[Reposting:]
So, having now finished The Anvil as well, some thoughts...
Broadly speaking I liked A Splinter of Hope more: that novella was a bit higher on characterisation, and had a couple of characters growing throughout. The Anvil is longer, but most of that length is battle scenes. I like a good, exciting battle scene as much as the next person, but they need to be balanced out.
I did quite like the extent to which the Lyrans were portrayed as competent and militarily skilled. Memetic Lyran incompetence has been a problem with that faction for a long time, and is particularly bad in the Dark Age plot, where it seems as though the Commonwealth's role has mainly been to be a punching bag for the Clans. So I definitely appreciated Pardoe going to an effort to make the Lyrans a credible force here. And with only a single 'Lyran recon lance' joke!
I'm genuinely unsure how I'm supposed to feel about Stephanie Chistu or the Jade Falcons. This might be part of why the novella didn't work quite as well for me as the other one. In A Splinter of Hope, it was reasonably clear who you're meant to sympathise with in any given moment: broadly speaking the Davions are the good guys and the Capellans are the bad guys, and while we might understand or empathise with Zhao to an extent, we want her side to lose. In The Anvil, that feels less clear. When Stephanie fights Jasek or Roderick, it's not immediately clear who I'm supposed to be barracking for. Normally I'd think we're supposed to go for the Lyrans - and for most of the novella they are written as the good guys, so to speak - but both battles are written from Stephanie's perspective, and she's generally presented as the 'good' Jade Falcon, in contrast to the moustache-twirling Yaroslav.
So it feels less clear what the work is actually saying. Stephanie is a polite, fair-minded person who doesn't believe in using nuclear weapons, but she's also helping a genocidal maniac prosecute unprovoked wars of aggression, and she clearly endorses Clan aggression. I feel like I am supposed to like her as a person, but also want for her to lose? But that leads to a particular ambivalence when she's fighting Jasek, a character I also like (which surprised me; I haven't read DA novels, but sourcebooks gave me the impression Jasek was a treacherous opportunist).
It's possible that this ambivalence is the point, of course. War is morally complicated, there are good people on both sides, and so on. But this is not for the most part a morally complicated story. Yaroslav is just evil and a jerk. Roderick is just heroic and noble and so on. I can't decide whether the ambiguity occasioned by Stephanie is let down by the rest of the story, or whether the author is trying to do something with Stephanie that the setting and story just can't support.
At any rate, the result is that I finished the novella feeling puzzled rather than satisfied. It's always interesting when I finish a story thinking "I'm not sure what I think of that", but it's also less emotionally involving and satisfying.
What else...
I felt the novella was a bit confused about melee combat. It notes several times that it's taboo for the Clans, which is true, and the Lyrans note that Stephanie seems to be unusual in having a preference for it. However, firstly that seems to conflict with the picture of Stephanie as an honour-bound traditionalist, and secondly there are bits of Stephanie's own internal narration where she engages in melee combat and then feels bad about it. Er, if she feels bad about it, why is her 'mech modified for melee combat?
I like the idea of Roderick's speech, but, alas, Henry V it is not. I don't want to be too judgemental here, because I can't reasonably expect a pulp novella like this to be Shakespeare, but I must confess that I don't think stirring battlefield orations usually include the phrase "I say **** them". Again, nice idea, but didn't quite get there in practice - and the idea of stirring up the troops for a large battle is perhaps undermined by the story's actual resolution.
Also, the Alamo is required reading at the Nagelring? Really? ???
I mean, it makes sense for classics of Earth military history to be studied, but the Alamo isn't exactly Cannae... I was under the impression that the Alamo wasn't very interesting in terms of military strategy, to make it worthy of study. Plus if the goal was to name a historical conflict in which a force suffered a great loss, but increased their morale in response and rallied to defeat the intruder, wouldn't there be more prominent, more historically relevant examples? Kentares springs to mind, or on the off chance that they reached the Inner Sphere, the death of Nicholas Kerensky.
Anyway, lots of action, good fun, some things I quite liked and a couple of things that I didn't so much, and I just don't know how I'm supposed to feel about the central character.