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Metal Fire | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Jack McKinney | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Robotech: Second Generation | Genesis, Battle Cry, Homecoming, Battlehymn, Force of Arms, Doomsday, Southern Cross, Metal Fire, The Final Nightmare, Invid Invasion, Metamorphosis, Symphony of Light, The Devil's Hand, Dark Powers, Death Dance, World Killers, Rubicon, The End of the Circle | ||
The Robotech Masters' flagship has been shot down! Now it rests over Monument City, resisting all attempts of the humans to enter the structure so they can perhaps find out who and what they are up against. In the meantime, the Robotech Masters decide to send Zor Prime out into human society as a POW so they can learn about and spy on humanity. And Dana Sterling's 15th Tank Squad becomes the centerpiece for both plotlines as they are the ones chosen to break into the ship, and Zor is later placed among them to hopefully regain the memories the Masters suppressed.
If you think it sounds kind of silly, you're right. It's not helped by how Dana actually manages to fall in love with Zor despite the fact that she knows for a fact he was her nemesis. Hell, when she first encounters him in the hospital she's trying to beat him to a pulp, and suddenly she's so supportive it's stupid. Zor gets caught spying by the alien-hater Angelo multiple times and Dana just plain refuses to hear it. That's just plain bad writing there.
The plotline involving exploring the alien ship isn't any better. The layout and design just makes no sense, with corridors that are large enough for a Battloid despite how all the aliens are human-sized, and branches only every few miles. Excusing it because it's an alien ship instead of a human one just sidesteps the issue. Bad and ineffecient design is bad and inefficient whether you're human or not.
As I read I was also finding it more and more remarkable that the human's Supreme Commander hasn't been replaced for incompetence. He seems unable to concieve of any tactic more complex than, "Hit them with a lot of mecha." It's getting people killed in rediculous numbers, and any civilian authority - there supposedly is one, though it rarely crops up in the story - would have had him pulled long ago.
The book is better in some ways than the last one, trying to build some depth into at least some of the characters. But by and large it fails because people are still acting so irrationally.
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