Review: Kris Longknife, Mutineer

Kris Longknife: Mutineer, by Mike Shepherd

=:) =:) =:)

That third smiling alien is flickering a bit, in my estimation. I’m not quite done reading this book, but I’ve read enough to form a reasonably informed opinion. I’ve read all or most of the Honor Harrington books (such as The
Short Victorious War (Honor Harrington (Paperback)) ) by David Weber, and although I got bored with them because the formula had worn a little thin for me, I liked the idea of reading SF books about galactic warrior women. This one struck me favorably; as the first in the series, it was the least likely to be hidebound by whatever quirks the author has saddled his title character with.
I’ve also discovered that the author’s name is actually Mike Moscoe due to an oddity of marketing in the publishing world.

I hope that this series improves with later books; for now there’s much to recommend this book to the new reader, and a few potentially serious problems with the way dialogue is written, with plotting, and with characterization.

First last, I’ll start with characterization. Kris Longknife is a young woman with unusual abilities, a wearable personal computer worth more than a dirt-farming colony world, a large and largely dysfunctional family that’s as long-lived as they are politically astute, paranoid, and wealthy, and she’s six foot tall, though not so much of a glamour puss. Thank God for that; if she’d been incredibily beautiful, she’d be insufferable (even in an eyepatch, David Weber’s Honor Harrington looks too much like Angelina
Jolie on the later books’ covers for comfort). However, she’s also supposedly flawed owing to a drinking problem she had as a very young girl (as in, around age thirteen after a horrible family tragedy laid her out for a few years). Kris has a sardonic sense of humor and is blessed with an almost inhuman capacity for getting a lot of work done, and getting people to help her get it done. She’s a lowly Ensign in the Navy of the Society of Humanity, a political entity that governs hundreds of human worlds, but
her family connections get her the kind of attention no Ensign ever wants; suspicious glances from superior officers who assume that Kris is coasting on the glorious family name as “one of those Longknifes.” Her parents disapproved of her joining the Navy and didn’t even attend her graduation from Officer Candidate School.

Thing is, she reads like a complete and total Mary Sue Swashbuckler In Space. She’s got a near-psychic pet/companion in Nelly, her wearable computer. That’s one hit. She’s got every male in human space interested in her, in spite of having a big nose and towering over a couple of them. That’s another hit. She’s incredilbly wealthy in her own right, and isn’t afraid to use her own wealth while serving in the Navy in order to cut red tape and get things done. She’s more of an altruist than most Mary Sues, but the
insane amount of personal wealth she apparently controls qualifies as another hit.

Characterization of everybody else: They all revolve around her.They take their cues off of her. They smooth the way for her or commemorate incidents from her family’s glorious past in ways to make her the noble, yet humble, center of attention. They’re willing to die for her on very short notice. They all have verbal “tics” to set them off as “characters,” but not the kind that step off the page and live and breathe as the story unfolds. One or two are a bit more than that, but all the fatherly twinkling from
the gruff older alpha males in Kris Longknife’s life is a bit much.

This brings me to dialogue. It’s short. It’s snappy. Everybody banters like… they’re characters in a tough-as-nails service movie that can’t decide if it’s a comedy or a tragedy, or they spent their formative years reading “Starship Troopers” over and over. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the dialogue is quite sharp and funny, but it’s all a bit of a muchness, The only characters that don’t get to talk all snappy-like are the ones that the author rather obviously wants us to see as incompetent drones.

And now to plotting. It’s basic stuff – start with a rousing rescue sequence, put the main character and her sidekick in a “fish out of water” scenario on two different planets, have Kris come up with a tough, no-nonsense solution, lose one or two people in action, and set up for what I’m reading now, the big conflict near the end, This is where David Weber lost me, because he used to do much the same thing – flashy opener, tragic event setting up conflict that simmers along for much of the book, put Honor Harrington
and everything and everyone she currently holds dear in jeopardy, kill off at least one well-liked secondary character from previous books, and cry havoc! Honor avenges all in the final act, but there’s some loose ends to tie up for the next book.

At least with this book, there’s some kind of mysterious goings-on related to the political turmoil that has just come to a boil – as you might realistically expect, Kris Longknife and her sidekick have been busy with their detour posting saving people on a planet experiencing a huge climate-change crisis, and they’re surprised to find out that the rest of human space is about to go to war with itself once they bother to catch up on current events. The mysterious goings-on have something to do with attempts on
Kris’ life, and with her political/familial connections, and with the planet with the weather problems being quietly bought up, piece by piece, owing to its strategic location. That part, I’m interested in finding out more about. I still don’t really have a bead on why all the aunts and uncles and great-grandparents in the family are cool, well-preserved people still very much in control of their military careers or personal fiefdoms, while her parents are such jerks (especially her mom and one of her grandfathers).
There’s no mention of any first or second cousins, though. Just one brother (and one younger brother who died in childhood). Oddly, she’s treated almost like a throwaway because she turned her back on the family business, which seems to be either politics, or making more money, or more probably both at the same time.

It’s a fun read – the story goes quickly, the adventures are adventurous, and there’s some cracking good dialogue. It’s just a lot of a good thing, without some kind of relief in the form of completely random and unexpected plot twists and character developments. Not everything has to be part of a huge, shadowy conspiracy just because a rival business and political clan is sharpening its own knives for Longknife.

Shepherd/Moscoe is actually at his best when he’s describing some of the technology that Kris and her fellow Navy officers and family members take for granted – such as “smart metal” that enables her to change the configuration of a space cruiser to atmospheric flight and back again, or to shapeshift other kinds of military materiel from a boat to a bridge to a barge. It’s described in an offhand way, just as we might describe using a cell phone or a handheld palm device without bothering to describe it in detail.
It’s pretty clear the author has a background or a big interest in military history, too.

I’ll finish this book up tonight – probably within an hour or so. I may browse the next book and pick it up, depending on how things turn out – obviously, Kris will end up catty-wampus to Naval regs, based on the title.We’ll see how that turns out, and maybe pick up with the next book in the series.