Author Topic: The Combine-Ghost Bear War in Novels (Path of Glory and Trial of Vengeance)  (Read 4424 times)

Ascension

  • Corporal
  • *
  • Posts: 66
  • Asker of Questions
I went through a lull in my BattleTech fandom at exactly the wrong time. I'm sure my local library used to have a couple of the novels, and a used book store a few towns over had a good stock of late Dark Age books that I kept telling myself I'd get around to buying eventually... Well, now I'm more engaged in the fandom than ever before, aaaand the local library has dumped all its BT novels and that used book store has closed. It's slim pickings these days.

As it turns out, though, a neighboring library system does still have a scattershot selection of BT novels, so I decided to start with the only two out of their collection that are at all linked to each other (and then only loosely): Randall Bills' Path of Glory and Bryan Nystul's Trial of Vengeance. Two first novels by two BattleTech line developers on two fronts of a short war. Here are my reactions. Unmarked spoilers ahead.

Path of Glory:

This one was a bit of an odd bird, not least in its choice of protagonist. MechWarrior Zane of Clan Nova Cat is... not your typical Clanner. He pilots light second-line 'Mechs, establishes a track record of failure throughout the novel (he does have his successes, but he's more often defeated, even when facing Inner Sphere 'Mechs and pilots), and spends most of his time just being ineffectually angry at everything and everyone around him.

Our setup with Zane is that he was late hearing about the Nova Cats' participation in the Great Refusal and subsequent abjurement, and late arriving in the Inner Sphere, and remains infuriated by what he sees as the Cats' corruption by Spheroid influences. That's a fine point to start from (particularly since his viewpoint is set up to serve as a mirror image of the Black Dragons' view of the Combine), but he remains not only utterly incapable of doing anything about it, but unwilling to truly acknowledge that incapability. He keeps making these grandiose plans about how he's going to rise to power and guide the Cats back to purity, but he doesn't ever seem to have a ghost of a chance at making any of those dreams a reality. Hell, he doesn't really even try... he watches the Oathmaster Grand Melee that Minoru ultimately wins from the sidelines, but doesn't seem to even think of entering it himself, despite it representing an actual chance for a single warrior to rise from obscurity directly to a position capable of altering the spiritual direction of the Clan. I think he would've come across as a much stronger lead if he'd at least tried (and failed) at that point.

Chu-sa Palmer Yoshio is hypothetically our secondary protagonist. I say "hypothetically" because, while the back cover copy presents him as a near-equal counterpart to Zane, we really spend very little time in his head. He's clearly meant to be Zane's mirror from the Kuritan side, but their situations and their personalities are dissimilar enough that the analogy fails on every level beyond the philosophical (and even philosophically, Yoshio is significantly more moderate in his Black Dragon views when we first meet him than Zane is in his, uh... White Cat views). Where Zane is angry, alone, and ineffectual, Yoshio is much calmer, is backed by an influential organization sympathetic to his cause, and is part of an actual plan to do something to further his beliefs. All-in-all, he comes across as significantly more mature than his Clan counterpart, but he also seems to be of significantly less interest to the author.

The back cover copy suggested to me that we would see Yoshio come to doubt the Black Dragons' leadership, and I would've liked to have seen that, but we get very little of it. He does come to respect the Nova Cats (and Zane in particular), but he doesn't break from, or push back against, the Black Dragon's plans. He just becomes slightly emotionally conflicted, and attempts to honor Zane at the end.

I found Path of Glory to be a surprisingly quick read, but it takes a looong time for it to get where it's going. A good chunk of the book is spent going in a cycle of low-stakes combat (training exercises and Trials of Grievance), Zane experiencing doubts, Zane powering through his doubts through the power of anger and pig-headedness, rinse, repeat. He receives a vision midway through the book that initially just gives him something else to be uncertain over, but ultimately it and some other clues lead him to intuit that the Black Dragon Society (Yoshio included) is going to carry out an ill-considered attack on the Ghost Bears, and he realizes how devastating that could be to the Nova Cats and the Combine both.

Zane puts the pieces together too late in the game to do anything but attack the 11th Alshain Avengers in an effort to stop them from getting off-world in order to carry out the assault on the Bears, and he gets only partial support from his commanders in doing so, despite deploying the patented Nova Cat "A vision tells me to do it!" argument. The Cats ultimately achieve a pyrrhic victory and stop the 11th AA from joining the attack... but the whole book is very nearly a Shaggy Dog Story because immediately afterward we're shown how the other three Alshain Avengers regiments woke the Bears regardless. There's a weak attempt to spin it, saying that if the 11th Alshain had been able to join the attack on Alshain then the Black Dragons miiiiight have had a chance at pulling off a narrow victory, but it's not very convincing.

I'm sure I sound negative on this book, and I do think it has significant flaws, but the truth is that I did find it an enjoyable read in spite of itself. The prose effectively grabbed me and pulled me through it, despite the long stretches of not much happening, and some solid ideas went into it... I just think it has a weak lead and an overly thin plot. With more happening and/or higher stakes, it could've been really good. As-is, though, it just didn't have a strong enough story to make a strategic-failure-but-moral-victory ending truly satisfying.

As a note, this was my first major direct exposure to Nova Cat visions, and I wasn't impressed with how they were handled here. If the intent is, as I understand, to leave it ambiguous whether or not their visions are accurate, I'd prefer seeing visions more dependent on interpretation, like the famous "wooden walls" of Athens ("correctly" interpreted as an oblique reference to the Athenian navy). The vision Zane sees in Path of Glory is only ambiguous in the absence of context; had he known about the Black Dragons when he first received it, it would've been pretty clear. (And the fact that he didn't know about the Black Dragons when he received it makes it look more magical, to boot.) Meh.

Trial of Vengeance:

After a brief prologue back in the Homeworlds, setting up personal enmity between our hero, Ghost Bear Elemental ristar Jake Kabrinski, and the Hells' Horses' Elemental Khan, Malavai Fletcher, Trial of Vengeance begins where Path of Glory ended, with the Alshain Avengers' combat drop onto Alshain, just from a different doomed DCMS MechWarrior's perspective. Proceeding from that point, Trial is a more conventional story, with a more conventional protagonist, than Path. Much more happens, since the novel follows the Combine-Ghost Bear war from beginning to end (in snapshots), and Jake is more of an action hero, even in defeat.

It's strange, I feel like I liked Path more than I should have, and I liked Trial less than I should have. Trial was technically sound, and I liked nearly all the characters, but there were aspects that kept me from fully engaging with it. Most of all, it thoroughly convinced me that an Elemental should never be given overall command of a combined-arms unit. We were repeatedly reminded that Jake had access to poorer sensors and communications equipment than the MechWarriors under his command, and his Supernova Trinary had to act largely independently from him much of the time. He just didn't have the capability to effectively lead the whole Trinary from the viewpoint of a single Elemental, and I don't think any Elemental could, without an advanced electronics suite specifically intended for that purpose.

I also didn't particularly like the book's "highlight reel" presentation of events. It generally skipped over the beginnings and even ends of battles (since Jake kept overreaching and getting himself knocked out of the fight early), and skipped over a couple fights entirely (most notably a Trial of Position in which Jake killed a MechWarrior who'd been repeatedly challenging his leadership... it happened entirely offscreen and we never get any information on it beyond the fact that she died). That presentation was probably necessary in order for Trial to cover the whole length of the war (plus bonus scenes before and after), but I would've preferred a more comprehensive coverage of one or two campaigns over what we got.

Most damningly, Trial sets up events so that Jake improbably faces two recurring nemeses (Malavai Fletcher and an unnamed female DEST trooper) across multiple planets in order to further this big character arc... in which he doesn't really change much. His Star Colonel identifies his real problem near the very beginning of the book, pointing out that he's a warrior rather than a commander, that he showboats for personal glory rather than fully considering the tactical situation, and we see that become an issue throughout his arc, but he never really grows out of that. The lesson he learns instead is "the shame [is] in allowing [a] loss to become a defeat"; that's the revelation that lets him bounce back from a slump and triumph over both his nemeses. So he gets his confidence back... but he already had plenty of confidence at the start of the story; he loses it and regains it without ever really addressing the larger underlying issue of how poorly-fitted he is for command. Oh, he does lead his people to some victories, but still, the very last battle we see him engage in is won under his XO's command while he personally duels with his DEST nemesis and blocks out the rest of the battle. What's supposed to show off what he's accomplished (in that he's able to beat the woman who beat him the last two times they met) instead underlines how little he's really changed. It's frustrating.

I did think the Elemental's-eye-view aspect of Trial was refreshingly novel, especially in a section where we see how Elementals are capable of dismounting from their armor and detaching the weapon in their suit's anti-personnel weapons mount in order to fight on into areas where their armor won't fit (or, presumably, after the non-lethal loss of a suit). It did make for more abrupt endings to combat than I'm used to in MechWarrior-oriented fiction, though, since there's a much thinner line between "fine" and "disabled" for battle armor. Slugfests were uncommon (though not completely absent).

And here's my nitpicky complaint for Trial... in Jake's first battle-armor-equipped duel with the DEST commando (who used a black Raiden suit in her second and third encounters with him), we get a blow-by-blow description of the fight, which could not have taken long if it transpired exactly as described... and then we're told that Jake only thought it was a quick exchange, and they were in fact fighting for "nearly thirty minutes" while the rest of his unit moved on and left them behind. You can't do that when you describe the fight blow-by-blow in third-person narration! It basically sent the message "You can't trust any depiction of combat in this book to be at all accurate." It was a small moment, but it really annoyed me.

In any case, regardless of my frustrations with Trial of Vengeance, Malavai Fletcher as a hammy gloating villain was pure cheesy goodness. Let me give you a quote:
Quote
With a sickening sound, [Malavai] pulled the claw out of Jake's chest and held it in front of his expressionless faceplate, as though admiring the gore and HarJel dripping from his sharpened steel fingers.

