Kris Longknife's Successor: Grand Admiral Stantiago on Alwa Station – Mike Shepherd

Giving up on this series

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2018 Format: Kindle Verified Purchase As you may suppose, if I’ve read ‘Successor’, I’ve read the previous books in this series as well as earlier ‘Kris Longknife’ books. The question with a long series - and with a spinoff series - is whether to keep reading. For this series, the answer has become ‘no’. These books have two centers of gravity - the continuity characters, and the space combat. Neither suffices.

It’s hard to write honest space-combat fiction. The author decides whether a shot hits or misses. The author decides whether the enemy can pull a rabbit out of its BEM-appropriate hat. There is a story-telling imperative to make the battle a near thing - and then have the heroes win. ‘Successor’ space combat is uninteresting for just those reasons: The enemy keeps pulling mataphorical rabbits, and the issue is never in doubt. (The enemy has unlimited resources - in the sense if the author wants their space fleet to have five thousand ships, it’ll have five thousand ships - so no victory in this series brings long-term benefit.)

The characters that have carried over to this spinoff series are minor - I didn’t care about them to start - and have remained two-dimensional - I haven’t come to care about them. So if the characters are uninteresting, and the outcome of the action lacks long-term significance, there isn’t much left.

‘Successor’ would have benefited from a copy-edit pass. The bad-homonym errors, strange autocorrects, and missing-or-misplaced words were an ongoing distraction.

I’m going to end this by scratching a technical itch. One of the main ‘tactics’ in this series is dodging. A spaceship changes its acceleration randomly, at random intervals, to become harder to hit. We are talking about accelerations of up to 4G, at distances of about 100,000 miles. Now if the enemy ship is accelerating steadily, the computer will aim its laser at where it expects the ship to be in the half second it will take a laser beam to arrive. So the best outcome from dodging is to accelerate in a new direction at 4G for one second before the beam arrives - meaning that the beam will be off by about 60 feet. Since these are large ships, the benefit would seem to be marginal.