Kris Longknife: Daring [Mass Market Paperback]

The Kris Longknife series has been a fun light space opera. It is heroic fiction staring the plucky young Lt. Kris Longknife, descended from a long series of politically powerful Longknifes, and her incredibly talented but quirky crew of associates and their artificially intelligent talking personal supercomputers. By this novel, Kris and her crew are extremely experienced, yet they now also all seem like morons--and the reason they seem that way is because their incredibly clumsy actions and Mike Shepherd's repetitious expository dialogue.

Shepherd tries to lay out the thin plot, and all of the ridiculously prescient lucky guesses his characters make in the guise of "deductions," clear--so scrupulously clear that the books feels like juvenile fiction. The characters carefully explain concepts and tactics they should all know to each other. They even explain nuclear winter and electromagnetic pulses to each other as if they are speaking to children rather than fellow officers. People's names and job descriptions are repeated over and over again. The catch phrase "one of those damn Longknives" is repeated on and on. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Just reading the book makes *me* feel like a moron. But don't mistake all of those overly careful explanations for a careful plot. That is something the book doesn't' have. Like most light space opera, the plot doesn't bear up to close scrutiny, but this book even more so--don't do the math on how long it would take to traverse solar systems based on the speeds cited.

[spoilers]

Now, as to those guesses disguised as deductions. In one instance, Longknife and her crew come across a planet of insect-like creatures who have been wiped out in a genocidal nuclear and kinetic orbital assault by unknown assailants 200 years ago. Millions and millions dead--the entire population. And among all of those millions and millions of dead, Longknife's crew just happen to discover the skeleton of a human-like creature damaged by blunt force trauma. And what do Longknife and company determine from this scant evidence? Well, that the skeleton must have been one of the invaders. OK, so far so good. What else? It was MURDER!!! (Couldn't have been killed in the assault, of course, by the natives :p) Not just murder, but a murder cover up! Oh, and DNA (DNA????) says the murdered aliens were female (nice to know gender is somehow universal even in aliens of unknown origin), so the alien females had been **raped** and murdered. Got any forensics that say rape? Well, no, but, but RAPE and MURDER!!!!. Groan... Oh, and did I mention that the insect-like aliens were killed by Sarin nerve gas? Who knew that Sarin nerve gas was popular with human-like aliens to attack insect-like aliens--heck, who knew Sarin nerve gas would work on insect-like aliens? What, were they being attacked by Nazis or something? Cringe worthy--over and over again.

With this book I have to wonder what is going on. Has Mike Shepherd lost it? Or have I? This book reminds me of the out of touch works by Heinlein from "the period which should not be read", like "Friday"--not in any specific way but in the gaping sloppiness. Even so, lots of people seem to like this book if the reviews can be believed, but I just don't see it. I still recommend the series, but I suggest people stop before reading this installment.

I read this in one day. There is lots of action, but it also has good character development. I preordered this as I knew the series was good. You leave the book knowing you want the next one.

In this book, the longknife story is taken into paths well travelled. An ad-hoc band of ships (the few and the proud) travels into deep space to fight a massive alien fleet (a massed multitude of minions). There are some plot holes in the story IMHO, but the book adds some new themes and plot developements and retains the humor and spunk of the previous novels.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 29 reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars