat on their robots and try to break each other. However, the story doesn't exactly focus on the game much, which is why I found the book interesting. Instead it involves murder mysteries, action, and political machinations, which I find far more fun to read about. As usual with these types of books, Agent Shane and Vann are brought in when a mysterious death takes place during a Hilketa game. From that tiny thread a full scale conspiracy unravels. It's pretty similar in format to “Lock In” in that regard, so maybe that's another mark against it, but I do enjoy Scalzi's writing to such a degree that even if it's not terribly creative I enjoy it regardless. Naturally, the conspiracy is totally different, but the overall format was the same as a lot of books of this type.Ultimately, if you enjoyed the first book, I can't imagine you wouldn't enjoy this book as well. Perhaps other readers will find the sports aspect more fascinating than me, but if you're up for a solid FBI murder mystery/adventure I think Scalzi did a good job on this once again. Who knows if we'll wind up with more stories from this dynamic duo, but we'll see.

I think I picked this book up when it first came out, but only recently got around to reading it. I remember getting it because at the time I noticed Vertical titles appealed to me. They seemed to have a more... I want to say adult content bent, not in a pornographic way, but just the subject matter was a bit deeper. I found “The Gods Lie” to be no exception to that. While the publisher may not have that as their mainstay, I feel like the titles I ran into frequently had that content.

“The Gods Lie” is a manga one-shot and it manages to deal with some fairly heavy topics in such a short span of time. The story centers on Natsuru mostly, a 6th grader, how isn't totally satisfied with changes being made in his soccer team. He's sort of your average character that gets put in a situation that seems entirely innocent, but at deeper levels isn't. Instead of going to his soccer camp he essentially “runs away” and winds up spending the summer with his classmate Rio and her kid brother. They two characters definitely start to trend towards a budding relationship, and for a while I thought this was going to be a coming of age love story, but that's not exactly how this plays out.

The make a special point to state how poor Rio is and Natsuru is shocked to see someone living in such a state. Again, Natsuru comes from an average family and this is probably his first time truly experience differences in economic class. Whereas Rio is always painfully aware of this dichotomy. From there the story takes a turn into topics involving death of a family member and child abandonment. I don't want to give the events away in any detail, but for a manga that started off fairly light hearted the grim reality of life sure took a fast and ugly turn.

The story is exceptionally crafted and I think I read it in a single sitting, because it is quite the page turner in that regard. If you have read other tales from this publisher I can't imagine this one would disappoint. Luckily there is a bit of closure in the final installment, but I do wonder if Natsuru and Rio ever cross paths in the future to build on the relationship they seemed to be building during that one fateful summer. I think the end of the story ends on a sort of hopeful note, rather than the tragic, but in some ways it could be interpreted the other way. Perhaps I am just a constant optimist?

If you had asked me what books Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was writing in retirement, co-authoring Sherlock Holmes fan fiction would not have even remotely been one of my guesses. Yet here we are. I had no idea these books were being made until I was at Barnes & Noble looking at the Mystery section (which isn't my usual haunt mind you, but I have quite a soft spot for Sherlock). When I stumbled upon this book and saw that there were others, I purchased it immediately, because I just had to know!

I usually do not delve into the modern day attempts at re-telling tales set in Doyle's Holmesian universe, but I was willing to give Kareem some benefit of the doubt. I've had rather bad-luck in getting what I want out of these stories, far too many, for whatever reason tend to Sherlock investigating the supernatural, which is quite anti-Doyle in my opinion. Very few of the Holmes tales even take that kind of bent, but all too often there are many modern tales that include this as the “mystery” aspect of the tale that Holmes must deduce with science. It's utterly ridiculous, just because stories like “The Hound of the Baskervilles” and “The Last Vampire” existed does not mean the majority of tales were supernatural in flavor, in fact quite the opposite if I may say so. To that effect, I was very worried about the inclusion of it at the very beginning of the book and I thought to myself “oh dear, here we go with the super natural nonsense,” but to Kareem's and Anna's merit this prologue was not the mainstay of the story and it quickly deviated from that. For that I was thankful and I think their desire to keep their tale firmly on the ground helped me finish the book at all.

Now, this isn't to say I dislike super natural stories, quite the opposite, what I don't like is Sherlock Holmes constantly investigating them. I just find it bad form for the character and deviates from the point of writing about the powers of deductive logic in every day life as Doyle set out to do as far as I can tell. I am not a massive Holmes fan, I am very fond of Holmes having read all the books since I was in elementary school and quite enjoying Jeremy Brett's rendition of the character, but outside of that I have not read much. However, I long for more tales written in a similar vein to the original Doyle style. Not this modern re-working of how books are written to sell as many copies as possible. And that, sadly, is why this book wound up in the three star category. If it takes me over a month to finish a book, that is a bad sign, doubly so if I finish multiple other books as I try to return to this one.

