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Kingdom's Fury | Rating | |
| B | |||
| David Sherman and Dan Cragg | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Starfist | First to Fight, School of Fire, Steel Gauntlet, Blood Contact, Technokill, Hangfire, Kingdom's Swords, Kingdom's Fury | ||
The Skinks are still on Kingdom. The 34th is still there, too, but they're getting reinforced by the 26th FIST. But the 26th, like most of the Confederation, doesn't know anything about aliens. The 34th is going to have to change that in a hurry even as they deal with the theocratic leaders of the planet. And dealing with the Skinks might turn out to be the easier of the two tasks.
It is utterly essential that people read at least Kingdom's Swords before they read this one, and reading Hangfire might be wise as well to see the real start of things. This is not a book to start the series with. There's just too much important information regarding alien encounters that would be missed.
Not that we know everything about the Skinks. Considering how much the text cuts to their leaders giving instructions on what to do next while laughing at the idiot humans, we know next to nothing about them. This being the fourth book the Skinks are in, I think the time has more than come for readers, at least, to start getting inside the aliens' heads. Perhaps the characters can lag behind, but I don't like being kept in the dark this long.
On the good side, the way those scenes are written gives the impression that the authors do actually have motives and a history in mind for them. They're not just writing out of their hats, and the Skinks, while uniformly aggressive towards non-Skinks, still seem plausible. It'd just be even more so if readers could get a backstage peek, as it were.
The only other thing I really had a problem with was Corporal Doyle. He's still an enormous coward, literally pissing himself scared. While it makes sense - well, more sense - in the last book, by now he's had several encounters with the Skinks under fire. By now he would either have cracked under the pressure and turned into a gibbering wreck unable to leave the barracks, or he'd have toughened up to the point where he could function. He could still be scared, but he'd stop trembling, stammering, and tripping over everything and everyone around him because he's too scared and preoccupied to march correctly. Given how things went on Elneal, I'd expect the latter. But that adventure is almost entirely ignored except when he needs to point to it to assert his authority to the native Kingdom army. As an aspect of his character, it might as well never have happened, and that's just not right.
But there's plenty of good to balance the bad. The military is acting smarter this time around, for one thing. No longer are they just begging to be slaughtered, and they're actually starting to get a handle on the situation in general. There are some interesting space navy battles as well, which is apparently a rarity in that setting; the Navy is considered a "safe" branch of the military. It's a very brief fight, but it is there, and I thought it done quite well.
There is also some politicking in the book, both on Kingdom and back on Earth. It's not an overwhelming portion, not hardly, just enough to show readers that there will be further developments and give a good idea what they'll be. The Confederation must decide whether the existence of the Skinks must be spread around more, and if so just how far to spread it. The paths that opens up are many and promise to be a quite interesting side issue in future books. And it's made very clear that we haven't heard the last of Kingdom, either...
This is in many ways what I felt the last book should have been. It is a well-balanced military novel, humans versus aliens. Simple as that. Fans of the genre should enjoy it, so long as they're familiar enough with what went on before. In many ways, though, it is less a continuation or conclusion of a storyline than the beginning of a major story arc. I'm rather looking forward to seeing what comes next.
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