His voice boomed out from his speakers again. "I have to hand it to you, cub. You have guts."

Metallic laughter erupted from the speakers as he thrust the blood-drenched claw in front of Jake's faceplate. "See? Here they are."
That's just beautiful.  :D

Overall:

Both books actually impressed me, in light of the fact that they were both first novels (and, in Trial's case, Nystul's only novel). The "game developer" and "novelist" skillsets don't always overlap as well as they did here. They gave me my BattleTech fix, and I enjoyed reading them. I feel like they both could've been much more than they were, though. I feel like they would've both been more balanced if they'd split the burden of portraying the war itself. As-is, Path of Glory spends a lot of its pagecount running in circles waiting for the war to start, while Trial of Vengeance has to sprint through the full conflict. Just printing a duology of the war instead would've alleviated some problems on both sides.

One "Huh, that's strange" observation from reading them both back to back: Path includes at least one scene (two by implication) of the DCMS and Nova Cats squaring off against each other in live-fire training, while Trial includes two scenes of an all-Clan Ghost Bear force doing simulation training. Kinda made me wonder which of the two Clans was really tainted by soft Spheroid ways first.  :P

Moving down the list of what's available to me via library, I'm prooobably going to be reading Measure of a Hero and Hunters of the Deep next. Measure keeps me in basically the same "beginning of the FedCom Civil War" timeline (but, frustratingly, there's no library in the whole state system that has the other two Archer's Avengers novels, so I'm not sure what I'll do if it turns out I really like it), while Hunters will show me how much Bills improved as a novelist between 2000 and 2004 (also, I'm curious about the Sea Foxes' perspective).

Kidd

  • Major
  • *
  • Posts: 3535
Nice review. Path of Glory was the 2nd book I read and which hooked me onto the Nova Cats* after the Exiled Wolves turned out less than awe-inspiring. Its one book which made good use of its non-combat scenes and the underdog (undercat?) vibe was strong throughout the book, setting up the Clan satisfactorily for the later death-or-glory struggle of the Jihad. Its also an outlier in that the protagonist is not the ristar - Samuel Devalis, Zane's Star Commander.

*Given what's happened since, I think I suck at picking factions.

Frabby

  • Major
  • *
  • Posts: 4242
Yes, thanks for the reviews and especially the juxtaposition. I never saw them that way before, nor did I realize it happened two books by former LDs. I sort of didn't know that I knew.
Sarna.net BattleTechWiki Admin
Author of the BattleCorps stories Feather vs. Mountain, Rise and Shine, Proprietary, Trial of Faith & scenario Twins

Ascension

  • Corporal
  • *
  • Posts: 66
  • Asker of Questions
Thanks! Glad you appreciated the reviews.

[Path of Glory is] one book which made good use of its non-combat scenes
That it did. I should've probably mentioned this in my review, but there were good conversations in there, particularly Zane and Samuel debating the Second Star League and Yoshio sharing his reaction to Minoru becoming Oathmaster.

Wrangler

  • Colonel
  • *
  • Posts: 24876
  • Dang it!
    • Battletech Fanon Wiki
Thanks for sharing your experiences reading the books.

I own both and love them both.  Zane's story was rare one, there wasn't alot of stories covering what happened with the Nova Cats, his showed him surviving the drama of his people being wiped out.  Him overcoming his views see something else in himself and world around him.

Test of Vengeance was good too, nice war story with up start Elemental Officer who in was finally faced defeat trying over come them, while doing alot stuff normal small command would never do.  Pretty good.  Don't time write alot how i like this story, it had issues, but it showed background on Clan Warriors you don't normally see.  Both of them.
"Men, fetch the Urbanmechs.  We have an interrogation to attend to." - jklantern
"How do you defeat a Dragau? Shoot the damn thing. Lots." - Jellico 
"No, it's a "Most Awesome Blues Brothers scene Reenactment EVER" waiting to happen." VotW Destrier - Weirdo  
"It's 200 LY to Sian, we got a full load of shells, a half a platoon of Grenadiers, it's exploding outside, and we're wearing flak jackets." VoTW Destrier - Misterpants
-Editor on Battletech Fanon Wiki

Dragon Cat

  • Lieutenant Colonel
  • *
  • Posts: 7827
  • Not Dead Until I Say So
Two of my favourite Path of Glory got me hooked on the Nova Cats after it I devoured all the information I could about them and Trial of Vengence was an Elemental story which was different and cool
My three main Alternate Timeline with Thanks fan-fiction threads are in the links below. I'm always open to suggestions or additions to be incorporated so if you feel you wish to add something feel free. There's non-canon units, equipment, people, events, erm... Solar Systems spread throughout so please enjoy

https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,20515.0.html - Part 1

https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,52013.0.html - Part 2

https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,79196.0.html - Part 3