One of the things Kareem and Anna did right was to, essentially, ignore Sherlock altogether, which is one of the reasons I found this a possibly intriguing read. Instead they focus on tales of a young Mycroft Holmes. Doyle's original rendering of Mycroft was relatively brief in comparison to Sherlock, but Mycroft was such a memorable character that anyone who reads Holmes absolutely remembers Mycroft. However, I quite think Kareem and Anna have the character a bit off. One of the major facets about Mycroft is that he is painted as a rather lazy man and with little energy, which is why Sherlock is often the investigator. There was one line in the Brett series in “The Greek Interpreter” where Mycroft states he “had never left England”, and I thought at first Kareem and Anna had missed an important detail, but they did not. In re-reading that story, that was added into the show. However, based on Doyle's writing it is entirely a believable aspect of the man. This is why as soon as Kareem and Anna sent Mycroft on a harrowing adventure away from England, it kind of went against my understanding of the Mycroft character. Certainly they could have decided to suppose that wouldn't have been true of the twenty-three old version, but I still think it was a bit more energetic than I would have assumed in the Mycroft background.

And herein lies my entire crux with the whole effort, this book reads entirely too much like a Clive Cussler novel or some other modern author. I recently read the first in the Isaac Bell series and these books are quite similar in format. Even though their over-arching story was quite good, it just didn't satisfy my desire to have a Doyle styled mystery. It never even got close. On top of that, everything was entirely too descriptive. I feel like Cussler was able to include this kind of detail in a more subtle fashion and not nearly as overt. There was no question they have done a great amount of research to leave no question to the reader about life in the 1800's, but this is relatively boring reading when one is interested in solving mysteries. And there's the real problem, this is barely a mystery. It's more of an action/adventure book. The book even included full on shoot-outs with Gatling guns no less! And while the Gatling Gun is an interesting detail in the history... is it really on par with the Doyle universe? Not exactly.

The overall tale was pretty good for a modern adventure. I don't want to give much away, but one of the true-to-form things Kareem and Anna did was give Mycroft his own “Watson”, essentially. Mycroft's best friend, a black man named Douglas, was, by far, one of my favorite characters in the book. I really thought he was well written and wonderful, and had I not had the internal expectations and baggage of Mycroft, I would have quite enjoyed this duo. I would have still found the book over-descriptive, but I think I would have found the entire affair more enjoyable, which is a massive problem when you walk in with certain expectations.

In the end, it's a decent book, not a great book, but on par with modern day fiction of the big names out there. If that kind of material is your thing, then it might be worth a read. I still think this book is around a hundred pages too long and you could have cut a lot of the descriptive details out. I feel more like the writers were excited about the history and just wanted to info dump on us, but they did it too much and too often, so the read wound up being more of a slog than fast paced. I may pick up the second book in the series to see if things improve... but I definitely won't be doing that for a while.

Let me first disclose that I'm a bit of a Manga casual, despite the volume I've read. I am not super involved in the community, nor am I on the up and up for all the genre classifications or sub-classifications. That being said, when I saw this title announced I knew I wanted to check it out. I'm not exactly sure what kind of expectations I was walking in with, but I think what I wanted was a light and wholesome yuri tale, of which I am an absolute fan. Throw in the fact that its about adults and not 14 year olds, total bonus! Which is why I was kind of interested to see how the story would be crafted from an adult perspective rather than a high-schoolers.

So, this story is basically a wholesome yuri romance through and through. But I feel like they took what takes normal manga 20 volumes to accomplish and did it all in volume one. Now, when you read the afterword from the author and her intentions were to make a “sexy yuri romance,” I think she definitely achieved that goal, especially towards the end of the volume. However, I felt like the character development was lacking a little bit? I don't know, maybe it's just me. It's almost overly wholesome in the sense that everyone supports them and there is basically no scandals. There was almost a scandal in one scene, but it was immediately dismissed. In fact, this happened a couple times. Just when you think there might be drama, nope, no drama. Having no drama is certainly an idyllic relationship, sure, but as for reading? I'm kind of on the fence after reading this.

So, basically, this is just two teachers dating and having a relatively uneventful relationship. Taking the usual steps through all the phases and being nervous on the way to the next step until they sleep together. I'd say it's sort of “slice of life”, but it almost jumps around a bit too much, because what feels like them sleeping together after a few days is actually months apart. This makes me think they're aiming for a sex scene per volume. Which definitely makes sense given the authors afterword.

