Teaser

The Star Kingdom if Manticore will one day be famed for its Royal Navy, but that is yet to come. In the here and now, the Navy is threatened not only by military threats, but by those in Manticore itself who believe it is noting more than a waste of resources . . .

Review

It has been four years since I read the first adventure of spaceman Travis Long, as chronicled in A Call to Duty. A copy of the second book proved very difficult to get a hold of in the UK, until I finally bit the bullet and went to eBay. Over the course of those four years I have read every other Honorverse novel, and forgotten pretty much everything that happened in A Call to Duty. The two facts may be linked. Leaving such a long gap, and filling it with remarkably similar books, forgetting details is just the cost of doing business. Nevertheless, coming into this book was a lot like coming home. A home filled with all the things I enjoyed about the early volumes of the Honorverse.

First off, there’s the page count. Forget being less than a thousand pages, it’s less than half that. Modern science fiction has a definite problem with bloat, and books in that sweet spot of three-to-five hundred pages are vanishingly slim, especially when it comes to space opera. A Call to Arms‘s relatively trim size is the result of much tighter editing. There isn’t chapter of chapter of boardroom meeting – these are dealt with over the course of a handful of pages. And while there are multiple plot threads, they compliment rather than combat one another.

On a related note, the character side of things is where I felt let down. Travis Long is not actually in this book a whole lot. True, this means we get to see events from whoever is most relevant at the time, but Long’s journey stalls for much of the book. It’s not that the other characters are less compelling, it’s simply that I expected to follow Long’s career more closely than we do. Instead of being in the thick of the action, Long actually spends much of the novel’s first act dog-sitting for a friend. On which note I have to add that Crumpets is a perfectly acceptable name for a dog.

Unlike the first book, which was credited solely to Weber and Zahn for marketing reasons, this one bears the names of three authors on the cover. Baen Books seem to be the go-to publisher for collaborative efforts these days, but at no point does A Call to Arms feel like the work of more than one author. It’s impossible to tell who wrote what, or which bits were edited by whom. It’s cohesive and smooth in way you might not expect from a multi-author epic.

The Manticore Ascendant series is exactly the shot in the arm that the Honorverse needed. It’s fresh, vibrant, and full of life. We can only hope that the rest of the series stays true to the form of these first two.

Book Stats

• Manticore Ascendant (#2)
• Published by Baen
• First published in 2015
• Space Opera
• 477 pages