Lethal Heritage
more of a review section
First off it's always difficult to join a new generation of characters, do the intros, the exposition, the catch up session while keeping it interesting and progressing the plot etc. Stakpole has a range of tricks up his sleeves to achieve this, Dialogue, internal Monologue, plane old exposition, he keeps it moving in the first few chapters with mixed success.
Victor's chat with Renny's folks gives us a nice glimpse into his character and general progress so far without feeling like a big exposition session. Kai's conversation on the beach with his ex-girlfriend on the other hand is riddled with painfully expositional internal monologue that just made me crazy.
But a big success of this book I have to say is the Phelan Kell character. It seemed to me the most natural thing, the guy gets captured, enslaved, made to toe the line. The clan teaches him what they expect of him as a bondsman, how their society works and he learns to appreciate his options and makes the most of them until he becomes one of them. Perfect. I didn't even figure out until much later on that the whole thing is a ruse to introduce this new culture through the eyes of a sympathetic character. It's all exposition to and very naturally achieved. That it makes for (IMO) the best part of the story is all the better. The Phelan chapters were full of interesting clan info that had me much more intrigued than, say, the latest chip on Victor's shoulder chapters. Every chapter ending in this book felt like a lucky dip when I read the opening lines of the next chapter to see who it was following, mostly hoping for Phelan.
Another high point was Shin Yodama's awesome Phoenix Hawk piloting while he tried to shake off some elementals. Great action scene. As a Kurita player I was overjoyed to see anyone in a Drac unit in a Stackpole novel do anything but promptly die in their Panther. Or commit sepuku having failed to die in their Panther as per the author's command.
Perhaps it's just all the young hot blooded adolescents running around making the themes get a little hot but I noticed a slight shift in tone to the more adult or lets perhaps say less universal rating. PG13 maybe. There was a slight nod to more sexual aspects of life without going into the details, this was no 40 shades of battletech by any stretch of the imagination. Say for instance when Phelan and his buddies find Vlad and Phelan's girlfriend in bed together there was a little more sexual content in the description than I would have expected, nothing really explicit or anything it just made me think "I don't know if we'd have seen anything like that going on in Hanse's day." Not a major issue, just sayin'. You'd think with all the death and violence and murder and all going on in these books that I'd have more concerns than a little mid chapter nookie but there you go.
I warmed to Kai a little more as the book went on but he is, I think, on the part of Stakpole, a deliberately infuriating character. He's flawed and brilliant and all that. Reading his chapters was like flicking the channels and catching snippets of some art house cinema coming-of-age flick, complete with boy meets world monologues. Visual: drifting gently back to the ground born aloft on the parachutes of the ejection pod amidst dust clouds and smoke, Audio: Kai's voice "It was then that I realised that life was..." you get the picture.
I'm sure that writing the first book of a trilogy is the hardest ( I wouldn't know, I'd love the opportunity to find out) with the necessities of laying the foundations for what's to come hampering the immediacy of the action for the reader. It must be the 'all work and no play' part and what's worse is it has to be good enough to whet the readers appetite for more. A tall order for this story given that we have a new generation to introduce, some lost time in between to account for, and a whole new culture of people to welcome into the Battletech universe complete with their history and technologies, never mind the actual action of the narrative. Barring a few faltering steps in the beginning of this book I'd say that Stackpole did some sterling work on this front especially through Phelan Kell.
After recapping the plot I'm surprised at how much was covered in this first book alone I must have raced through this one at some pace because it was over before i knew it. Compulsive reading from the stalwart of Battletech fiction we've all come to know and love, or appreciate at least.
Hats off once again to Michael A. Stackpole for another top page turner. O0