The art is awesome. Both characters are impossibly cute. They actually sort of remind me of an adult rendition of the Kase-san series (which is awesome, for those who have not read that). I think I just wanted to know more about the characters, I guess. One of the typical setups is you get to meet the characters on their own before they get together, so you have a bit of an idea of their personality, but not with this manga. From the first page it is announced the two characters are dating. So the journey to “us” is never really told, it's just them together with everyone at work and all their students supporting them. Which is fine... but, wow, I just don't know where this will go next.

In any event, I'm definitely planning on getting the second volume of these, because I am entirely too curious to see what the author does from here. Basically this is practically the end of a long running series, so what exactly is next? I confess, I am painfully curious.

Riposte is the second book in the Warrior trilogy and I enjoyed this book a lot more than the first. Some of the misgivings I had with Stackpole's first book were basically fixed within this volume. The overall story design was absolutely great though and there were many occasions where such big reveals were happening that it was a real page turner and I found it hard to put down. I really wish my time wasn't so consumed in other places or else I would have easily finished this in a week instead of three.Riposte's major event is the wedding between Hanse Davion and Melissa Steiner. In the first book [b:Warrior: En Garde 1163127 Warrior En Garde (The Warrior Trilogy, #1) Michael A. Stackpole https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187140l/1163127.SY75.jpg 1150787] we saw the outcome of just trying to get Melissa transported to the Federated Suns and with this installment we find out after she has arrived safely. Given how combat oriented the first book was, I was surprised to see Riposte was mainly focused on political machinations. Granted there is a lot going on in all the five houses, so it really can take up a lot to get through it all, so it is understandable. But it's only the last handful of pages that are really ‘Mech combat oriented, so if you're here for battles, you might be disappointed.One of the interesting things with the wedding is Hanse Davion brought all the houses together to celebrate on Terra with ComStar as host. So, as readers, we all got some serious insight into the clandestine world of ComStar and there seems to be awfully big things brewing behind the scenes there. House Marik was the only major house rather absent from the story and had no major presence other than being around or being mentioned in conversations. I feel I should also point something out about this wedding. If you're just stumbling into the series you may find the whole arranged marriage thing a bit strange and disturbing. Just the fact that an eighteen year old girl would be marrying someone in their forty's is kind of not cool. But you have to remember, when BattleTech was designed they basically had the general setup of medieval times in space. So, all the trappings and weirdness of the royal structure is going to appear in this universe, just like it did in human history and everyone is going to think it's all perfectly normal. Luckily this seems to be just a royalty thing and the other relationships that are built with characters are far more normal.There are two major stories developing here. The first one is centered around the Kell Hounds with Morgan Kell returning after the death of his brother, an inevitable event. With Morgan's return, because of Yorinaga's re-activation in the first book, the Kell Hounds start moving towards a final face off against the Genyosha, which I'm sure is coming in the third book. The second is the continued tale of Justin Xiang and his new life in the Capellan Confederation in employ to House Liao. This would eventually come to a head as he and House Davion would try to out spy each other, which is harder than it seems when dealing with the somewhat unhinged Maximillion Liao. However, I really love Justin's overall tale and I found myself wondering “...but how is Justin's side responding to this?” as we are told about other events. The one and only major missed opportunity in this book, and maybe it will come about in book three, is that Kym Sorenson, Justin's girlfriend from the first book (and Davion spy) was around on Terra. I was waiting for their chance meeting, but it never happened. I am not surprised about Justin's response to his brother Daniel Allard, but I was really interested to see what would happen if he ran into Kym, especially with Justin escorting Candace Liao. In fact, I wanted to read more about Justin and Candace and I felt the book lacking in that particular area. However, again, a lot of this might come to a head in the third book, so we'll just have to wait and see.When the ‘Mech battles erupt in this book Stackpole did a far better job of describing the combat. In fact his strategy for conveying large scale combat was pretty good. He no longer tried to tell the goings on of multiple units and instead just stuck with one ‘Mech's combat. For example, Redburn's full lance was attacking Goliaths at one point, but for the chapter in question we strictly stuck with Redburn. We saw combat from his perspective pretty much exclusively and this made it much easier to follow. This is largely how William H. Keith Jr. approached ‘Mech combat and I am glad Stackpole seems to have adopted it as well.In the end, I really enjoyed the book. Middle books are always difficult to read and I'm sure write, because you never really feel all that satisfied with everything. I think the problem is that this was supposed to be setting up a major even in the BattleTech universe, so to tell the full tale would take at least two books and the middle book really serves as setting the stage. It sort of ends on a bit of a cliff hanger and I do look forward to reading the next installment to find out what happens!

