Claws that Catch

In the 4th book of the Looking Glass series, the storyline's undergarments are starting to show. The formula of the third book ([b:Manxome Foe|1624960|Manxome Foe (Looking Glass, #3)|John Ringo|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1186032977s/1624960.jpg|1618980]) is repeated: first 60-80% of the book is about "they flew there" and "they flew here" and the "marines made fun of the CO", then the final part is about a big space battle with exotic ships and weapons, alien allies and enemies and the hard-fought victory by the key characters, all of whom manage to survive and are in fact the heroes.The final battle is probably worth the effort (to both writers and readers), although this probably could have been a short story rather than the novel length treatment here. Hopefully, this marks the end of my military fiction binge as I am all gung-ho-ed out. Need to stop jumping to attention for Semper fi! ( )

This is the 4th book in the Looking Glass series, and again features many of the same characters in the new and improved Vorpal Blade flying around the galaxy fighting. This one is less about discovery and more about the combat, though its not quite as tense or desperate as in previous books. If you like John Ringo books you'll still like this one, but it is not my favorite. ( )

The Vorpal Blade II is gearing up for her first real mission. With the Dreen presence looming and the rest of the world suddenly in on the interstellar secret, the crew is back together, the newly married (and promoted) Two-Gun Eric Bergstresser, XO Bill Weaver, of course Miriam, are off again.

Ringo takes a couple of side-trips into domestic life and military day-to-day, and trots out a few old jokes. Entertaining as always. ( )

At this point it's become pretty strongly a Mary Sue adventure. Ringo is prone to those - though he manages to write ones that are interesting for multiple volumes, which is kind of amazing! Eric is the unquestioned hero, to a ridiculous degree - and I'm sorry, the anime bit didn't help _at_all_. Weaver gets to be XO, which means he spends most of his time on paperwork and personality/authority clashes and none of his time (that I recall) on science. His greatest scientific contribution this trip is convincing the new captain that Miriam really is useful, despite being a civilian woman. Oh and by the way, at the end of the last book she picked up an alien hitchhiker...who hated heat but has no problem with human body heat, apparently. Why it settled for her implant, if it did...Miriam spends the first half of the book in bad with the Captain - and he never even knew she'd brought the cat on board. Good thing she did, stupid action, poor plot point (maybe the Cheerick could have caught the spiders?). And just where did Tiny go when Miriam was on the Tree? And she complains once that he spends no time with her and once that he won't leave her alone (though that was deus ex machina to get him hopped up on catnip). And so on. This one feels much less like a smooth, connected story and more like a series of neat scenes stuck together with...space tape? Heavy authorial intervention. And Two-Gun has gotten seriously boring (actually, I liked him when he was with Brooke and when he was trying to deal with the paperwork, much less so when he was Two-Gunning). Not terrible, but nowhere near as good as Looking Glass. I really hope he doesn't write another in this series...but I bet he will, they haven't even encountered the Dreen in force (let alone the people with the big ship or the ones with the concert hall/weapon (Tar-Ayim Krang?)). Sigh. Science goes by the wayside, replaced by two-gun mojo and the invocation of 'quarks' at every opportunity. Oh, and by the way, it's spelled 'whelm'. Not 'welm'. There's a chapter near the end where there's an 'overwelm' or 'overwelming' on just about every page - arrrrrrrgggggghhhh! ( )

Good old-fashioned "hard" science fiction, with a reasonable dash of adventure thrown into the mix. ( )