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Military science fiction during a wartime that's going badly

a book review by Eric Jackson

Kris Longknife: Resolute

by Mike Shepherd

Ace Books, New York (2006)

342 pp, $7.99 in paperback

Military science fiction is the action-packed genre of futuristic war. It favors fast-paced combat and maneuver over character development or science. A lot of it is written by folks with military backgrounds. Just like some people used to (and others still do) look down on the entire genre of science fiction as trash, there are those who work in or enjoy science fiction who look askance at this sub-genre.

Well, yes. Most of everything out there is inferior to the best.

But some of the best science fiction is military science fiction. It always has been that way.

Good science fiction, and even the bad stuff, tends to reflect the tenor of its time. And what about military science fiction coming from an American society that increasingly judges the great US military adventure unfolding in Iraq to be an unmitigated disaster?

You get heroic tales of those who do everything in their power to avoid war, but young jerks who inherited their undeserved commands recklessly and cynically provoking conflicts against all the best advice forcing the formers' hands. You get interactions of honorable warriors from opposing camps that must inevitably end badly because of dishonorable people up the chain of command. You get good guys being jerked around by political intrigues and dismal bureaucracies back home, but muddling through all the same.

Mike Shepherd doesn't seem to be any sort of radical. He comes to us from the US Navy, and gives us a heroine of the royal blood and possessed of great wealth. This is not a book about the revolt of the masses.

But in the end, the leader of the bad guys is defeated by the good guys and meets his even more disastrous personal fate most probably at the hands of underlings he offended. In the book's last pages, an old warrior waxes philosophical with the young heroine: "You can't loose the hounds of war and expect to know what tree those puppies are gonna bark up. That's why any smart man does his best to keep those sons ah bitches on a leash."

And that's the  tone of US military science fiction published in 2006, which is very different from the stuff that came out right after 9/11.

This particular book probably won't win a Hugo or a Nebula. Still, it was a fun, fast-paced read.