4.5 StarsI got into John Scalzi because my partner and I had picked up [b:Redshirts 13055592 Redshirts John Scalzi https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348617890l/13055592.SX50.jpg 18130445] because it looked funny. From there we were off to the [b:Old Man's War 36510196 Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1) John Scalzi https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509467059l/36510196.SY75.jpg 50700] and by that point we were just buying whatever Scalzi put out and here I am reading Lock In. Lock In is a very different book from the others we've read by Scalzi and I was kind of surprised he dived into this genre. It is certainly still rooted in sci-fi, but the overarching style is more of a crime thriller.Lock In feels a lot like a crime thriller when you start reading it. The story is told from the perspective of FBI Agent Chris Shane and written in the first person. So, you'll never really get to see what other characters are up to outside of Chris' viewpoint in this tale. The worldbuilding is really interesting for this, but it has that near future sci-fi feel of a story like [b:The Minority Report 581125 The Minority Report Philip K. Dick https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390719396l/581125.SY75.jpg 63086].The world has changed pretty drastically due to a massive pandemic that has hit the human population, what's worse is there was no cure, so it is still kind of in the background. Those who have severe cases may not die from it, instead the person could suffer from lock in, which changes a persons brain in such away that they can no longer move their body. It's like being in a coma, but you're a wake and the rest of you won't respond. This only happens to a small fraction of the population though. This has caused a technological revolution, where apparently the quickest thing to “unlock” people was to give them access to high tech neural networks installed in their brains, which they can then transmit their consciousness into mechanical bodies, which they call “threeps” after C3P0. It sounds complicated, but Scalzi does a great job of bringing us up to speed on the technology while immersing us into Chris' first day on the job that, naturally, starts off with a murder mystery.Scalzi wades into this territory telling it in a way that just draws from the standard fair Crime Thriller style. Let's be honest, if the format isn't broken, don't fix it. Instead the thriller is recast into this sort of hi-tech near future setting. It certainly has vibes of the cyberpunk dystopias from William Gibson, only Gibson writes in a further future, but I think some of this had some [b:Johnny Mnemonic 313998 Johnny Mnemonic William Gibson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386922726l/313998.SX50.jpg 304846] style in there.As usual with a Scalzi book everything feels pretty fast paced. This is something I love about his writing, because I feel like when I sit down to read a Scalzi book, I just have to tear through it. There's no fluff. There's no being overly descriptive. There's just a killer story that you can't put down. I never would have expected a Crime Thriller from this author, but I think they did a great job. It's not going to be mind blowing sci-fi or anything, but it is certainly going to be a fun ride while you're there.

