Warrior: En Garde

An interesting way to set the table for the 4th succession war.
Like a lot of Battletech fiction though, the handling of culture and race in the 80s hasn't aged well. It's a thousand years in the future and race relations in the Inner Sphere are so silly that you're left practically welcoming the eventual clan invasion to wipe the slate clean of racially segregated interstellar empires. Argh.
Still the plotting is interesting enough and Stackpole is at worst a bit corny and at best a great weaver of wide-ranging cast.

I'd never read this book as young Battletech fan, but it had such a point of prominence in the fictional history of the universe that I'd built up a lot of expectations.

I was looking for something easy to read and it delivered on that, with a continually moving plot and battle scenes aplenty. The writing does the job of explaining everything very clearly, and that can't be ignored; I've definitely read worse action!

This sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, and that might be true, but I also think that this book in some respects leans on the fictional universe it's drawing on for it's dramatic impact. If I were deeply immersed in that universe all the time, I might get more of a frisson of excitement as various prominent characters show more are revealed. Also, it's references to the drama of previous books both drains some of the drama in this book but does give it a more expansive feel, which is exactly what a fictional universe based on a wargame and roleplaying game needs. So I think this book delivers to that demographic well, but bereft from that context, it loses some of it's impact.

Some of the dialogue and internal monologues suffer from being either expository or extremely on-the-nose, but again, this book and it's universe isn't about exploring the subtleties of human interaction. It's about important events in a galactic scale.

So I do understand why these are missing, or at least not prioritized, but after reading authors like Guy Kay or Ursula K Leguin, I did find myself missing that extra level of detail. show less

I was hoping that Stackpole could really make me like this universe, because so far I've been very meh about it. Unfortunately, this did nothing for me either. I just won't be reading any more I guess.

F/SF