ZZB4 ( )

Fun story. A literal 'black box' from the first book gets extended into a warp drive and a reason for a new adventure here. New character - Eric Bergstrasser - I like him, too. William Weaver's still there, Mimi and Tuffy come along and so does Chief Miller (I like his existential doubt near the end - gives a good excuse for him to keep coming, too). Oh, and Miriam. Also an interesting character. I got to not liking her by the fourth book, so it's hard to remember how I saw her in this one. But I think even in this one there started to be some confusion between Mimi and Miriam - as in, instead of Mimi pulling some data out of a hat to solve things Miriam did. So just why was Mimi along?
The story itself is relatively simple - first spaceship (a converted sub rechristened the Vorpal Blade) goes out into space and tries to figure out how to handle things out there. Some politics, a lot of interesting cross-service culture clashes (Marines vs SF, sub vs carrier...). Some interesting worlds discovered, though none of them struck me as either wonderful or particularly original. Lots of gung-ho, and Eric "Two-Gun" got to challenge the standard mantra that two-gun mojo is a fool's game. Not bad, not as good as Looking Glass. ( )

The cast of Into the Looking Glass takes off for other worlds in a spaceship cobbled together on a nuclear submarine frame.

New worlds, new conflicts, new allies, new discoveries. Not so much a direct advancement of the plot idea from Into the Looking Glass as a quest of discovery. Theoretically, elements discovered in this novel will be applied to further novels in this series. ( )

The first book in the series was quite interesting, but this one seemed to have way too much in the way of "fake" science gibberish. It went way past the "if they start talking one more time about" gibberish threshold.

Granted, the action was interesting. When it occurred. ( )

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