More of a 3.5This kicks off the novel career of an author I have come to enjoy quite a bit. I had never had a chance to read this first book from Michael Stackpole, but I wasn't really sure what to expect. I assumed it wasn't going to be as well written as his later material, and I was right about that, but his knack for story craft shone through since the very beginning!Stackpole really started off as a game designer and I'm not really sure how he got pulled into the BattleTech universe, but I'm really glad he did. Starting here he would begin to shape the BattleTech universe quite a bit and write about some of the biggest things that would befall this fictional universe. I truly enjoyed [a:William H. Keith Jr. 20444 William H. Keith Jr. https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343233912p2/20444.jpg]'s trilogy that truly kicked off the BattleTech expanded universe and I was looking forward to diving into Stackpole's take on things.Warrior: En Guarde introduces us to one of the most infamous mercenary groups, the Kell Hounds. During this novel they are aligned with House Davion of the Federated Suns and as readers we are already made aware of some past history involving the Draconis Combine. In fact the Dracos have quite a grudge against this mercenary unit. At first I was a bit disappointed in having yet another story where the main characters (good guys) face off against the Draconis Combine, because I started to feel that Keith's novels went pretty hard in that territory, but Stackpole quickly backed away from that being a central aspect of the book, thankfully.Instead the Kell Hounds are sort of used as the action element of the novel to give us that injection of Mech combat while Stackpole crafts a complex political story that will eventually cross paths with the Kell Hound operations. I absolutely loved this setup and it made for a really exciting and wonderful story absolutely filled with twists and turns of great political intrigue. Stackpole ties a lot of this together with the story of Justin Allard who is half Capellan and half brother to Daniel Allard a member of the Kell Hounds. Both are MechWarriors but Justin was part of a different regiment, also in the employ of House Davion. Something goes terribly wrong and Justin is eventually exiled from Federated Suns and this brings us on a wonderful journey deeper into the realms of BattleTech. Justin makes his way to Solaris VII, a world built a round gladiatorial games, but in Mechs! Behind the scenes Justin finds himself amidst all kinds of different players of which the Capellan Federation plays a larger role.While Justin is seeking out vengeance for Federated Suns warriors on the game world the Lyran Alliance is trying to solve the problem of getting their heir Melissa Steiner to meet her future betrothed Hanse Davion. They believe they have a clever ploy to let her travel, but as with all things... this doesn't go well and this is where the Draconis Combine return to the scene and eventually cross paths with the Kell Hounds again.After such major developments to rock the BattleTech universe I'm really interested on what could possibly happen in the next novel! Stackpole has always had quite the gift for crafting excellent stories and I was pleased to see that has always been true. So why the 3.5 rating?The unfortunate truth is the writing isn't as streamlined as it could be. I give him some leeway for it being a first novel, but I found this book to be far too overly descriptive. At times, description is warranted, but I think Stackpole went a bit overboard describing everything, and what felt like all the time. He also used far too many metaphors. They were constantly being used in Mech battles early in the book, but I feel like he realized he was using too many and backed off about halfway through, because they suddenly disappeared or just decreased to a normal volume. This made the story a bit clunky and hard to read at times.The other thing that was hard to read was the Mech battles. I think Keith's approach to Mech battles was a bit smoother, because I feel like he focused on one pilot for most of the Mech battles and gave a quick synopsis about other pilots as needed. Stackpole, on the other hand, he tried to describe a turn by turn battle from every Mech. He basically ported a game of BattleTech into a chapter of the book. BattleTech is fun to play, and I am glad Stackpole clearly enjoys the game, but reading a play by play of a game is pretty grueling. So he talks about what every pilot did and who they fired at etc. I've read later novels by Stackpole and I think he backed off from this approach, but I assume this will keep up for the next two novels in the trilogy. Maybe it's just me, I just didn't feel like a play by play data dump was all that exciting, but the way Keith wrote about the battles felt more exciting.In the end Stackpole's story overtakes any of the criticisms I could level at his novel. Even though his writing might not be as streamlined yet, I still look forward to reading the next book and finding out what happens to these characters. He's created some excellent characters that I want to know more about and see what happens to them in the future.

Even though this is the 2nd edition of BattleTech this is actually the first version of the game published under this name. The game was originally published under the name Battledroids in 1984, but there was a conflict with George Lucas who had a trademark on the term “droid”. In my opinion this is a rather serendipitous situation because to me a droid implies a machine that operates under it's own power. In BattleTech the giant war machines are controlled by human pilots called MechWarriors. So, for me, the name change is really a good one, besides I think BattleTech just sounds cooler.

BattleTech is a science fiction wargame of sorts set in the future of the 31st century where the players control anywhere from one BattleMech to several on the board. The game is a hex based game and this allows more freedom of movement choices and firing arcs compared to a simple square playing arrangement such as chess. In this game you face off against an opponent and the objective is to destroy the other players Mechs on the board. There are various ways to approach this game and as BattleTech would gain more traction they would really flesh out the world even more.

The concept of people piloting giant robots is nothing new and creator Jordan Weisman makes no secret to say he was influenced by these amazing images that came out of Japan. Gundam has been a thing since the late 70's and I think a lot of the Japanese approaches to their stories was somewhat overly fantastical. However, Gundam always had a serious dose of political intrigue in its background and I feel like Weisman was influenced by that combination when developing the BattleTech universe. One of the major differences with some of the giant robot genre in Japan is I feel like Weisman tried to create a universe that was built on more hard science. I'm not saying this is absent from the Japanese vision at all, but the limitations Weisman set on his universe feels like he tried to ground it in reality fairly hard, while trying to imagine what the future of humanity might look like. While the core game is about robots fighting it out on a battlefield the rule book contained in this Box Set outlines a rough idea of a far more vast universe in which your pilots reside or why they are fighting.

I don't know if the original Battledroids rulebook included as much background, but reading pictures of the back of the box the notion of the Successor States was certainly there. In the margins of the rulebook of the 2nd Edition you get a lot of quick background into the BattleTech universe and its major players. Luckily within the the same year that the second edition was launched FASA also launched some scenario books to bring the fight deeper into this freshly imagined world.

One of the interesting aspects of the BattleTech universe is that it is taking place during a time when humanity has lost a fair amount of technical knowledge from previous centuries. This creates further hardships and interesting problems that could be faced for players. But a lot of those aspects wouldn't get fleshed out until later and sadly at the time of this Box Set's release the novels were still a year or two away from being published.

