Saturday, July 9, 2011

KCR: Jump Pay / The Lucky 13th (novel, scifi, war, Rick Shelley)

Rick Shelley has quite a few books out, concentrating on three series: the Mercenary series, the Lucky 13th series, and Special Ops Squad series. This is a part of the "Lucky 13th" series.

The premise: 13th Spaceborne Assault Team, i.e. the Lucky 13th, was called upon to spearhead a huge invasion of the enemy arsenal planet. The enemy is building up troops and equipment for an assault and a Pearl-Harbor-style pre-emptive strike will be needed to destroy most of the arsenal. The action flicks from airborne assault using newly deployed grav belts, to recon squads doing hit and fade on enemy positions, to assault howitzer crews pumping out shells on enemy positions, and aerial fighter "Wasps" dogfighting and performing close-support on the troops, and the commander trying to make sense of the chaos, the war jumps from perspective to perspective, almost too fast to keep up.

Indeed, that is the main problem I have with the series: the action just keep flicking so fast that you have a hard time keeping up. As a result, you don't really get attached to any of the characters. They feel like cliches: the hard sergeant, the dumb rookie, the contemplative lieutenant, the colonel who have to choose between duty and not spending his soldiers needlessly. The enemy have no faces, no motivation. They are simply the bad guy. The weapons described makes little sense even though they sound quite futuristic. What happened to grenades? Or tanks? Or light armor?

Or as someone else puts it, this is like Hammer's Slammers, except it makes much less sense.

Rating: borrow it from a library and see if you like the style. I don't.

EDIT: apparently Mr. Shelley died in 2001


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