Battletech fiction is what got me into the universe so recently I finally decided to actually read through all of it in order. I started with Sword and the Dagger, and while it was poorly written in some parts and the story wasn't great, it wasn't nearly as bad as I felt it had been made out to be. I blazed through the Gray Death Legion trilogy and thoroughly enjoyed it, although some of it was a little campy.
I'm now halfway through Warrior: En Garde, and MAN is it bad. I've heard a lot of high praise for this book and trilogy and I guess I'm just confused as to why people like it so much. The dialogue is exceptionally hammy, there is a hell of a lot of exposition delivered as dialogue, and there seem to be about fifteen main characters which is just too many to keep track of or care about. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of consistency in the behaviour of said characters either, which makes it even more difficult to engage with them.
I'm particularly confused by the continuity issues though. I have read the pages discussed below multiple times and I just can't figure it out. Am I missing something, or is it a genuine and serious continuity problem?
In the middle of Chapter 25, Andrew Redburn, Ardan Sortek, Katrina Steiner and Melissa Steiner's double get into a hovercraft. The relevant passage reads:
Melissa preceded the others into the craft's dark interior. She seated herself with her back to the hovercraft's pilot and Leftenant Redburn sat down in the jump seat beside her.
She then performs a dramatic swap with the hovercraft's pilot to reveal that the pilot was actually Melissa all along, and the Melissa on the landing pad was a double!
Turning the page, we read this:
Johnson glanced over to where Redburn stood talking to the Archon and raised an eyebrow. Ardan shook his head only slightly, as if to say, Redburn knows nothing of the double, or of his true purpose here.
Wasn't Redburn sitting in the hovercraft when Melissa did the swap?
I'm charging on as I do want to get through all the fiction and by and large I have been enjoying it. I'm just wondering how something like this was missed, whether it has been noticed before, and why, with so many issues, the Warrior trilogy gets so much praise?