This box set is sort of a “beginner” type of setup. It has two identical maps to play with, which you can arrange in various ways. The playing pieces are just simple cardboard pieces that you stick in a plastic stand to move around the board. The rules are not overly complex and they give you a few options on how to play the game, each version increasing in complexity to make the game as real as possible. It's up the player to decide what rules to use. The more simplistic the rules the faster a game will go. A highly complex game played with even just two full lances (8 Mechs in all) can take hours to play.

Some of the criticisms I can make is that the rulebook is rife with typos. It does not seem the editing team did a great job and I don't know how much was added or taken away from the original rules set, since this shares the same ISBN with Battledroids I imagine not a lot has changed between editions. This rulebook also has the strangest description of dice I have ever read in my life, even for 1985, people know what dice are...

“The game includes two standard, 6-sided dice, one red and one white. In the game, sometimes only one die will be rolled, and sometimes both will be, either one at a time or both together.”

This is by far one of the most roundabout ways to say “sometimes you roll one die and sometimes you roll two.” I just found it quite comical when I read it. The most annoying part of the game is that the rulebook takes the time to show you a picture of each different Mech model given in the game, but it doesn't seem the artists were collaborating at all, because the playing pieces don't match the art in the book. Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly which playing piece is what Mech. It's so bad that some of the gun arrangements don't even match, which just makes the problem much harder.

In the end though, I think BattleTech is a really fun game. I've played it quite a few times and have started collecting the old editions to see what it was like to play since the beginning. It has been a rather fun journey going back in time like this, since I started getting into the game around the time the 4th Edition was released. At this point the game is just a total classic for players.

I read the original Bolo books quite a while ago now and I don't remember too much from Keith Laumer's original presentation of the story premise other than it was about very large sentient tanks. Which, the BattleTech fan in me will get interested for sure! Now, I must confess I'm not largely into pulp sci-fi as I am into more modern takes on the genre. So my disinterest in the writing may relate to that, but I remember the early books feeling very disjointed, since they probably just started as short stories, but “Rogue Bolo” was a novel and just kind of weird. Anyway, I finally made it to “The Stars Must Wait” from the 1990's. I was absolutely expecting campy, but I was also expecting Bolos...

“The Stars Must Wait” is one of the most confusing Bolos related books around, I would imagine. This book is more like Laumer wanted to write a post apocalyptic story and needed some tanks, but called them Bolos. The real confusing aspect of this entire journey is how wrong all the dates are when you compare them to the back of the book, the Bolos time line and what's actually written.

This book is written in the first person and it tells the tale of Torrence “Jack” Jackson, who is also called “Whiz”... so we've got four names to keep track of throughout this book. Already we're off to a bad start. Anyway, Jackson was supposed to be an astronaut going on an experimental mission which involved being frozen in stasis, but before the ship can launch all hell broke loose on Earth and the mission never took off. Instead Jackson wakes up 100 years in the future in the aftermath of this apocalypse when his stasis pod has an emergency and decides to revive him automatically. Now, despite all this sci-fi stuff going on I got the impression this was written in 1990, despite the fact that all the lingo feels very 1960's. Jackson talks about leaving his wife and son behind and even finds her grave that says “died 1992” and Jackson comments that she only lived one more year after he went into stasis. The back of the book says he started preparing for his mission in 2002... so already the dates are at odds. I have no idea when things are happening and it doesn't seem like Laumer does either.

Jackson, upon leaving his stasis pod runs into a Mark II Bolo and comments that the machine is still there, implying it was there when he went into stasis. The Mark II according to the history in “The Compleat Bolo” was made in 1999. Later we'll run into a Mark III that is listed as being made in 2020. So, Laumer couldn't be bothered to refresh his memory on the series and it really shows. He clearly had no interest in writing a book about Bolos or care about writing within the frame work of the series.

After Jackson leaves the facility we basically never hear about the Bolos again, except some discussion about the Mark III which is not working for half the book. Instead Laumer brings us through what's left of human society and it really is pretty wild and feels quite a bit like a story out of Fallout. I think some of the assumptions Laumer made about the degeneracy of the human race were pretty stupid and way off point. Like the whole part about people being afraid of having babies so when they have them, they just kill them. That's just utterly ridiculous. Or how about humans would forget everything and be afraid of eating food like chicken in favor of expired and rotten canned foods found in old malls. Also, ridiculous. I was expecting ridiculous to a degree... but this was just silly because he tried to frame it from our real world. And then to say in eighty or ninety years we'd be like this without modern systems in place? Just stuff and nonsense.

