Challengers Hope (Paperback)

Don't get me wrong. I like heroes and anti-heroes. And even as a kid I thought that Captain Bligh was one of the former.

But the main character here is the sort of half-crazed martinet who makes Captain Queeg look like Francis of Assissi and Mother Courage rolled into one. A religious fanatic. Grasping. Power mad. Self-absorbed. Needlessly cruel. With no regard for the lives and well-being of his men. The kind of officer who would be fragged in any sane military past or present and who would almost certainly have washed out of OCS, much less a the military academy.

The covert racism in this and others is impossible to ignore. The "gangs" down in the cities are all Black or Latino (as if these would still be meaningful categories that far in the future). They even talk like refugees from a minstrel show.

And the "Fish", the demons of the piece, aren't even very good monsters. They seem big, strong, dumb and hungry. Less the objects of a military campaign than a job for the game warden.

This whole series is a lot like a sick cat; it just doesn't wash.

In this book, Seafort is sent with a big group of ships to go defend Hope Nation. The only problem is, they fuse a great deal of times and meet fish on two of those times. Betrayed by the admiral in charge, Seafort is transferred to a disabled ship with a bunch of the more useless (read, trannie - sort of street kids - and elderly) passengers. His crew is skeletal, and some of them are rebellious. The passengers are snotty except for the old ones, who are pretty dang useless, and the trannies who dont' improve the situation. So... Seafort tries to pull things together and improve their chances of survival although everything looks pretty dang hopeless. Seafort becomes more disagreeable throughout the book until you feel like you'd join in any rebellion against him too.

But, it's a good book. Feintuch has a rare talent of drawing the reader into the book and making the reader become attached to the characters (my attachment is to Vax). Watch the characters grow and change... all the while keeping the story interesting and suspenseful.

I don't think this book is as good as Midshipman's Hope, but it is a good read and I recommend this saga to anybody. Actually, I just got my best friend addicted to it by giving her Midshipman's Hope for her birthday and sending her Challenger's Hope when she was done iwth the first one. She absolutely loves the books, as does my other best friend. And the one had never even read sci-fi before! As she put it, you forget it's a scifi novel for the most part. It's about living and dealing with problems...