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Post by reznor on Mar 16, 2013 21:53:13 GMT
DragonLance -Time of the Twins -War of the Twins -Test of the Twins -Dragons of Autumn Twilight -Dragons of Winter Night -Dragons of Spring Dawning -Dragons of Summer Flame -The Soulforge -Brothers in Arms -Dragons of the Hourglass Mage
Red Dwarf -Infinity -BTL -Backwards -Last Human
Fear and loathing Jurrasic park Sphere The Rum Diary Congo The Amityville Horror
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Post by simonr1978 on Jul 29, 2013 20:17:27 GMT
At the moment, I'm working my way through re-reading the old Battletech novels starting with Decision at Thunder Rift by William H Keith Jnr. It's interesting to see how much the Battletech universe has changed since these books were written towards the end of the 1980s. From the last time I read these, Keith isn't my favourite of the Battletech authors and I don't think this is going to change somehow, Keith's Grey Death Legion series, of which Thunder Rift was the first, tend to be a bit formulaic and a bit clichéd with Greyson Carlyle being a bit goody-goody for my liking. In short the Legion are formed after the Carlyle and his father's unit get caught up in a conspiracy and despite being betrayed and heavily outnumbered, the young Carlyle has to build the the mismatched units of local militia up into an effective force against a background of local politics and power struggles. They eventually win out against the odds. Most of that summary from what I can recall can apply to most of the rest of Keith's Battletech novels.
Having finished that, I moved on to Mercenary's Star, the second in the series. No conspiracy this time, but again the fledgling Legion is outnumbered and outmatched, they're up against it as they try to win the hearts and minds of a local ragtag rebel army and build them into an effective fighting force. As before, they eventually win out against the odds.
To be fair to him, Keith isn't a bad author by a long stretch. The main characters are reasonably well fleshed out, the action is pretty well written and for the most part seems to be plausible within the framework of Battletech as a whole, but something in his novels just doesn't quite gel for me. The supporting characters tend towards being two dimension and stereotypes, the bad guys are almost 1960s style Bond villains and the protagonists for me seem a bit too good, noble and heroic to be 100% convincing.
Still, if you're in the mood for a pretty lightweight science fiction novel you could do a lot worse. If you can track down these though, they have been OOP for a while now and Kindle versions don't seem forthcoming (I have requested them, but I'm not hopeful anything will come of it any time soon). There are other electronic versions out there, if you know where to look though...
Next I moved on to The Sword and the Dagger, by Ardath Mayhar. This is one (Along with the whole Warrior trilogy) I missed the first time round. This one was pretty good, IMO I'd rate Mayhar up with Stackpole as an author. The characters are pretty well written and the story engaging and interesting, for a Battletech fan. I'm glad Battletech as a whole moved away from including sentient alien civilisations in future novels, though to be fair they don't play a huge part in the story. Overall I was a bit disappointed that some of the characters introduced early in the novel just seem to get dropped and forgotten about (The amputee Capellan aerospace pilot for example) and the ending seemed to just sort of fizzle out a bit, but the conspiracy involving Hanse Davion and Arden Sortek was done well and the balance between action and story also done well. I wonder why Mayhar didn't get involved in any more Battletech fiction since I thought she did a good job with this one, but from what I can gather from Stackpole, FASA/ROC were a bit hit and miss when it came to paying their authors on time, maybe she just decided it wasn't worth the hassle.
Next was number 3 in the Grey Death Legion series, The Price of Glory. Fresh from their success on Verthandi, the Legion are picked up by the Free World's League and get a contract and land holding. At the end of the campaign (Where the book begins) though, they're framed for mass murder by a shadowy conspiracy led by an evil villain determined to obtain the lost, hidden cache of weapons, technology and material on the Legion's holding on the planet Helm. Once again the Legion face seemingly overwhelming odds, once again they eventually win out in spite of them and once again the bad guys are almost irredeemably evil whilst Carlyle himself and the Legionaires as a whole are almost two dimensionally brave, noble and heroic, pretty much without fault. As before with the other two Grey Death books, it was actually better than I remembered, I just wish that Keith added a bit more depth to his characters.
5th and 6th were the first two books of the Warrior trilogy by Michael A Stackpole, En Garde and Riposte. I read these two one after the other (And have just started number 3), but as a trilogy most of what I'd want to say really applies to both books. I'll come straight off the fence here and say that I think Stackpole is easily the best of the Battletech authors, I'd previously read his later novels so I had a fair idea of what to expect and whilst I hadn't read these ones first time round, I have picked up enough to know roughly what happens.
Overall, Stackpole's characters are well fleshed out. The bad guys are not irredeemably evil and the good guys have their flaws too (For example, Hanse Davion in particular comes over as a bit of a dick at times), infact I think he does a good job of reflecting that good and bad in Battletech are really a matter of shades of gray rather than black and white. The intertwining stories that he portrays are interesting and well written. I'm writing this at the moment with a view to posting the same brief review on a couple of other forums so I'll leave the spoiler-y stuff out for now, in case anyone's wondering I haven't done the same for the Grey Death Legion books because all that is pretty much on the book cover.
If you were looking to take a first dip into Battletech fiction, I'd definitely recommend starting with Stackpole and the Warrior books.
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Post by Fandango on Apr 29, 2016 6:31:45 GMT
Hey Danny, u ok Hun?
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Post by Chirs on Oct 2, 2016 10:01:12 GMT
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