The overall story of Jackson finding his way through these places was pretty boring. Most of the time Jackson just walked into places, claimed to be important and then people let him in, even though people never saw him before. At some point Jackson runs into an old astronaut that had been revived 20 years before him, but now he's some crazy warlord trying to take over the world. This part made sense and you'd think there'd be more conflict and intrigue. But no... Jackson just escapes from him after he gets the Mark III working, then the other guy just leaves. At least in this process Jackson ran into some hot chick that immediately fell for him and helps him out. The whole story about her and the other astronaut is utterly stupid, because she betrays the other guy in seconds (her reasons made sense), but the other guy basically does nothing about it and trusts her enough to leave her in charge again. I mean what? But hey, after a couple days of knowing Jackson and probably only really hanging out with him for a few hours she's ready to bear his children by the end of the book, so there's hope for the human race right?

I could go on and on. There is one battle between bolos involving the Mark II and Mark III and it lasts a solid two pages. Hence why I am baffled this is a Bolo book. Laumer could have easily just talked about any old tanks. I'm kind of glad that after this other authors have stepped into the series. I really do hope they are better. I have no idea how Laumer expects the complete collapse of society to occur and then somehow we're manufacturing Mark XXX's at some point in the future... Give this book a hard pass if you wanted awesome hi-tech tanks and battles.

After reading “Golden Rule” I was definitely interested in reading more, but I was a little less excited because “Golden Rule” also made some of the short story restrictions pretty glaring. “Eyestorm” does fall into that trap a bit, but Keith handled the story a little bit better in my opinion. It's just a shame, because after reading this installment I really do kind of wish this operation had been fleshed out to more of a full novel length.

“Eyestorm” was packaged with the BattleTech: A Game of Armored Combat game box set that you are intended to purchase after going through the Beginner Box. It has a fuller set of rules and more plastic Mechs, so it is a bit pricier, but I think Catalyst does a good job of making it worth the cost.

“Eyestorm” continues where “Golden Rule” left off, sort of, and now Colby's Commandos have to face off against the rest of the invading force. Will the Commandos be able to fight in a storm that hides the enemy from their sensors? That's pretty much the Mech battle that takes place in this book. Keith hasn't really lost the knack for writing good Mech battles, they're just a bit more brief than I think he would normally have written them in some ways. In the character development end of things he also introduced some interesting new characters, which makes me wish this had more to it and he wasn't so restricted by the 24 page goal. Ah well... maybe a new Keith novel in the Battletech universe will surface someday beyond short stories.

This series of short stories does continue on into the rule book Mechwarrior Destiny. In there you'll find the next chapter in the Colby's Commandos story. So, this was a pretty interesting way to bring new players into the realms of BattleTech fiction.

“The Price of Glory” is the third installment for the Gray Death Legion and this is by far the best book in the series. I thought this book was awesome. At the start of the book I thought William H. Keith Jr. was getting a bit overly predictable with his story format (to a certain degree he is), but then he throws this twist in around the 100 page area and the book just took off for me. After that I couldn't put the book down. The prior two books are good books for their style, but this one really captured the whole feel of the BattleTech universe really well.

Despite the above paragraph, you have to remember this is a book written in the 80's and part of the first round of stories to expand on the new BattleTech game at the time. The BattleTech universe wasn't nearly as fleshed out as it would eventually become and I think some people are reviewing it through that lens a little bit. RoC's republishing of these early books didn't make matters any better by listing them after Thurston's series, which is patently out of order with the BattleTech timeline. This, singlehandedly, is one of the reasons I was so confused when I first tried to engage this series and only recently twenty some odd years later am I finally going all in as I've sorted out the publishing timeline!

In the prior BattleTech books we've gotten to know Carlyle and his team fairly well, so a lot of character development has been built up since then. This book is definitely not meant to be read as a stand alone, because even though Keith tries to recap elements of the first two books, you just can't fill it in with a couple paragraphs and do the stories justice. There are new people added into the Legion, but we never really get to know them, and I imagine they are really just canon fodder names for battles. Basically, the redshirts of a BattleTech book. In this regard BattleTech books are predictable, but as with any large franchised book series readers should kind of already walk in expecting this. I find it pretty rare for main characters to get killed off in series unless the author is ready to call it quits so no one can use their character. In that regard, sci-fi is generally fairly predictable... but I still love it.

The only thing that I will say has gotten terribly predictable is with Keith's format. The Legion is always the massive underdog fighting an overwhelming force. While I'm sure this makes for an exciting story, it does get a bit harried by the third time around, especially when it's not an ongoing fight. Instead an entirely new overwhelming force is created etc. and naturally the Legion prevails, as I expected them to do. It's not like Star Wars where there is an ongoing fight with an overwhelming force, which, to me, is a bit more reasonable in format because that's the point. But whenever Carlyle and crew prevail they walk away much much stronger than they were before, so Keith has to go find a different bigger force for him to fight...

