William C. Dietz (1945–2026)

I actually read 300 pages of this book, quite an investment in time, before giving up in disgust. The story itself wasn’t that bad. Humanity in a war against evil bugs, losing even, trying to get allies, both of them, playing political games, trying to gain technological edges. Human Confederacy troops are sent to an occupied planet where the Ramanthians are rumored to have some advanced technology the humans covets. The mission is to destroy the enemy and grab the technology. Murphy hits show more from the very beginning. Everything goes wrong.

But that’s not my complaint. Back on the base, there was a gunnery sergeant named Kuga-Ka who’s been a bully and a bastard who has everyone scared of him and who actually tortures his men. And he has his captain addicted to life threatening drugs, so he has him in his pocket. Meanwhile, the good guy of the novel, First Lieutenant Santana is brought in to lead his platoon in their company and let’s just say, the two don’t get along. Santana sees early what’s going on and confronts the man and threatens him with severe disciplinary action if things don’t change. To make matters worse, though, the Confederacy fights with warbots, cyborgs that are huge, seven foot fighting machines made from dead warriors and recorded personalities/souls/digitized recordings/etc with individualized “brain boxes” containing that “former” person’s personality in it, to be linked only and solely with its individualized cyborg body. And for reasons I either don’t recall or never really made totally clear to me, Kuga-Ka HATES one of these cyborgs with a passion, a female, and determines to steal her brain box. Why? What exactly does he plan on doing with it? Throwing it away? That might make some sense. But, no, he hangs on to it while traveling to other worlds through jungles and deserts, for months. He carries this brain box while wounded, hacking his way through jungles with a machete for what? Why does he hate this cyborg this much? For another thing, why does he hate ANYONE so much? Because he goes on a murdering spree, with some cronies of his. They’re captured, or at least he is, but upon getting to the next planet, he’s helped to escape and they’re off. A tracking team is sent after them, but they’re ambushed, tortured, and slaughtered, so that everyone can see them hanging there dead with their entrails hanging out of them. Nice. This asshole, while just a gunny, seems to know a little bit about everything. It’s amazing how much he knows. He knows about airships, about all sorts of weaponry, about close quarters combat, about sniping, about cybernetics, although he admits he’s no cybernetics tech, about negotiating with aliens, about tactics and strategy. My God, he’s the smartest man the military has ever produced! Too bad he’s the biggest psycho too, because for the life of me – and this is why I gave up – he has utterly NO motive whatsoever for being a hate filled nutjob on a murdering spree who hates Santana, who he’s known a couple of days, so much he wants to butcher him, and who hates this one cyborg, out of dozens – why her? Why any? –so much, that he turns traitor and gives himself in to the bugs and offers to help them track down his human ex-colleagues for the purpose of slaughtering them. And he wants to be paid and paid well for this. Nice.

OK, is this remotely believable? Isn’t this carrying things a bit too far, Dietz? I can understand resentments. I can understand people having issues. I can understand being pissed off. I can’t understand people being so psychotic that they go on two world killing sprees, torture, main, ambush, slaughter, turn themselves into the enemy and offer to help them kill your former colleagues, ALL FOR NO MOTIVE WHATSOEVER!!! Usually when people act this way, there’s some type of motive. A spouse or lover has been unfairly killed, or child or parent. Someone has lost their career. They’ve lost their life’s savings. Something HUGE has happened to someone to turn them into a killing monster and traitor. I don’t recall that happening to Kuga-Ka in this novel at all. He’s just a generic bastard to begin with. Someone who needs the shit beaten out of him from day one to begin with, but not someone who you would expect would go insane or who you would even think is intelligent enough to pull all of this stuff off. It just doesn’t make sense. Dietz takes a mediocre character from a minor situation and turns him into a super villain with super powers and it’s irritating and not believable. It’s just damned annoying after awhile. In fact, Kuga-Ka is so relentless in his hatred and murderous desires that it becomes almost comical and nearly ruins the dramatic elements of an otherwise decent military sci fi novel. If Dietz had dialed down this character A LOT, this book might have been fairly enjoyable. As it was, I got too pissed off after 300 pages to finish it and, as I said, I gave up. I don’t care enough to find out what happens. I just want the gunny to die a horrible death and I don’t care enough about the other characters to read on and see what happens to everyone in the meantime.

I’ve read other books by this writer and in fact, have two more waiting in my stacks to be read. They tend to be hit or miss. This was somewhat of a miss with hit potential. I would give this three stars, but I’m downgrading it to two stars because of the Kuga-Ka character and the overkill associated with him. It really brought down my enjoyment of the novel. Nonetheless, cautiously, cautiously recommended for military sci fi fans. show less

I really wanted to love this book. The cover is absolutely bad ass and the blurb grabbed my attention, so I was really excited to sink my teeth into this story. Well, it was a huge disappointment.