However, despite this Keith setup a massive underlying intrigue story rife with political machinations that was far more exciting than in any of the other books. Sure, this aspect of BattleTech showed up in his other stories, but none of them were this big and just outright fascinating to read about. The smart thing Keith did was not make the Draconis Combine the enemy to be faced again. This time Carlyle is facing off in a different region of the world and the books start off with a campaign in Laio territory while the Legion is under contract with Marik forces. So, already the players are quite different and we get to delve a little bit deeper into the realms of BattleTech.

The coolest part about the whole story is the dealing with ComStar and the secretive Word of Blake. Their obsessions with old Star League tech made for a complex wrench thrown into the whole story and made it one of the more fascinating things to read about! The political intrigue subplot really made this book great in my opinion.

The Mech battles were well written, as they usually have been in Keith's books, so I have no complaints there. Carlyle's battle prowess seemed a lot more reasonable this time around, sure he's overly lucky in his survival, as we expect, but he's not constant headshot lucky like it felt like he was in the last book.

Personally, I think Keith's writing has steadily improved over the series and I think he did a great job laying the foundations to expand the stories of BattleTech. After this I'll be delving into a new author in this series, but I do know Keith wrote more books about the Gray Death later on and I'll experience those in time.

Really more on the 2.5 end

If you've been following my reviews on these books then you know I wasn't really into the second installment. But I figured since there is only one more book in the series and I own it, I may as well finish it off. It's not that reading Brandt's writing is a slog, his writing and books is fast paced, I just started to lose interest in his characters and “The Rebel” was no exception to this.

At this point I was pretty done with the main character Kris' story. In “The Rebel” I felt like Brandt shifted to write more of a stereotypical Young Adult bratty teen into this book. This was a far cry tough as nails operative he had set Kris' character up to be. He does keep up that plot point of “everything is tragic,” which just got more annoying as Kris' bratty decisions against the adults put her in more and more tragic scenarios. Seriously, she wouldn't go back and sleep in her own room, because she had argued with the guy in charge. This book reads more like a petulant teens story rather than some covert op to take down the big corporations... which is what it should have been. I'm surprised to say there is no more overly tragic death scenes, but the hurt and hardships experienced by Kris and those around her are often of her own making, because she can't follow orders. Again... this is after a years worth of military styled training.

Let's hone in on that for just a moment. Kris' whole newness and training is painfully incongruous to the world Brandt has set her in. It's practically absurd in it's entirety. This makes me wish even MORE that he had kept Ian alive, because then with them working together MAYBE some of this would have made any sense at all. Case in point. A character brought up in the second book, Janice appears in this book. Janice is built around being a double agent, which we know after the second book. Brandt makes it a point to say she had already been trained by the Meridian corporation, so she was only pretending to be “new” when she trained with Kris. That's fine, but then Janice gets beaten up by Kris at one point. Okay, first time around, I'll allow it. Then SoCal captures Janice and now she'll work for SoCal. SoCal sends her with one of their best agents to go monitor Kris. While doing this Janice and this best operative get into a fight and Janice wins. You heard that right, Janice wins against the best Socal has to offer. Okay... bet then in the next few scenes Janice gets the drop on Kris and then Kris wins. This happens again for a total of THREE times. Give me a break. There's no way a barely trained 17 year old pregnant girl is taking these people on and winning. Brandt goes so far as to infiltrate a Satellite city and has Kris taking down full on top tier military soldiers, not all of whom she gets the drop on and they are not fighting her one at a time. This book just got stupid fast.

So why does this have such a high rating. The background story about a new character named Andrew Ito who took over the Meridian station is AWESOME. Seriously Brandt should have just written about this stuff. The underlying political machinations and the characters surrounding the moves the corporations make in warfare were great. The whole sci-fi element with new technology surrounding Bryson Searls was awesome! The whole part about him being capture by a corporation and trying to reproduce his test results was SO good. Brandt has the ability to write cool stories, he clearly does. He just decided to tell a story about the people on the ground with people on the ground who were just annoying and unrealistic.

In the end Kris' story is getting a solid 1.5 from me. The whole Kadokawa vs. SoCal corporation content with them vying over new technology, that's a 3.5. This could have been a killer series, but it just tanked fast with Brandt's obsession with trying to write the most tragic story on earth as a cover for not writing something exciting. I think he's trying to make it “edge of your seat” with all the mishaps, but his characters don't fit into this design very well with what he has them do. If he didn't set this up to try and be so realistic, maybe I could have given a bunch of the nonsense a pass... but turning Kris into an argumentative teen “who knows everything that's best for her” post military training... sorry I can't get beyond that.