I have so many issues with this book that listing them all would make this review the size of a dissertation. So I will just enumerate what irked me the most.

The protagonist. If there was a competition of protagonists who make the worst possible decisions and try to get killed (sadly show more unsuccessfully) at every turn, Cassandra Lee will take the gold medal. Rushing straight into a firefight, though at least she had her bulletproof vest on, unlike her partner. Going alone to investigate a suspicious abandoned house. Getting involved with her mutant partner (more about that later). Generally rushing into without backup or even a sliver of a plan. Yep, that's Cassandra. A few time during the book I wished for a big boulder to fall on her head and grant her the dead wish she seems to have. Add to that the fact that she is rude and antisocial, and it's NOT someone whose story I really want to follow.

The multitude of POVs. Some of the POVs in this book were entirely unnecessary. Why give the widow of the killed mutant a point of view if she appears only for one scene and doesn't add anything remotely interesting or important to the story? And speaking of POVs, why give one to Cassandra's first partner if he gets killed in chapter 2?

And that's another one of my pet peeves. Why was that move necessary? Why bring him into the story at all, just to kill him off two chapters later? And give him such a stupid death as well. What experienced cop in his right mind would rush into an open intersection, guns blazing, against nine armed men? Without a protective vest to boot. Is it supposed to make me sad? Make me empathize with the protagonist and her loss? What loss though. She barely met the guy and didn't like him much. Needless to say that this move completely missed its mark.

The whole mutant / norms deal. The worldbuilding just doesn't make sense. All mutants can potentially carry the pathogen and there is no way of determining who is contagious and who isn't. In a sane world, all of them would be quarantined. Preferably behind a ten foot wall with barbed wire and decontamination stations all around. And nobody would be allowed in or out. What do we have in this world instead? Border zones where norms and mutants intermingle and trade without any protective gear. I mean yes, the mutant women wear something similar to a burka, but it sounds more to hide their deformities than to prevent contamination. And Cassandra ventures into mutant territories without any protective gear at all. That just makes no sense. Either they are contagious to norms and then the partial segregation makes sense, or they're not and then it doesn't make sense.

On that note, when Cassandra and Ras first start working together, they don’t even eat at the same table for fear of contamination. Yet later on they have sex. Hello, there is definitely exchange of bodily fluids during that act, unless both parties are wearing full body rubber suits. So how is sex okay when eating together isn't?

I could go on and on, but I think I will just stop now. Will I recommend this book to my friends? Hell no. show less

Dietz, William C. Deadeye. Mutant Files No. 1. Ace, 2015.
William C. Dietz is best known as a writer of military scifi, including novelizations based on the Halo universe. So, it is no surprise that when he writes a near-future police thriller, his heroine is a crack shot, the bad guys are very bad indeed, and there are lots of them. Bioterroism has produced an America divided into norms and mutants, with a few cyborgs tossed in for good measure. The heroine is likably kickass, but the plot show more is a bit predictable in places. A strong 3 stars. show less

When Duty Calls is another Legion of the Damned novel and it’s one of the better ones I’ve read. In fact, Dietz writes our heroes into some crazy situations that I swore were impossible to get out of – I knew they were dead – but somehow, someway, they survived, or at least some of them did. Written wizardry. Captain Santana is back, kicking ass with his company of biobods and cyborgs, fighting the Ramanthians on Planet Gamma-014 in the Clone Hegemony, a government and people that show more play a huge role in forming an alliance with The Confederacy of Sentient Beings. Santana’s love interest, Christine, is back in this book as well, although this time she falls for a clone, so there’s some tension here and she has to make a decision. Pretty unfair to Santana, if you ask me, out there getting pounded with his men, risking his life just about every minute. Speaking of risking lives, the fighting on this planet is so fierce and so bloody, it’s just a slaughterhouse, mostly of humans. The bugs are slaughtering humans and it’s mostly because there’s an idiot clone general in control of the invasion and he doesn’t know what he’s doing, first of all, and second, he’s only sending in human troops to do the fighting and he’s holding back all of the clone troops to do administrative work, which pisses the humans off and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. So, they’re dying by the tens of thousands for nothing. Things get really tense, over and over, as they have to fight mutineers, bug ambushes, while hoping to get rescued by civilian spacecraft, which is dangerous to both the civilians and the soldiers, and the climax of the book is, well … climactic! There’s a ton of nonstop action in this book. You don’t really have time to stop and think, but then this isn’t a philosophical tome. It’s a shoot ‘em up military sci fi action novel. If that’s what you’re looking for, this is the book for you. Four stars and recommended. show less